$125M Tour of Whitney Park
A 1920s Adirondack Great Camp with the New York Whitney and Vanderbilt family pedigrees, a spectacular three slip-boat house with vintage 1800s ADK guide boats, the first A-Frame east of the Mississippi furnished in original mid-century modern furniture, a big game trophy room, a deer motif sterling silver dining room, a herd of pet deer that feed from the doorstep, 30-plus lakes and ponds, each equipped with cabins and lean-tos, a 1900-era Trapper’s Cabin, and bottles of “Mrs. Vanderbilt’s” Madeira in the wine cellar dating from the 1830s. It’s all at Whitney Park, a grand and historical 36-thousand acre forest and lakes estate hitting the market in the Spring of 2025 for $125 million.
And, in an incredible windfall, the proceeds will go to the Town of Long Lake.
Camp Deerlands at Whitney Park. Built circa 1915-1920 by Harry Payne Whitney and his wife, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Here, Gloria Vanderbilt was hidden from the press during a bitter family custody battle.
Before you gulp, yes, it’s a lot of money, even for a Billionaire. However, this is the largest privately-owned contiguous property in New York State, and perhaps the most unique and historically significant large property on the market in the Spring of 2025 in the United States. It also includes another historical Great Camp, Togus, on Little Forked Lake's shore.
Owned by a succession of Whitneys (of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin origin), including Cornelius “Sonny” Vanderbilt Whitney of Pan Am, Miami’s Marineland, and Gone with the Wind provenance, it was passed along to his wife, Saratoga, Louisville, and Palm Beach socialite and philanthropist Marylou Whitney. She joined with Sonny after a prior marriage in the John Deere machinery family. When Sonny died, Marylou married a much younger tennis coach and assistant to the Alaska governor, John Hendrickson, and together, they embarked on a multi-decade loving romance that ended with Marylou’s death in 2019.
John Hendrickson and Marylou Whitney.
2020: What to do with Whitney Park? Hendrickson was determined to do what the Whitneys would have done. Use it to benefit the surrounding community. The massive land is owned by Whitney Industries, a lumbering and aggregate operation designed to manage tax issues on such a large and valuable property. When Marylou died, Hendrickson became head of Whitney Industries. His brother, Edward Hendrickson, served as an advisor, using his experience as CFO of ConocoPhillips Alaska. Initially, Hendrickson offered to sell Whitney Park to the private sector for $180 million. He vowed never to sell it to New York State after a previous sale of a portion of Whitney Park to the state ended in bitterness when bass were introduced into Little Tupper Lake, overcoming the native brook trout population carefully nurtured by the Whitneys for generations.
“If I don’t get $180 million, I’ll take it to my grave,” Hendrickson told me during a wide-ranging interview that included intimate details of his lasting relationship with Marylou, and notable middle-aged and older women who vigorously pursued him after Marylou died. When few lined up to the enormous asking price without agreeing to keep it intact, Hendrickson took it to his grave in a shocker during the summer of 2024.
John Hendrickson in September 2022, in the original kitchen adjacent to the Deerlands mansion of Whitney Park. This became Sonny Whitney’s office and John’s office to manage Whitney Industries. The founder of Whitney Park, William Whitney, has his vintage fly fishing rods displayed on the left wall.
Photos shared as John Hendrickson traveled while contemplating the dispersal of Whitney Park. At the 2024 U.S. Open. Tuscony, Italy, 2024.
With John Hendrickson's death at 59, brother Edward is now in charge of selling Whitney Park as specified in John’s will, and honoring the Whitney wishes. From our interview and private, off-the-record discussions, what I’ve never revealed until now are details about the proceeds of Whitney Park. Requesting trust and secrecy, Hendrickson revealed that when Whitney Park sold, the proceeds would go to the tiny rural Town of Long Lake and possibly lakefront land the town could develop as it wished. I agreed, despite hinting to a local town businessman about how the community would benefit greatly, as it had in the past from the Whitney Park largesse.
I first met Hendrickson when he was head of the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in 2017, a position his wife, Marylou, arranged. She, after all, made significant donations at Saratoga, among many others, continuing the Whitney tradition of philanthropy, to help immigrant track workers and their families live a better lifestyle during the racing season. Sonny Whitney had organized and funded the museum in 1950. During our live television interviews at Saratoga, John was nervous about his on-air performances. I helped put him at ease for the interviews, enhancing his profile, and he told me he never forgot.
