Go behind the gates Welcome back to Period Dramas, a weekly column that alternates between rounding up historic homes on the market and answering questions we?ve always had about older structures.
From Levittown to the amenity-filled co-living apartment buildings designed for millennials today, planned communities tend to generally be associated with more modern developments.
But they are not a purely 21st?or even 20th-century?invention: Planned communities have a history stretching into America?s past, including the Gilded Age, exemplified by the village of Tuxedo Park, New York.
Located about 40 miles north of New York City, the gated community of Tuxedo Park was the brainchild of Pierre Lorillard, heir to the Lorillard Tobacco Company. ?Lorillard was a Newport man,? says Mosette Broderick, Clinical Professor of Art History at New York University. ?He owned The Breakers, which he then sold to Cornelius Vanderbilt II in the 1880s. The original house burned down, and then Vanderbilt constructed the mansion we know of today.?

Courtesy of Creative Commons.
A vintage photo of the grand Henry W. Poor house, which is currently for sale.

After declaring himself done with the Newport scene?which was gaining more and more fame and attracting a more status-concerned crowd in the later 19th century?he hopped on the train and got off in the Ramapo mountains just north of New York City, where his family owned thousands of acres of wooded land.
There...