Vanderbilt Museum and Planetarium

Eagle's Nest from Mantra

In the late morning, after I took a shower on the swim deck and we had breakfast, we were ready to set off for Northport to visit the Vanderbilt Museum, including the summer home of Eagle's Nest and the planetarium.  The adventure began immediately.  I got into the dinghy while Peter was still in the cockpit locking up, believing the dinghy's painter to be secured on a cleat on deck.  Nope!  It let loose and I was adrift with the sudden realization that I really didn't know how to use the outboard motor!   Shouting from the swim deck as I slowly slipped further away, Peter guided me in getting the engine in the water, using the choke, pulling the cord and getting the engine started.  He was almost out of range for my hearing him, and I didn't know where the gearshift was!  He was wondering if he was going to have to swim to me.  With various hand signals from him and my own wits, I was able to find it and realize that forward would mean pulling the handle forward (Duh!).  After making a couple of tight turns in the water, I figured out how to maneuver the dinghy and made it back to Mantra.  It is unfortunate that there was no one around to video this hilarious incident.  It would have been a hit on YouTube.

In my defense, it has been over ten years since we owned a boat, and in the three years we had Epicurus, I rarely drove the dinghy.  If Peter wasn't driving it, then Matthew was.  It was his favorite thing to do when we were living on board.  Realizing that I might need to hone my skills, I drove it to the dock this morning and back to Mantra late this afternoon.

In town, we got a Lyft.  The driver was a 40-year-old Pakistani-American Muslim woman, separated from her husband and, therefore, living with her parents (as is her 30-year-old brother, since he is not married).  She kept us entertain telling us stories about her family and cultural customs as she drove us out of town and up the hill to the Vanderbilt Museum.

Mantra (fartherest large sailboat toward the right) from the Vanderbilt estate

The mansion, called Eagle's Nest, was built as a summer cottage on 43-acres in Centerport, on the Gold Coast of northern Long Island, by William Kissim Vanderbilt II (1878-1944), the great-grandson of the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt.  Born into a life of extreme wealth and luxury, he grew up in various Vanderbilt mansions, traveled to Europe frequently with his family, sailed the globe on yachts owned by his father and was privately tutored before prep school and Harvard.  While he worked at times for his family's New York Central Railroad at Grand Central Station in the city, he devoted himself to his various interests and hobbies, including horse racing, car racing, yachting, and collecting.

When he was 20 years old, Vanderbilt, known to family and friends as Willie K., met Virginia Graham Fair, know as Birdie.  She was several years older than he and had been born in poverty in San Francisco.  By the time they met, however, she was a wealthgy young lady.  She had inherited part of the substantial fortune of her father, and Irish immigant named James "Slippery Jim" Fair, one of the four "Silver Kings" of the rich Comstock Lode in Nevada.  (She and her sister built the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco.)  Willie K. and Birdie were married in 1899 and had three children, one son and two daughters.  They divorced in 1927 after years of separation and he immediately remarried.  His second wife was Rosamund Warburton, and she sailed with him often, including on two circumnavigations.

Vanderbilt was recognized as an accomplished sailor, yachtsman and race car driver.  In 1900, he won the Lipton Cup trophy (an enormous and ornate silver cup on display in the museum) with his 70-foot yacht Virginia.  In 1904, he sponsored the first Vanderbilt Cup Race for motor cars on Long Island.  In the first half of the twentieth century, it was the second most popular sporting event in America, after the Kentucky Derby.  It used public roads until the local authorities objected because of two many accidents and deaths of spectators.  Vanderbilt, along with other investors, created the Long Island Motor Parkway to be used for the race once a year and at other times as a tollroad.  It was one of the country's first modern paved turnpikes.

In 1933, his son, William Kissam Vanderbilt III, died in an accident while driving home from their estate on Fisher Island in Florida.  He would have inherited the mansion as well as other assets.  After his death, Willie K. built a memorial wing onto the house to display memorabilia, trophies and souvenirs including those from his son's African safaris.  He then opened the estate for public viewing several days a week and re-wrote his will so that, upon his death, the Eagle's Nest property and a fund for upkeep could become a public museum.

