The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [108]
Among the stodgy denizens of the National Horse Show Committee, there were those who claimed that the show had reached its apogee in the year 1898—the height of the Gilded Age, the same era that had produced the mansions and way of life that surrounded Harry’s home on Long Island. Every year thereafter, some old codger was sure to lament that the National was not quite the show that she used to be, the implication being that someone had let the riffraff in.
Until 1925, the show had been held in a beaux arts palace at Twenty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan, now referred to as Madison Square Garden II. The elaborate building, designed by McKim, Mead and White and considered a marvel of its time, contained a summer garden, an arena for the horses, and an indoor restaurant. A bronze statue of Diana soared from the rooftop. Inside, blue bloods—both horses and people—pranced. Around the arena swooped a flower-banked twenty-foot-wide promenade where top-hatted gentlemen escorted evening-gowned ladies, while young boys tried to make a buck pointing out celebrities to out-of-town visitors.
Garden II, like many large Victorian structures, had not been built to last. It succumbed to the wrecker’s ball in 1927. But the committee to preserve the horse show quickly grabbed a toehold in a new venue. In 1928, the horse show moved to a building that inspired both devotion and loathing. Built in 1925 and known as “the house that Tex built” after Tex Rickard, a boxing promoter and the owner of the New York Rangers, the third building known as Madison Square Garden was not on Madison Square but on Forty-ninth Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. From the outside, Madison Square Garden squatted angularly, a water tower awkwardly poised on the roof. The design did not naturally suit itself to an equine affair, and there were always a few old-timers who complained. But by 1958, during this distinctive week, the building itself seemed wrapped in a special mystique. As the horse trailers pulled up along Seventh Avenue, an unmistakable aura of grandeur buzzed in the air.
For all of the glory upstairs in the Garden, the basement was a sorry excuse for a stabling area. The ventilation was famously poor, and made worse by people who ignored the no-smoking rule. Horses were prone to respiratory infections, which spread like wildfire in the enclosed space. Grooms from the Mexican team cooked in their stalls, filling the aisles with the odor of sizzling tortillas. In order to allow a horse to stretch his legs, you had to walk him up on the street, but as hot and stuffy as it was in the basement, the air outside in the streets of Manhattan was cold, and the contrast could stiffen muscles and make a horse’s cold grow worse.
Harry was stabled in a corner, in a few box stalls that were off the beaten path. Like everything at the Garden, there was a hierarchy. The best stabling, the best boxes, the best parties, the best order to ride in the competitions, were all distributed with an eye to social standing and status.
The upstairs-downstairs mentality—still so prevalent among the East Coast upper class—was much in force at the Garden. Despite the egalitarian notions that were supposed to characterize a democratic society, the American horseman had, from the get-go, in the words of Kurth Sprague, who wrote the definitive history of the National Horse Show, “patterned himself on an Anglo-Saxon model whose exemplar was the upper-class English country gentleman.” Even in the late 1950s, at the National this mentality still prevailed.
American society was in the midst of important changes. It was becoming clear that the grand estates,