24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Tuxedo, NY

Tuxedo is a town in southeastern Orange County, New York, set in the Ramapo Mountains along the Ramapo River, and it was officially formed on March 4, 1890, from the southern part of the town of Monroe.

The town of Tuxedo had 3,811 residents in the 2020 Census, spread thinly over about 49 square miles of wooded mountain terrain — a density of only about 81 people per square mile.

The town's name comes from a Lenape word, tucsedo or p'tuxseepu, said to mean 'crooked water' or 'crooked river.'

In 1885-1886 tobacco heir Pierre Lorillard IV built Tuxedo Park inside the town as a private hunting and fishing preserve for New York's social elite, with some 1,800 laborers building twenty miles of roads, a clubhouse, and three dams in about eighteen months.

The tuxedo dinner jacket takes its name from Tuxedo Park — the tailless black formal coat was made famous at the Tuxedo Club's first Autumn Ball in 1886, and 'black tie' style spread across America from there.

Tuxedo Park became an incorporated village in 1952, its historic district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 13, 1980, and it remains a gated Gilded Age enclave of about 645 residents around three lakes.

Most of the rest of the town incorporated as the new village of Tuxedo in 2021, which counted 3,169 residents in the 2020 Census — everyone in town outside Tuxedo Park.

The Tuxedo area was known in the colonial era for its undeveloped iron deposits in the Ramapo Mountains, and Lorillard's family first acquired the land and its iron interests in 1790.

By 1915 Tuxedo already had 3,636 people, but the 1929 stock market crash hit the wealthy enclave hard and the town grew only slowly for the rest of the century.