The house itself was constructed in three phases.  The first part was designed as a 24-room Spanish Revival palace and built in 1910.  We took a tour of the house first and learned a lot about the family and their lifestyle when they lived here.  By their standards, this home was not lavish and it was not intended to host large parties.  However, the rooms are elegant and beautifully furnished, and the courtyards, gardens and views are lovely and tranquil.  (And the King of Enland at the time did visit.)    Using the same architectural style, the second part was added in the 1920's, after Willie K. inherited some of his father's wealth ($21 million) upon his death and married his second wife.  The memorial wing was completed in the 1930's.

Peter in the rose garden at Eagle's Nest

Portcullis and entrance to Eagle's Nest

Library

Small enclosed courtyard

Courtyard outside the Memorial Wing

In addition to the family's living quarters, Willie K. also included exhibition spaces for his various collections in his home.  He added the Habitat Wing in the 1920's, and, along with scientists and artists from the Museum of Natural History in New York, created nine remarkable dioramas of animal life.  Hanging from the ceiling is the world's largest taxidermed fish, a 32-foot whale shark caught accidentally by fishermen off Fire Island in 1935.  An additional area includes specimens of large animals such as a polar bear, lion, tiger, jaguar and leopard collected and donated by Charles Stoll, a local judge who was a explorer, naturalist and big-game hunter.

Most of the specimens were collected by Vanderbilt.  His traveled to the Galapagos Islands, throughout the Pacific, Asia, the Mediterranean, Africa, the Atlantic and the Caribbean, and his voyages yielded thousands of specimens of marine, bird and insect life, some of them new discoveries when he found them.  In the Memorial Wing are rooms full of these specimens.  The room with preserved marine life and shells from all parts of the world is stunning in its diversity and symmetry.  Another room includes butterflies and moths, birds from far-flung as well as local places and an assortment of ethnographic artifacts collected in the South Pacific, Indonesian, Australia and New Zealand still displayed as they were in the early half of the 20th century, so that it is like a musuem of a museum.  Tools, jewelry, weapons, baskets and other items are mounted on precious tapas and woven mats from tribal cultures.  Numbers corresponding to the guidebook entries are stuck right on the artifacts!  Museum curators today would never do such things, but it has a warm and intimate feel.

Room with marine specimens and a model of the Alva, one of the yachts in which he circumnavigated

display of ethnographic artifacts from the South Pacific

Peter and I also went to the planetarium show at 2:00 (after the mansion tour and before seeing the exhibit spaces).  The planetarium was added by Suffolk County, which owns the property, in 1971.  I don't think I have been to a planetarium show since the kids were little. The night sky as it would appear tonight was shown and discussed as were a few constellations.  I will never be able to understand how ancient people in various cultures saw people and animals in these collections of stars.  A special feature at the end was a trip to the edges of the universe as if we were on a spaceship.  This was new and fascinating for me, and it made me wonder about communication across the vast expanses of space.  One of the staff was quite willing to answer my questions with answers including information about radio waves, the speed of light and red shift.  Outside, Peter and I discussed the possibility of communication faster the speed of light, perhaps by quantum entanglement.  Science is fascinating!

We had assumed that we would spend two or three hours at the Vanderbilt Museum, but they had to ask us to leave at 5:00 (although the docent let us, no, encouraged us, to peek into one more room before we left).  Outside, thunder was rumbling in the distance, but our Lyft ride arrived just as the first few drops of rain fell, and the brief shower was over before we got back to town.  We stopped at the Copenhagen Bakery for scones for afternoon tea (or Diet Coke in my case) on the boat and we also bought a quiche to have for dinner.  Expecting rain and planning to travel most of the day tomorrow, we hauled up the outboard motor and the dinghy before settling down for our treats from the bakery.

Heavy rain arrived after we were cocooned in the salon down below.  The wind is about 15 knots, and lightening is flashing behind the clouds as thunder booms, but we are safe inside.  We are also dry, but that is only because we avoid the places where the hatches leak in heavy rains!  We are always ready with old towels and a basin to catch the biggest drip.  Eventually, we will get the problem fixed.

Meanwhile, I am enjoying the storm and thinking of my mom, who always liked to sit on the front porch to watch brilliant ones like this.