Haut Monde and Demimonde The wealthy fashion a culture of extravagantpleasure, modeled on the lifestyle of Parisian aristocrats ⠀瀀氀甀猀 愀 搀愀猀栀 漀昀 䐀漀搀最攀 䌀椀琀礀).

—to the cheers of sightseers on porches of inns along the route. Vanderbilt might well find Robert

Bonner of the Ledger awaiting him with his new champion trotter, Dexter (for whom he had paid an

incredible thirty-three thousand dollars). Certainly his partner Leonard Jerome would be there, a

horse fancier of such intensity that he housed his team in a black walnut-paneled stable complete with

wall-to-wall carpeting—lodgings that rivaled Napoleon Ill’s Mews in Paris, where Jerome had

attended races with French dandies. August Belmont, when not selling railroad or municipal bonds,

would be behind his sulky, urging on his prize horses. The actor Lester Wallack and even the Rev.

Henry Ward Beecher were known for their fast teams. Indeed so famous an institution was Harlem

Lane that when General Grant first visited New York after the war he immediately asked to be taken

uptown to see the spectacle.



Fast Trotters on Harlem Lane N.Y., by Currier & Ives, 1870. (© Museum of the City of

New York)

A more sedate type of horse-mania was the carriage promenade through Central Park. In the late

afternoon the aristocracy climbed aboard their coaches and entered the park at Fifth Avenue and 59th

Street; by four P.M. the miles of drives were alive with carriages, so many that “a stranger would

think that the whole of New York was out on a grand trotting spree to see which had the fastest pair of

horses or the gayest and most costly equipage.”

This mode of elite socializing—an elaboration of the Broadway promenade of the 1850s—

embraced both sexes. While plenty of men were delighted to demonstrate that they could afford to

curtail their working day, women were more available for these fashionable parades, especially as

Central Park was a thoroughly controlled environment, insulated from the indignities of urban street

life. By the 1870s even young unmarried women could drive through the park—with a friend, with a

suitor, even alone, albeit not without raising an eyebrow or two. As May King Van Rensselaer later



recalled, “When I drove the first pony phaeton ever seen on Fifth Avenue, members of the Union

Club, as I passed, shook their heads and feared the young Miss King was rather ‘fast.’”

Vehicles varied by class clique. The old patriciate of Jays, Livingstons, and Stuyvesants favored

stately black broughams, or perhaps a landau, hauled by huge fat horses. The smart set, who relied

more on wealth than pedigree to establish their position, adopted the barouches favored by the

Empress Eugénie. The avant-garde, taking their cues from Leonard Jerome and August Belmont,

piloted coaches with two pairs of fine horses, a feat requiring some skill at four-in-hand driving. Not

to be outdone by anyone, Jim Fisk, the King of Flash, would roll out from his stables just behind the

Erie’s Opera House headquarters, driving six-in-hand—three pairs of white and black horses—with

a coach adorned in front by two black postilions in white livery, and in the rear by two white footmen

in black livery.

Jerome and others also organized the more formal Coaching Club, which sponsored semiannual

parades organized according to strict protocols. Drivers dressed in bottle-green cutaways with brass

buttons and tall white hats and were accompanied by ladies under frilly parasols. When all was ready

members would roll four-in-hand up Fifth Avenue, past crowds of gawking onlookers, many clutching

The Tally-ho, a pamphlet that identified the heraldic colors of each participant. Gossip columnists

reported on the doings for those who couldn’t afford the trip uptown.

The pleasures of coaching, with its opportunities for social primping, and of trotting, with its harddriving manly competitions, merged neatly in thoroughbred racing. Before the war, as sectional

relations curdled, southern horse breeders had refused to send their steeds to northern competitions,

and the sport had declined. Now southerners were back at Saratoga, and New York turfmen returned

to building up racing stables.

What they lacked, however, was a proper setting, Long Island’s Union Course and Fashion Park

having been taken over by the hoi polloi. Leonard Jerome, a familiar of Parisian courses, set out to

fill the need. In 1865 he and wealthy horse fanciers August Belmont and William Travers formed the

American Jockey Club (AJC). Jerome then purchased a 230-acre Bathgate estate in Fordham and laid

out a track, an eightthousand-seat grandstand, and a clubhouse patterned after elaborate European

models. With his brother, Lawrence, Jerome had a wide avenue cut from Macomb’s Dam to the track

(today at the bottom of Jerome Park Reservoir). Local authorities named it Murphy Avenue, after a

local alderman, but Lawrence’s infuriated wife ordered bronze plates bearing the words JEROME

AVENUE and had them riveted in place—a fait accompli in which the authorities acquiesced.

