Establishing Roots in Renwick Park

Abstract

This chapter looks at the new Wharton Studio facility that the Wharton brothers established at Renwick Park (now Stewart Park), at the southern tip of Cayuga Lake. With its lake frontage, gardens, bandstand, pavilions, open air theater, carousel, miniature steam railroad, and trolley connections, the site seemed ideal for their purposes. Best of all, the new facility would give the brothers the space they sorely needed and the opportunity to expand their operation. Once the renovations at the new Renwick Park studio were almost complete and the filming of the third segment of the Elaine serial was finished, the Whartons began planning their next projects. The most ambitious was Get-Rich-Quick-Wallingford, later released under the title The New Adventures of J. Rufus Wallingford (1915). The fourteen-part serial comedy was based on the “Get-Rich-Quick-Wallingford” stories by popular author George Randolph Chester. It was the success of their serial pictures that then inspired the Whartons to try their hand at something new: the production of a feature film. The chapter then considers the film versions of the plays Hazel Kirke (1916), The City (1916), and The Lottery Man (1916).