CKG Billings: The Man, the Myth, and the Menu

CKG Billings

The Man, the Myth, and the Menu

WRITTEN BY L.A. SOKOLOWSKI | PHOTOS PROVIDED

Long before HBO viewers swooned for the unbridled opulence of The Gilded Age, one Saratoga native’s name was already synonymous with the most over-the-top dining experience New York City’s bluebloods ever yearned to attend: ‘American Horse King,’ Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings.

Billings Stables, 1913.

The future titan of industry (Peoples Gas Light & Coke Company, Union Carbide Carbon Corporation), philanthropist, art collector, and horse breeder (part-owner of 1920 Kentucky Derby winner Omar Khayyam; owner of harness racing recordsetters Lou Dillon and Uhlan) was born in Saratoga Springs on September 17, 1861, the son of Augusta S. (née Farnsworth) and Albert M. Billings, an enterprising stagecoach line owner and former ‘road driver’ from Vermont who, when Cornelius was three, moved the family to Chicago to heed the siren call of fortunes to be made.

In remarks archived at the Saratoga History Museum in Congress Park, on NYRA letterhead dated November 19, 1962, then-chairman of the New York State Racing Commission, Ashley Trimble Cole, recalled Billings as “a man whose contacts with Saratoga were brief and occasional but who, nevertheless, was a real Saratogian.”

Judging by some of the entries in his father’s 1864 Saratoga diary – “Put sleigh in hay loft.” “Sold Munson carriage to C. Ladd for $200.” “Had Kitty shod on fore feet, new cost $7.” – horses made an indelible impression on the boy. It was in his blood. His father, a successful local harness driver, owned and raced Princess 2:30, bred by Andrus Hambletonian and reputed, in 1858, to trot a mile as fast as Flora Temple, the first trotter driven to a mile on record in 2:20 or better.

Fortunately for Cornelius, when he grew up he would be able to afford horses.

Fifteen years after leaving Saratoga, Albert Billings became president of a Chicago gas utility service, Peoples Gaslight & Coke, and hired his 17 year-old son, fresh out of college, as a laborer. Eight years later, C.K.G. succeeded his father as company president and, by 1910, led the mergers of 12 gas companies and co-founded Union Carbide and Carbon. At the height of his industrialist influence, C.K.G. Billings was purported to be one of the five richest men in America, with a net worth of $30 million (equivalent, in 2021, to $823 million).

Enough to make even a prudent businessman start thinking they could break even in this horse business.

C.K.G. Billings' racehorse Lou Dillon after winning the Webster Cup in 1903.

Estate of C.K.G. Billings. Photo courtesy of Library Of Congress.

THE AMERICAN HORSE KING

“Billings, with more money than he knew what to do with, continued his interest in trotters, something else he inherited from his father, and began buying horses,” recounted a June 17, 1987 retrospective in the Ballston Journal column, On The Rail.

“He began buying horses like Lou Dillon, the first 2:00 trotter, and the world champion, Uhlan,” it continued. “But instead of keeping them for himself, C.K.G. shared his good fortune in Standardbreds with the world. He exhibited them in this country, Europe and Russia. It was in this spirit that the founders of the Billings Amateur Classic named the harness racing series. Life, it seems, can be enjoyed all the more if you can view it from a horse.”

The New York Times dubbed him ‘The American Horse King.’

It was an honorific not without merit. Billings, a member of Belmont Park’s Turf and Field Club, was said to own the fastest stallion, mare, and gelding in the world; he bought controlling interest in the Kentucky Breeder’s Association, rescuing it from insolvency; held interest in the Jamaica Race Course in Queens; and was part-owner of Omar Khayyam, the first (1917) foreign-bred horse to win the Kentucky Derby.

“C.K.G. Billings owns more championship trotters and pacers than any other man,” the Daily Racing Form said in October 1915. “He has a remarkable breeding stud at Curles Neck Farm (Virginia), where the champion trotting stallion of the world, The Harvester, with a record of 2:01, holds court. While Mr. Billings takes much pleasure with the champion Uhlan, 1:58, which he rides and drives, he confesses to a growing fondness for horses of pure blood. This is most encouraging to his associates in the Jockey [sic] Club.”

When Billings decided to bring his own family back to New York, he hired Guy Lowell to build a Louis XIV-style chateau at West 196th Street and Fort Washington Road, on one of the highest points in Manhattan, that included a 25,000-square foot, two-story high, stucco walled, $200,000 stable with two exquisite guest suites as well as 22 box stalls, 9 straight stalls, a 75-foot outdoor training ring, 40x50-foot carriage and sleigh room and separate hay loft (that Albert might have appreciated), and 5,000-bushel, zinc-lined granary. The stable had steam heat, electric light, and hot water provided by a dynamo room.

It was also convenient to one of his fondest indulgences, the Harlem Speedway, an impromptu racetrack among gentlemen horsemen that ran from West 155th to Dyckman Street.

To celebrate completion of his grand equestrian estate (now Fort Tryon Park), and his selection as president of the New York Equestrian Club, Billings feted 32 of the Club’s gentlemen members with a stag formal dinner at 8:00 p.m. on March 29, 1903, in the grand ballroom on Fifth Avenue and 44th Street of restaurateur and “society caterer,” Louis Sherry.

