Tasteful friends... 36,000 acres, $180,000,000

You can see the electrical cords leading to the lamps over the bed in the first photograph.

No thanks.

Only 2 pictures of this Great Camp? Well, I guess 180million comes with privacy.

By the way, people are saying the Chinese are buying the Adirondacks. If so, this camp will be snapped up at any price. There aren't that many Great Camps and not with this acreage.

It's a lovely camp, beautiful property, stunning views.

Mr. Whitney did all right for himself, marrying a 71 year old woman when he was 32.

It was love!

[quote]It was love!

The love of money.

Should be gifted to the nation. Who the fuck needs 36000 acres? I live on 250 and I can just about manage that.

She sold 15,000 acres of it to NYS in 1997.

William C. Whitney bought 80K acres in 1897 for $1.50 an acre.

Gold Digger Hall of Fame for him!

There is no national park in the Adirondacks. It is a state park laced with private domains and towns.

and old-time, honest-to-goodness, looooong, gushing profile of this couple

It has been sold! The Trust of Sum Ting Wong and Bang Ding Ow snapped it up at list.

My head can't wrap around having a property with 22 lakes much less 32,000 acres.

Was this her primary home or did she just summer there?

Someone installed the rear legs on those chairs backwards.

[quote]Should be gifted to the nation

Oh, dear!

John Hendrickson is no philanthropist.

R16Broaden your vocabulary.

So John Hendrickson is a homosexual, right?

Holy shit - thanks for the link R12. Wow - so two gold-diggers got married and some commoners end up with remnants of the Whitney fortune? She married into the John Deere fortune and then into the Vanderbilt/Whitney fortune.

Based on the other 'act' they performed for reporters after they got married (she put him in a wheelchair with aged makeup, wheeled him in to the parlor and jumped in his lap and said "Every girl needs a sugar daddy") - I have to wonder if this New Yorker article was also a performance piece for the reporter.

This is unreal. I mean - how many 33 year olds find 72 year old women 'beautiful and sexy'? And this schmuck gets several hundred million?

Wow, Marylou was an old whore!

And it gets better - in her will, she left only $17 million to her 5 children. $10 million to the Whitney child, $5 million to one of the John Deere daughters, $1 million each to her sons and only $200,000 to her other daughter.

Everything else goes to the gold-digging husband. I hope the children of the John Deere marriage (the last 4 listed) got some money from the dad's side, because $200K is fucking peanuts and an insult.

Sounds like she was a true gold-digging bitch and held the money over her kids' heads - some of them clearly didn't live up to her standards and wishes. That's a cold bitch.

LOL at the reporter saying that Marylou was "endearingly uninfected by political correctness."

Her summer home was Cady Hill in Saratoga. The Great Camp was simply inherited property with great prestige as only the Robber Barrons bought and built such places.

Boy - this woman is DL gold. She also wrote in her will that if any children contested the will, they got nothing.

However - they sure did leak this to the press, didn't they? There's no reason for that info to get out into the press unless one of the kids gave it to them.

I wonder if she had provided for them somewhat before she passed to avoid inheritance taxes and such?

He better move quick, there aren’t many 120 year old heiresses left.

Should become a commune for lesbians.

R27 would be a perfect venue for Michfest but they’d have to change the name... 🤔

R28 Bitchfest

^ Bitchnest.

R22

I like that she left homes for 2 of her longtime employees.

If that daughter only got $200 grand, she probably got off lucky.

Will he now adopt a son?

R33 - Good one. Either he will have some close 'companions' or he's gonna marry some inflated-titty gold digger himself. He's LOVING the life of the Saratoga savior and financial elite.

Get the popcorn - I don't see this guy fading away gracefully.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

I looked for photos of John thinking he was some strapping stud, but he looked old even in the photos from the 90s.

He has a bit of the Mike Huckabee about him.

I actually think this is an opening bargaining position for him. The eventual buyers will probably be state or land conservancies, and he will probably donate a fair chunk as part of a deal.

$5,000 an acre is insane for the Adirondacks, trophy property or not. The 1997 sale of some of the Deerland property to the state was at like $1,100 an acre. Jack Ma paid like $850 an acre in 2015 for a 28,000-acre camp, a DuPont/Rockefeller property. It is notoriously difficult to develop land there.