Jerome Park opened on September 25, 1866. Everyone was there: old money and new, swells and

politicos, Vanderbilt and Fisk, Tweed and Morrissey, sportsmen from around the country, all in white

hats and gloves. Grant was guest of honor. Ladies attended too—“ladies of fashion, ladies domestic,

ladies professionally literary, ladies of birth and culture” (in the words of a Harper’s reporter). They

felt protected in Jerome’s elegant clubhouse, despite the presence of people who arrived via the

Harlem Rail Road, and their participation rendered racing both fashionable and respectable.

Too fashionable, some thought. Complaints emerged about the AJC’s “aristocratic” policies.

Opponents sniped at its governing clique of fifty life members, calling it the “House of Lords,” and

objected to having the main section of the grandstand restricted to members only. The AJC dealt with

such adverse press by inducting publishers (Henry Raymond, Man ton Marble, and James Gordon

Bennett Jr.) into the ruling group and permitting nonmembers to enter the club section if introduced by

a member. But mainly they hung tough: “Racing is for the rich,” Belmont said bluntly.



Racing was also faster than ever. The AJC abandoned four-mile heats in favor of the British

system of “dashing” over short distances, an “urban” approach that emphasized speed. In 1867 the

Belmont Stakes was inaugurated, named for the AJC’s first president, and the size of prize monies

mounted steadily. Soon New York’s purses, largest in the nation, were drawing entrants from around

the country, and the metropolis had reemerged as the capital of American thoroughbred racing.

Nonequestrian clubs blossomed too, as bourgeois men refurbished old sanctuaries and created

new ones—venues one observer classified as “anti-matrimonial and antidomestic” havens. Merchants

and lawyers of impeccable pedigree indulged in the sedentary pleasures of conversation and dining at

the Union Club, now resituated at Fifth Avenue and 21st Street. Its ten-year waiting list so grated on

blueblood potential applicants that Alexander Hamilton, John J. Astor, and Philip Schuyler formed

the Knickerbocker Club in 1871, and gentlemen of the Democratic persuasion turned to August

Belmont’s Manhattan Club (1865) in the old Benkard residence on Fifth Avenue.

Many of the newly monied flocked to the New York Yacht Club—though the group drew the line

at accepting Jay Gould—and their ever bigger boats, including schooners of over two hundred tons,

encouraged millionaire members Jerome, Bennett, and Pierre Lorillard to launch racing on a

transatlantic scale. Other vigorous Knickerbockers (including some young Roosevelts and

DePeysters) were inspired by the London Athletic Club to open a New York version in 1868, and

soon the New York Athletic Club was sponsoring track and field meets. Sporting men also turned to

the New York Racquet Club or got caught up in the velocipede (early bicycle) craze of 1868 and

formed associations dedicated to its development.

When such wholesome diversions palled, gentlemen could gamble at any of a dozen new luxury

casinos, equal to Europe’s finest. Here one could dine in splendor—the sumptuous meals and choice

wines were free—and then repair to the glass-domed, velvet-carpeted, rosewood-furnished gaming

rooms for high-stakes faro and roulette (Belmont reputedly lost sixty thousand dollars in one night).

Old-fashioned Knickerbockers considered even the grandest of these establishments, John

Morrissey’s on 24th Street near the Fifth Avenue Hotel, to be somewhat indecent. They had not

forgotten Morrissey’s brawler origins or Tammany ties. But the frisson of such connections appealed

to sporting men like Vanderbilt, Jerome, and Belmont, who had no hesitations about racing

Morrissey’s team up at Harlem Lane or playing at his tables.

New York clubmen seeking new ways to shatter old constraints on conspicuous consumption

adopted recreational hunting, that favorite pastime of European aristocrats. The ever energetic

Bennett Junior, assisted by his good friend General Phil Sheridan, organized one such expedition in

1871. The party whose sleeping car chugged out of the newly completed Grand Central Depot in midSeptember included such members of the “fastest society set” as Leonard Jerome, John G. Hecksher,

Carrol Livingston, and J. Schuyler Crosby. Awaiting them at Fort McPherson, Nebraska, was a

supply train of sixteen wagons to carry tents and provisions (including ice for the wine), three

hundred Fifth Cavalry troopers to ward off Indians, and a guide, gorgeously resplendent in a white

buckskin suit and crimson shirt, by the name of William Frederick Cody—better known, since the

1869 New York publication of Ned Buntline’s dime novel about him, as Buffalo Bill. The “dudes”

proceeded to “rough it” in style, shooting up behemoths, dining under prairie sunsets on filet of

buffalo aux champignons, and leaving behind campsites littered with Mumm’s champagne bottles.

