At the height of the Gilded Age, America's wealthiest families began to cluster in Newport, Southampton, Bar Harbor, and Tuxedo Park. In these idyllic locales they built luxurious summer cottages away from the grit and grime of New York or Boston or Philadelphia. The Belle Haven peninsula, in Greenwich, Connecticut, is home to one of the first and most spectacular residence parks in the country. Its development occurred rapidly, and between 1884 and 1894 Belle Haven Park was transformed from scenic pastureland set above the glistening ribbon of Long Island Sound into a bastion of Victorian luxury. Successful American magazine described the Belle Haven of 1902 as a nonpareil spot, surpassing in beauty, while equaling in elegance, the pet of the fashionable world, Newport, and outshining Tuxedo in brilliance and gaiety. The New York Times, meanwhile, called it the flower garden of Greenwich, and, indeed, of the whole Connecticut shore. Victorian Summer The Historic Houses of Belle Haven