And oh, what a dinner it was…

Estate of C.K.G. Billings

Billings' dinner party at Sherry's.

DINNER FIT FOR A HORSE KING

Among the Fifth Avenue archives inside the Museum of the City of New York are the remarks of New York Herald Tribune ‘café society’ columnist, boulevardier, and gourmand, ‘Luscious’ Lucius Morris Beebe, who said of Billing’s lavish dinner and the complimentary Byron Company photograph provided each guest after dessert:

‘The photograph reinforced people’s belief that New York socialites went to bed in full evening dress after brushing their teeth in champagne.”

The next day, such photos assured guests they indeed had not been dreaming. As did sterling silver horseshoes, inscribed with the menu, given each diner as a souvenir.

The New York Times estimated Billings spent $175,000 annually on his racehorses, so what’s another $50,00 ($1.5 million by 2021 prices) for a banquet? A hotbed of high society discussion, journalists jockeyed for details and breaking, in advance, that his dinner would be on horseback.

So to throw news-hounds off the scent, planners fed expectations of a more restrained event at another locale, while quietly changing the date and a fourth floor Rococo grand ballroom of Louis Sherry’s 12-story restaurant into a “woodland garden” where a canvas backdrop of a bucolic countryside was accented by real birds, trees and shrubbery, a burbling brook along its sod floor, and a harvest moon from the ceiling.

There, however, were no tables.

Billings' dinner party at Sherry's.

The dirt footing would have belied one of the few clues that the “tables” were, in fact, 32 well-trained riding horses, their hooves muffled in cloth, coming up the freight elevator to be led into the ballroom where Billings’ guests would mount and face one another in a circle, while dining atop custom-made, linen-covered trays attached to their saddles and sipping champagne from rubber tubes attached to iced bottles of Krug in their saddlebags. Every rider had a waiter, in huntsman’s pinks and white breeches, while a real groom stood, oats handy, at the head of each horse to reduce the tossing of salads (or diners) through each French-style course.

The dinner began with caviar and potage tortue lait en tasse (creamed turtle soup), followed by a first course of truite au bleu – fresh cooked trout plunged in vinegar, resulting in a blue-purple color – and served with a green herb sauce. A rack of lamb with glazed vegetables, Guinea hens with lettuce-heart salad, and asparagus with hollandaise sauce followed. Peches flambé chaud (flambéed peaches) were served for dessert, while Scotch and sodas complemented a good cigar.

Louis Sherry, ever the attentive caterer, took note that Mr. Billings eschewed hard alcohol, preferring instead to enjoy bottled ginger ale with his convivial guests.

Two days later, once the formal meal had been enjoyed, Billings officially debuted his stable to the public, with a luncheon for the Equestrian Club and wealthy horsemen and dignitaries from around the country.

Handwritten menu for Billings' party of 32 persons, dated March 28, 1903.

A TRUE SARATOGIAN

“He was extremely abstemious at the table, eating sparingly and, for the last 40 years of his life, abstaining altogether from the use of wines and liquors,” friend and writer John Hervey reminisced in a May 19, 1937 edition of Harness Horse, shortly after Billings and his wife succumbed within days of one another to bronchial pneumonia at their home in Santa Barbara. “The sole time when he departed from this custom was Armistice Day when, to join the rejoicing, he sipped a few drops of champagne. At banquets his glass was always turned down, and in private life, while he was pleased to have his friends pour out libations to Bacchus he poured none for himself.”

Just two years after Billings’ horseback banquet and the completion of his breathtaking stable, he sold 18 of his 22 horses at Madison Square Garden, fetching $46,270 in the dispersal, including a top seller at $10,500. As World War I closed in and his health began to fail, he divested himself of his East Coast properties in anticipation of moving to California.

With due respect to the old adage, you can take the boy out of Saratoga but you can’t take the Saratoga out of the boy or the Gilded Age magnate. Billings, despite his culinary display of excess, turned out to be simply another horseman, in love with the sport and its horses.

“In his great achievements with his horses,” Harvey wrote of Billings in The Greatest of American Sportsmen, “he resolutely avoided all personal exploitation, parade or pomp. He kept out of the spotlight as much as possible – desiring that the fame and adulation be centered upon the horses themselves rather than their owner.”

Dine Like A Horse King

Partake like racing royalty with culinary delights similar to that Gilded Age menu:

Chicken Caesar Salad: Chicken, lettuce heart, shaved Parmesan, anchovies, garlic croutons PanzasRestaurant.com

Ginger Ale:Quaff like Billings, it’s okay PartingGlassPub.com

New Zealand Lamb Loin: Chinese five-spice, soubise, radicchio, black garlic ketchup, dukkah 15churchrestaurant.com

Peaches & Cream: Vanilla panna cotta, almond crumble, roasted honey peaches PrimeatSaratogaNational.com

Trout Dip: Cold smoked rainbow trout, vegetable crudité, salt crackers SperrysRestaurant.com

Waterville Farm Asparagus: Smoked trout roe, dill, sauce gribiche HamletandGhost.com