Centerport museum to showcase archives from Vanderbilt's Idle Hour estate, which became Dowling College 

Hundreds of photographs and artifacts depicting life at Idle Hour — the former Oakdale estate of 19th-century railroad heir William K. Vanderbilt that later became Dowling College — have been donated to a Centerport museum housed at another of the Vanderbilt family's Long Island mansions, where they are being prepared for public exhibition.

The collection is part of a larger historical archive from the defunct college that has been moved incrementally since June to the Vanderbilt Museum and Planetarium. There, the material is being scanned, digitized and archived for eventual online and live display, Paul Rubery, the museum's director of curatorial affairs, told Newsday. Items could appear on the museum's website later this year, he said.

He called the donation "a major coup" for the museum.

"It's a tremendous history," Rubery said, adding that the Vanderbilt family's influence can be felt in landmarks such as Motor Parkway, Long Island's first major thoroughfare, and Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, which William K. Vanderbilt helped found in 1891. "It's one of the greatest stories of Long Island history."

The collection — including photographs, artwork and items from a shuttered Oakdale restaurant — is a trip back to a time when Long Island's North and South shores were a summer playground to the Vanderbilts and other Gilded Age families. But it also explores life at Idle Hour in the decades after the Vanderbilts sold the estate following Vanderbilt's death in 1920.

Vanderbilt's granddaughter Muriel had donated family photos and other memorabilia to Dowling in 1970, Rubery said. Among the archive's images is one from her high-society 1925 wedding in which she is seen wearing a veil that purportedly once belonged to Marie Antoinette, he said.

The collection also includes a real estate brochure from about 1923 when the Vanderbilt family decided to sell the estate. At the time, Idle Hour stretched some 900 acres — almost all of Oakdale — and included hundreds of buildings and horse and cattle stables. Most of the former estate now is a residential neighborhood still known as Idle Hour.

The nonprofit Friends of Connetquot River State Park Preserve, which raises money and plans programs at the sprawling Oakdale park, had acquired the collection after Dowling, carrying more than $50 million in debt, closed in 2016. The campus was sold in bankruptcy the following year for $26.1 million to NCF Capital and its affiliate, Delaware-based Mercury International. The Dowling site now is owned by Beijing-based China Orient Asset Management.

Some of the material donated by the Connetquot group previously belonged to the disbanded Vanderbilt Historical Society, Rubery said. Besides the Vanderbilt material, the collection includes items collected by Dowling as it became a de facto local history repository, he said.

The Connetquot group agreed earlier this year to donate the material to the Suffolk County-owned Vanderbilt Museum because the nonprofit did not have the means to properly store the century-old documents, said its president, Janet Soley. The museum, at Eagle's Nest, the North Shore estate built by Vanderbilt's son, William II, houses many of the younger Vanderbilt's collections, including artwork, an Egyptian mummy and marine animals he caught on fishing expeditions throughout the world.

Killian Taylor, the museum's archives and records manager, told Newsday during an Oct. 10 visit that he had scanned 136 photos from the Vanderbilt archive. There are hundreds more to be digitized, Rubery said.

Rubery said the Dowling collection will be stored in climate-controlled facilities and displayed under glass.

Soley said the Connetquot group still has more to donate. "We have so much more to go through and so much more to see," she said.

Maryann Almes, president of the Oakdale Historical Society, said the Dowling library in Idle Hour still is filled with material, mostly college textbooks. But the books and other items are deteriorating from mold and water damage due to age and leaks, she said.

"Anything that is in that building is lost," she told Newsday. "It's even bad for people to even walk in there. That's how bad it is."

Officials have said vandals and looters have broken into the building in recent years. Police have said they have stepped up patrols of the campus.

Almes said the society had hoped to obtain the Dowling collection but also lacked proper facilities.

"They're established and they have facilities to scan stuff," Almes said, referring to the Vanderbilt Museum. "A lost opportunity, perhaps, but I'm glad it is in a safe haven. … I'm glad that it has a permanent home where it will be cared for."

The Dowling collection is more than just a trip through Vanderbilt family ephemera.

There are detours aplenty through obscure local history — including artifacts from groups such as the utopian Peace Haven community, a dairy farm and an artists colony that occupied parts of the former estate before Dowling was founded in the 1960s. Peace Haven had generated controversy in the 1930s when it conducted behavioral psychology experiments on a child adopted from a local family, Rubery said. 

Photos and artifacts from the groups landed in Dowling storage spaces as they folded or moved, Rubery said.

And there's an extensive collection of menus, photos and items, such as gravy boats and mixed-drink shakers from Bronco Charlie's, the log cabin-style restaurant that operated for decades a mile from the college. The eatery's namesake, Bronco (or Broncho) Charlie Miller, who died in 1955, was a local legend known for regaling patrons with tall tales about his supposed exploits in Wild West shows and the Pony Express. 

The college acquired the Bronco Charlie's collection — including a wood carving of Miller riding a bucking bronco — when Dowling bought the steak joint's Montauk Highway site after it closed in about 1994. The restaurant was razed in about 2007 and the property remains vacant.

Rubery, who started working at the museum about a year ago, said the collection helps the museum tell a more complete story about the Vanderbilts and Long Island.

"As we all know, these grand estates that were built in the late 19th and early 20th century are gone," he said. "I think it's important that we interpret the afterlives of these grand estates. Bronco Charlie's, the artists colony, they're all part of that story."