Not long after I moved to New York City now just over 30 years ago, a friend told me that the key to living in New York

York was finding a way to get out of it. What she meant, of course, was to try to find

a place of escape from the pressures and the pace of the city. In the 19th century, and particularly

in the Gilded Age, getting out of the city was much easier for some than for others. It was great

social inequality, of course, and a deeper look at that

will be coming in another show. But the New York of the Gilded Age was indeed a city full of

industrialization and mechanization, evolving into a modern society, which certainly could be said to be

the most inhumane of environments for humans to live and thrive.

But there was another side to this story. We tend to think of those gilded families

packing up and decamping to their Grand Newport cottages to play croquet and sip champagne

at yet another silt and satin soiree. But some of the most famous names in the Gilded Age added in another choice as well.

They went back to nature.

It would be inaccurate, of course, to imagine Morgan's Aster's or Vanderbilt, pitching a tent

in a wooded clearing, singing songs around a campfire,

or toasting marshmallows, which incidentally had not yet even been mass-produced.

But a new community was evolving in the woods and the shores of the Adirondacks,

far from Newport and far from the grime and soot of Fifth Avenue.

It was a world created by these great camps as they were called from Newport and far from the grime and soot of Fifth Avenue.

It was a world created by these great camps, as they were called, built around the Adirondack lakes that offered the influence of a natural world on new architecture and design, a new

understanding and appreciation of the environment and its history and added an entirely new chapter

to the story.

Hello, I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast where every other week we journey into corners light and dark in America's gilded age, France's Belepaac and England's late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Fashionable European Society of the early and mid-19th century wanted to find an alternative

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