Westminster, The One and Only: New York is (Still) the Center of the Dog World BY DAN SAYERS continued PEERAGE AND PEDIGREE
18 variations representing 26 American cities. Smaller regions within the scope of the New York Social Register have published “blue books” of their own. The Morris Social Directory lists nota- ble residents of Morris County, New Jersey, where many Manhattan families built “country residences” with self-sus- taining farms. One such manor, Giralda Farms in Madison, New Jersey, was the estate of Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge, hostess of the original Morris and Essex Kennel Club dog show. Morris County is named for Colo- nel Lewis Morris, the Welsh-born Brit- ish Governor of New Jersey from 1738
elevated the circumstances of indus- trialist and immigrant alike. Not sur- prisingly, the descendants of the city’s original Dutch, English and Huguenot merchants that comprised the social elite were unimpressed by all the new- found wealth. The Astors, Newbolds and Van Rensselaers remained dutifully unimpressed with the nouveau riche . By the mid-nineteenth century, it had become impossible for “Knicker- bockers” to distinguish “old” money from “new.” So, in 1886, a solution was devised with the publication of a Social Register. Modeled after Burke’s Peerage in the U.K., the New York list spawned
The railroad and oil companies that funneled people and produce into New York soon made their owners very rich. The industrialist J. Edgar Thomson led the Pennsylvania Railroad to become the world’s largest business enterprise at the time. His great admirer, Andrew Carnegie, was another Pennsylvanian who made a fortune, but in steel. In New York, industrialist John D. Rock- efeller built the world’s first and larg- est multinational corporation, Standard Oil. The fortunes of these and other men ushered in The Gilded Age, a peri- od of unprecedented prosperity that
Like the Empire State Building, Westminster is synonymous with the city that never sleeps. (Photo by Dan Sayers)
82 • S how S ight M agazine , F ebruary 2018
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