In January 2001 James Zug began a series of articles in the Dedans, the now-defunct official newsletter of the USCTA, about U.S. court tennis facilities no longer in use or existence. The first article was a look at the Buckingham Street court, the original American tennis court built in Boston. After that, the newsletter ran articles on the court at the Boston Athletic Association in May 2001, Myopia in August 2001, Harvard in August 2002, the Chicago Athletic Association in December 2004 and the Racquet Club of Chicago in November 2005. Below is an article on the Roslyn court, built on the Mackay estate "Harbor Hill" on Long Island. A final article on the two original New York City courts (1891 and 1904) will be forthcoming in 2009.

 

The Roslyn Court

By James Zug

September 2008

 

In 1860 a young Irishman arrived at new mine in Virginia City, Nevada called the Comstock Lode. The Irishman, John MacKay, started a processing mill and began buying up claims. In 1872 when miners working on one of his claims hit the Big Bonanza—a shelf of gold and silver worth more than $100 million (today $1.6 billion)—Mackay became a very rich man.

 

His son Clarence H. MacKay built the most expensive tennis court in U.S. history, Harbor Hill.

 

Clarence MacKay (pronounced MACK-ee) was born in 1874 in San Francisco; at age twenty he became a director of his father's companies. (In the 1880s John, along with James Gordon Bennett, got embroiled in a feud with Jay Gould over transatlantic cable lines—thus briefly bringing three of the future great American tennis court building dynasties together for a good old-fashioned fight.)

 

In May 1898 Clarence MacKay married Katherine Duer, a leading New York socialite and the "Prettiest Woman in America" according to the Chicago Chronicle. As a wedding present John MacKay gave them a seven-hundred-acre estate in Roslyn, on Long Island's Gold Coast. The land contained a series of rolling hills—the highest on Long Island—that had views of both the Atlantic and Long Island Sound. The New York Times reported, "on a clear day the Brooklyn Bridge can be seen with out the aid of field glasses."

 

Over the next decade Clarry and Kitty built their dream home there, designed by Stanford White. It was a difficult process. They had to relocate an old Zion African Methodist cemetery and close the town road that wound through the estate; both were controversial, as was a plan to build a twenty-three mile private road between the estate and Long Island City for Clarence's commute to Manhattan (it was never built).

At one point they had a thousand workers from all over the world working on the estate. There was more scandal when one of the artisans, an Italian stonemason, shot and killed a Roslyn groceryman and his wife in cold blood.

 

In November 1901 the MacKays opened Harbor Hill. It was considered the most opulent home in the country, surpassed only perhaps by the Biltmore. Modeled after Chateau Lafitte in France, Harbor Hill lay on the eastern outskirts of Roslyn. You passed through a granite gateway and up a two-mile sinuous driveway led you to the house. It was almost three football fields wide. There were twenty-three feet-high ceilings; twenty-six bathrooms; marble floors; meticulous workworking; acres of artwork. Many critics, eager to scorn Harbor Hill, pounced on the heavy decorations and the fact that the stairwell was visible from the front hall.

 

MacKay was a sporting man, a keen thoroughbred horse breeder, but his first joy was racquets. He won the 1902 national amateur title, beating the defending champion Quincy Shaw in the finals at the Boston Athletic Association. (Tom Pettitt did the marking.) MacKay also won a half dozen Racquet & Tennis club championships at the 43rd Street courts and the Gold Racquets at Tuxedo three times (he was one of the men who opened the Tuxedo court in February 1902). Mackay was renowned for his corner dropshots in racquets.

 

In June 1907 MacKay opened a $200,000 ($4.9 million today) casino. (The six year delay after the opening of his house was due in part to the murder of Harbor Hill's architect, Sanford White, in 1906.) The multi-story casino, designed by Warren & Wetmore, measured one hundred and eighty-two feet by one hundred and thirty-three. It had a French-style half-timber over brick exterior, with columned porches.

Like the main house, the provenance of the materials in the casino was

global: marble from Alabama, stone from Maine, limestone from Indiana, steel from France, cement from England and tilling from Italy. It faced north, looking over the Sound and two lawn tennis courts. Inside there was a squash tennis court, a billiards room, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, a sauna, and a gymnasium. Attached were the living quarters of its caretaker, John Canary. On the parquet floor of the casino's sitting room was an enormous polar bear skin with bared teeth; on the walls was the prize possession in the casino's artifact collection, Gentleman Jim Corbett's heavyweight boxing championship belt.

 

As for the tennis court, the New York Times said that "the best points of the English courts were being used with the premier advantages of the American, making an effective combination." Mackay formally opened the tennis court in March 1908 with a match between world champion Peter Latham and Eustace Miles. Latham, conceding 0-15 handicap, won 6-5, 6-3, 3-6, 6-4.

 

The court was never terribly active, with more play seemingly going on down the road at Greentree, which was opened in January 1915. The first pro at Harbor Hill was Robert Moore, Jr.. Known as Bobby, he was the eldest of thirteen children of the old, beloved R&T and Tuxedo pro. In

1915 Punch Fairs succeeded Bobby Moore at Harbor Hill. Fairs, a former world champion, lived there for twenty years and trained a number of players, including A.B. Martin.

 

By then there was so much sorrow at Harbor Hill that it was nicknamed Heartbreak House. In 1913 Kitty left Mackay and their three children and fled to Europe where she obtained a divorce and married a New York surgeon, Joseph Blake that she had met at a suffragette conference at Harbor Hill in March 1911; she and Blake divorced in 1929. Kitty's uncle, William Travers (the first New Yorker to winter in Aiken) killed himself in 1915 after his wife left him and the husband of Kitty's first cousin jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and died. The worst tragedy was avoidable: the Mackay's younger daughter, Ellin, married Irving Berlin, for which Clarence disowned her; they only reconciled after Kitty died in 1930.

 

By then, Clarry Mackay was a changed man. The Wall Street crash in 1929 and the Great Depression ruined him. He lost, the story went, $36 million in thirty minutes on Black Friday. He and his second wife, Anna Case, an opera singer, moved out of the main house and into a caretaker's cottage. Mackay died in November 1938 at the age of sixty-four. He had just $2 million in stocks and bonds at the time of his death. Three thousand people attended his funeral.

 

After his death, the main house at Harbor Hill was never again occupied. In July 1943 the Army Signal Corps took over the estate to use it as a radar station to spot submarines; it was called Camp Mackay. In 1947 the main house was dismantled.

 

In the 1940s a syndicate of players, led by Clarry Pell, sometimes used the court. That ended in in January 1949. Nine months after the Army left Camp Mackay, the last remaining large building at Harbor Hill, the casino, burned to the ground. (The cause might have been arson or a leftover pile of Army explosives stored in the casino The nearest fire hydrant was a mile away. Two hundred firemen fought the fire in vain.

The casino was lost and with it went the Harbor Hill tennis court.

 

In 1954 Samuel Roth, a Manhattan developer, bought the property and built an upscale, four hundred-home residential housing development that still exists today. The only remnant of Harbor Hill is the original gateway in Roslyn, a servant's house, one farm building and a life-size pink marble horse rearing on a hilltop, forever frozen.

 

History