American Gangster|Old Westbury Gardens — Dominic Cattano's Long Lawn

Frank Lucas drives out to the country to be complimented and warned in the same breath. Dominic Cattano receives him outdoors, admires the suit, admires the nerve, and explains with enormous courtesy that a man who owns his own supply — who cuts out every wholesaler between Bangkok and Harlem — is a problem for everybody at the table. The scene works because of where it stands. The deep lawn. The clipped hedges. The long walk back to the car with nothing settled.

That is Old Westbury Gardens, on Long Island's North Shore. Westbury House was built in 1906 for John Shaffer Phipps, whose fortune came out of Carnegie steel, and designed in the Charles II manner by the Englishman George A. Crawley, who also laid out the two hundred acres around it. The Walled Garden alone runs to two acres. The family lived there into the 1950s; the estate opened to the public at the end of that decade and has been a house museum and garden since.

It is one of the most photographed private houses in America — Hitchcock used it, and so did a long line of productions afterward — and the reason declares itself the moment you come up the beech allée. The place reads as inherited money without saying a single word, which is precisely the argument Cattano is making to a man whose money is eleven months old.

Buy the ticket that includes the house, then save the Walled Garden for last. That conversation on the terrace is about who is permitted to own things. You will be standing inside the answer.

Photo: Pexels (free licence) — a historic estate and formal garden, illustrative rather than Westbury House itself.