At work at the Saratoga Race Course, Saratoga Springs, New York. We’d perform 2 1/2 hours of news live from the track daily, in which Hendrickson would sometimes appear discussing a variety of issues concerning the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame.
When I called Hendrickson in 2022 to arrange a tour of Whitney Park for a story in The Land Report magazine, he readily agreed. Invited for an overnight stay, I was amazed that after passing through Whitney Park’s iron gates, it’s a nine-mile drive through the thick Adirondack woods to Camp Deerlands. We spent hours touring the vast, unspoiled acreage of northern forest, lakes, ponds, and cabins, first in his Mercedes sedan and then in a side-by-side ATV over 100 miles of smooth gravel roads. We socialized over gin martini cocktails, dinner of chicken cordon bleu, an evening of live viola music performance, and a spaghetti and red sauce breakfast in the cozy kitchen the next morning. We admired a rhinoceros hoof ashtray given to William Whitney by President Teddy Roosevelt. Streetcar and shipping brick-a-brack adorned a massive kitchen fireplace, representing the origin of wealth on the Vanderbilt side of the family.
Hendrickson showed how he had befriended an enormous buck at Deerlands, among many friendly deer on the estate, convincing the excellent horned whitetail to take graham crackers from his mouth. He gave me the keys to peruse the old Vanderbilt wine cellar, where vintage Madeira was labeled in the 1830s, “for Mrs. Vanderbilt.”
“I don’t have to sell,” Hendrickson told me. “But, I want to be John Hendrickson again,” he added, as if it would remove him from the moniker as Mr. Marylou Whitney or being the caretaker of such a vast property with so many demands. He was, after all, highly successful before his marriage, and it was a Whitney-Vanderbilt property, not a Hendrickson property.
Grand estates, Great Camps as they’re called in the Adirondacks, were once common among the wealthy of New York and Philadelphia. Today, only Chinese tech magnate Jack Ma’s Adirondacks property (Rockefeller/DuPont) at 28,000 acres comes close to rivaling Whitney Park. The state and/or lumber conglomerates have purchased and preserved many other Great Camp forest lands within the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park, the largest public-private park setting in the United States. Whitney Park alone is more than twice the size of Manhattan Island in New York City.
Since word leaked out in 2022 that I was preparing a story about Whitney Park for The Land Report (2023), more than a few people I’d met and interviewed for my former Albany television program, Empire State Weekly, offered information about how the state could buy the property to preserve it forever for public access. However, the minor lobbying toward my article didn’t even come close to the effort underway to convince Governor Kathy Hochul to organize an effort for the state and/or conservation groups to obtain the property. Critics wondered how she could justify millions of state dollars for a Buffalo billionaire’s new football stadium and pass on the chance to buy Whitney Park. Some have advised her that losing Whitney Park would harm her environmental legacy.
Whitney Park will sell, and with the proper management, the Town of Long Lake, one of my favorite parts of the Adirondacks, will prosper and benefit from the proceeds. While I haven’t seen Hendrickson’s will, he indicated the benefit to Long Lake would be a combination of money and land, probably waterfront property along Forked Lake.
I’ve long been interested in Whitney Park's disposition since my first forays into the Adirondacks in the early 1970s. Since then, I've made scores of additional hiking, camping, fishing, and other visits. In the early 1990s, I got the rare chance to fish the Whitney’s native brook trout in Bog River, a stream near Little Tupper Lake, where I caught some of the beauties that later inspired the rift between Hendrickson and New York State. The photo on the left, below, is a Whitney brookie from the early 1990s. The image on the right, below, is an example of the brookies decimated in Little Tupper Lake by the unauthorized introduction of bass after New York State purchased a large tract of Whitney Park in the late 1990s.
Let’s see if New York State steps into the fray. Intense coverage of the Whitney Park debate began anew on May 9, 2025, with an article in the Wall Street Journal about the new sale price of $125 million.
Meanwhile, anyone who wishes to share information about the impending sale and the state and local political efforts to influence the sale may contact me confidentially here.