A couple of you have described the property as a "camp". What does that mean?

When I think of camps I think of places parents send their kids for the summer.

Any links to the auction they just had of her stuff? I saw they auctioned off some of her clothes, which just seems tacky.

R38 - for some reason, NYC elite began to build multiple houses on a single property and called them 'camps' because of the different cottages and housing.

They weren't camps for kids - that's for sure. Just like their 'cottages' in Newport were anything but. I think it was a way of downplaying the holding.

Check out the Daily Mail article linked above for more info about the auction and pics of the auctioned pieces.

He sure did wait a long time for his payday.

R41 - well, he probably didn't think it was going to take this long. He probably kept her drunk and medicated a lot. They both knew what was going on. She played the same game - TWICE. She probably thought it was her just reward.

I always wonder how 'accepted' these wives are. Like Sonya Morgan on RHONY - she married a fucking Morgan and has all the social graces of a trailer park girl who 'done good'.

There must have been constant stares and whispers. I don't think I could handle that.

R38 in the 19thC an elaborate summer house in the forest for a European industrialist or aristocrat was called a lodge or Jagdschloss, and in the USA, a camp. The guided age camps in the Adirondacks were purposefully rustic, and a few were also elaborately so. Summer villas, mansions, palazzos were built elsewhere. If one wanted a palazzo or fauxtaux in rolling hills there was Lenox Mass. The Adirondacks are remote and a lot of wilderness.

Muriel! We’ve finally got room for Dataloungeland.

That man needs to go down as THE goldigger of all goldiggers ! For that payday,Id have ate that old hags cootch till the cows came home .Well done Sir !

Hold up R45.

Who is going to pay $180 million for remote land that can’t be developed? The state will ultimately buy it for $50 million.

[Quote]Will he now adopt a son?

I'm available!

NYS is probably bankrupt and not in the park buying mode.

Perhaps Nestor has a younger brother he can sell to Mr. Hendrickson.

Marylou was pretty generous to her children during her lifetime. They were suspicious of John at the start but, over time realized that he was an old soul who loved her very much. He doted on her and helped her keep the “Marylou Whitney” image alive as long as possible. He stood by her when she had her massive stroke in 2006. Thanks to him she was able to make a nearly full recovery.

The original Whitney Park consisted of 96,000 acres, which MLW’s husband Sonny’s grandfather assembled in the 1890s. I think he paid $1.80 per acre back then.

The family will miss vacations at Deerland, the main lodge. It was where they could really relax and be out of the public eye.

The auction is interesting. Does Hendrickson get to deduct the auction proceeds from the estate taxes?

Marylou never took herself too seriously. She knew she was incredibly fortunate and, as a former radio DJ, knew the power of the press. Her visits with morning DJs during track season were legendary. She also knew that she needed to make a splash.

Ed Lewi was to Marylou Whitney as Howard Rubinstein was to D. Trump. Lewi crafted the socialite image for her at time when Saratoga and Lexington were full of real, old money socialites who had gone to Miss Porter’s Finishing School. Everyone loved CV Whitney. His wife, MLW, not so much. Lewi created the image campaign for her that included gifts to local nonprofits and funding services for the track workers. She was a willing client who loved his ideas. The two of them had a perfect agency-client relationship.

The real question is how will the nonprofits and do-gooders in Saratoga and Lexington survive without the generosity of people like the Whitneys, Wilmots and Mr & Mrs Ogden Phipps? The summer season nights used to be full of charity ball after charity ball events. They were like Datalounge come to life. Today’s donors don’t participate in quite the same way.

PS - John remains owner of the 136-acre Cady Hill estate in Saratoga, the horse farm in Lexington, the winter home in Florida, the NYC apartment and the residence in Alaska.

R51 I covered the creation of Whitney Park at R9.

[quote] only $200,000 to her other daughter.

For reasons that are well known to her, no doubt.

If you like this sort of thing, here is a 1988 interview with Marylou and Sonny Whitney (when she was 61 and he was 88), the kind where old married couples contradict each other remembering what happened in which years gone by.

