In one of the greatest tragedies in Thompson family history, officials at the Phoenician hotel apparently raised Mabel Thompson Filor’s historically significant Phoenix estate to make way for the Canyon Suites, a bland collection of luxury vacation cottages. A Starwood Hotel website — Starwood bought the Phoenician about 10 years ago — attempts to put […]
Clergy Inhabit Mabel Thompson Filor’s Old Stony Point Estate
Mabel Thompson may not be as famous as her well-heeled older brothers William Boyce and Joseph Edward, but she was very wealthy nonetheless. Born in Butte, Montana, in 1886, Mabel married a stockbroker, Walter Filor, eight years her senior. He earned enough to buy Mabel a very impressive, 150-acre estate in Stony Point, New York, […]
Walking in the Thompson Party Footsteps
Though I had never ventured this deep into the Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Superior, Arizona, as I looked at the rock jutting over the path, I felt like I had been here before. Then I realized: I had seen this site in the infamous Arboretum Picnic pictures. I say “infamous” only because my grandfather, William […]
Jimmy Filor and His Family Died in Plane Crash
Tony Thompson vividly remembers the day in 1951 that his uncle, Jimmy Filor, died in a plane crash. “I remember coming home from swimming at the Bronxville Field Club to find my mother in tears after having learned that Pop’s cousin, who they were very fond of, had crashed, along with his wife and two boys, […]