Piping Rock Club is acountry club inMatinecock, New York. It falls within the ZIP Code boundaries ofLocust Valley, New York, inNassau County, onLong Island.
The Piping Rock clubhouse was designed by American designerGuy Lowell and built in 1911. Lowell based his designs on American colonial architecture and a desire to link the house with the landscape. Most of the rooms open into a hall that surrounds an internal courtyard.[1]
The Piping Rock Club has an 18-hole links-style golf course that was designed byCharles B. Macdonald. Its tennis facilities include several indoor courts, clay courts and grass courts. A separate facility onLong Island Sound provides beach, pool and summer dining facilities for members.
The club hosted the Piping Rock Horse Show from at least 1912 to 1915.[2][3][4] On October 24, 1937Cole Porter was in a riding accident there that crushed his legs, leading to one of them being amputated years later.[5]
It was the "Augusta of its Day" and boasted members likeJ. P. Morgan Jr.,Benjamin Strong Jr., the first president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Percy Chubb, co-founder of the insurance company,Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass,Frank Nelson Doubleday, publishing,Condé Montrose Nast, publishing,William L. Harkness, Standard Oil,Frederic B. Pratt,George Dupont Pratt,Harold I. Pratt, Standard Oil heirs and philanthropists,W. Averell Harriman, future New York Governor,Payne Whitney,Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt andVincent Astor.[citation needed]
InMad Men: "The Quality of Mercy" (the season 6 penultimate episode),Jim Cutler invites the agency's St. Joseph's client to golf at Piping Rock "while there's still grass left".
InNelson DeMille'sThe Gold Coast, the narrator John Sutter describes Piping Rock as one of only two country clubs that count. "Piping Rock is considered more exclusive than The Creek, and I suppose it is, as its membership list more closely matches the Social Register than does The Creek’s. But they don’t have skeet shooting."
InDominick Dunne's 1990 novelAn Inconvenient Woman, the club is described as extremely exclusive and is frequented by a character'sbridge-playing father.
MissLida Louise Fleitmann, one of the best known women riders in the Long Island hunting set, suffered a double fracture of the right leg yesterday afternoon when she was crushed by her lightweight hunter, Cygnet, which slipped and fell while competing in one of the jumping classes of the Piping Rock Horse Show Association's thirteenth annual exhibition on the grounds of the Piping Rock Club at Locust Valley, L.I.
That the horse retains its position in the affections of society and sportsmen and sportswomen generally was again made manifest at the eleventh annual show of the Piping Rock Club at Locust Valley, at which a peep at the names on the boxes overlooking the picturesque inclosure, and under the lee of the clubhouse, showed several hundred who are prominent in the social register.
40°51′23″N73°35′06″W / 40.85639°N 73.58500°W /40.85639; -73.58500