Plus with the property caretaker, who guarded Poor Little Gloria Vanderbilt with a shotgun when she was hidden here in 1934, during the trial when Sonny's mom (Whitney Museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney) was trying to get custody of her little niece.

R38, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, wealthy New Yorkers (and further afield) "discovered" the Adirondacks as a summer destination. They built homes there, and they called them "camps." Many of them were on the lakes. For instance, Mary Lou Whitney's It was almost like the even wealthier building "cottages" in Newport. These homes were more rustic and were certainly not palatial as you would find at Newport.

On Lake Placid, there were "camps" around the lake, and some were built on islands on the lake. A few were accessible only by water. One even had a trolley system to bring goods up to the house from the camps dock.

Growing up, my family spent summers in LP. "Summered" is a snobbish term. Mary Lou Whitney was a well-known figure around Lake Placid. She was famous for spending the height of the racing season in Saratoga, but I remember seeing her as a kid.

Kate Smith had a camp on Lake Placid, as did the Rockefeller's at Saranac Lake. They varied in size and amenities, but think old WASP families and Irish Catholic families...understated comfort

Hello?

DDE renamed it for his grandson. FDR named it Shangri-La, after the popular James Hilton novel "Lost Horizon" and subsequent movie of the 1930's.

The point is it’s called a camp.

A $180m “camp” infested with insects and whatnot. No thanks.

Trivia:

Cornelius Vanderbilt "Sonny" Whitney died at the age of 93 in 1992.

Marie Louise "Marylou" Whitney died at the age of 93 in 2019.

I feel poor

The "finest surviving example of rustic twig work built on an architectural scale."

She gave this to the Adirondack Museum in 1995, as she'd mused about in the 1988 interview above.

It is pretty awesome in person.

cottage pix

Seriously, who made that bed?

upthread some oh, dear type oh, deared re. the phrase "gifted to the nation."

She should Google before she gets too grand in future.

www.telegraph.co.uk › culture › Saatchi-artworks-are-gift... Saatchi artworks are gifted to the nation. The museum would be owned and run by the government on behalf of the nation, and several of Saatchi's most famous ...

Hadrian's wall fort gifted to England's historic sites collection ...www.theguardian.com › uk-news › jan › hadrians-wall-... Jan 8, 2020 - Roman garrison base of Carrawburgh built circa 122AD handed to English Heritage.

Three works by British modernist artists gifted to the nation ...eutoday.net › news › culture › three-works-by-british-... Jan 2, 2020 - Three works by British modernist artists gifted to the nation. A sculpture by Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), a sculpture by Denis Mitchell ...

Pompous ass. And one of the reasons no doubt I have the sow on block.

A Wiki piece on the Adirondack camps.

Some of them are rather sophisticated in their luxurious rusticity and others (like the Whitney one for sale) look like your rich Uncle Tightwad's lake house 7 hours from nowhere that smells of dry rotted taxidermy and oriental rugs, a dog that went missing about 40 years ago, and a vacuum cleaner that spits out more dusty than it sucks up so mostly the cleaning woman just sweeps a little.

It's a beautul setting with nothing to do and a day to get there and a day to go back, so trips are few.

The camps were social bait in the early years. Railroad men had private spurs built, then fleets of private cars to haul hunting hear and guns and Abercrombie & Fitch fishing rods (before they became that other thing) and crates of other essentials. They were outposts for private discussions among robber barons plotting great or awful things and cabins and bedrooms enough sometimes for a large village s few weeks each year then closed up until next, a reverse of city displays of wealth where rusticity and acreage counted more than finery.

Didn't the himbo grandpa fuck in some refreshed DNA?

OH well, wrong thread.

A luxury inn that operates in an updated version of the old camp traditions: dogs yes, children no, very limited wifi and communications, and black tie dinners two nights a week

R70 looks fun.

#BlackTiesMatter

First, she was the gold digger, then she was the gold diggee.

R70

That place looks amazing but tuxes being required for dinner would make me not go. Other than that I'd definitely book a long weekend. Only 11 rooms for a huge property like that sounds wonderful.

Tacky. Ugly. Inauthentic.

And bad juju.

I can do a lot better with my $130 million (which is all this place could get, at most).

Looks ugly, to me.

Here's the happy couple.