Buffalo Bill made such a hit with the New Yorkers that they invited him to the metropolis, where for

six weeks he was trotted around town from party to party. Hostesses lionized him, papers reported

his every word, and Cody became the smash hit of the social season, the quintessence of western



equestrian chic.

LES GIRLS



The unbuttoned, not to say raucous, sexual hedonism of upper-class males—in marked contrast to the

growing prudishness of the merely well-to-do—was yet another way that the haute bourgeoisie

pleasurably demarcated itself in the Gilded Age. New peaks of public promiscuity were attained at

masked balls (also known as French balls), which began just after the war when the Cercle Franỗais

de l’Harmonie started hosting wild parties at the Academy of Music, New York’s sanctum sanctorum

of high culture. Nouveau riche Wall Street brokers in fancy dress rubbed elbows and much else with

the city’s assembled demimondaines, attired in costumes that exposed much, if not all, of their

persons. As the champagne flowed, modesty was abandoned and the parties escalated to Mardi Gras

levels. In the words of an amazed World reporter attending one such event, women were caught up

and tossed in the air, then fallen on by a “crew of half-drunken ruffians, and mauled, and pulled, and

exhibited in the worst possible aspects, amid the jeers and laughter of the other drunken wretches

upon the floor.” There was, he recounted, “not a whisper of shame in the crowd,” nor did such press

strictures halt the carryings-on. Indeed they expanded, as clubmen and courtesans flocked to the

frolics—in 1876 over four thousand attended one event—and they would grow even larger in

succeeding decades.

Public theaters too became sites of sexual display, the likes of which had not been seen since

“living tableaux” had been suppressed before the war. In 1866 Niblo’s Garden booked The Black

Crook, a balletic musical spectacle. The unprecedented display of female flesh by lightly clad

“coryphees” packed the house, night after night, until nearly five hundred performances had shattered

all box office records in New York City—and the sale of men’s opera glasses had reached an alltime high.

Two years later the Lydia Thompson Burlesque Company arrived at Wood’s Museum (Broadway

and 30th Street), four British blondes who sang, danced, winked, leered, and satirized conventional

manners with raucous impertinence. These prototypical “showgirls”—voluptuous departures from the

ethereal feminine ideal—were soon followed by dancers of the opera bouffe companies, fresh from

the boulevards of Paris. Offenbachian events climbed steadily in popularity, capped, during the 1874

winter season, by the triumphant arrival of the cancan. Crowds came to see dancers expose their

colorful garters and ruffled drawers.

With the showgirl came the man-about-town, as wealthy, famous, and often married men vied with

one another for the attentions of dancers or singers. The richest—the Belmonts and Jeromes—openly

“sponsored” singers, showering them with flowers and jewelry, investing their money for them, and

driving them around town, while their wives looked the other way or, as in Jerome’s case, were

packed off to Paris. Jim Fisk, whose wife languished in Boston, did things in his usual spectacular

way. Apart from his many liaisons, culminating in a soon-to-be-fatal affair with Josie Mansfield, Fisk

set up entire companies in his Grand Opera House, becoming the city’s first “angel.” Soon the

playboy-showgirl nexus was as prevalent in Manhattan as it was in Paris.



“Paris in New York,” from Van Every, Sins of New York. “The shameless antics and

contortions indulged in by the lively damsels of la Belle France, at the Cercle de

l’Orpheon masquerade ball at the Academy of Music—free champagne and

Offenbachian music puts life and mettle in feminine heels.” (General Research. The

New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

Churchmen fulminated against “French indecencies” and attempted to suppress the “leg shows,”

but they flourished, ironically, in response to the successful prewar crackdown on immorality in

conventional theaters, with “disreputable” women expelled from audiences now popping up onstage.1

An equally unintended consequence of suppressing “third tier” prostitution was the birth of the

concert saloon, forerunner of the New York nightclub. These boozy and licentious variety halls

thrived on the patronage of civil War soldiers on furlough, prompting moralists to persuade the city to

require in 1862 that all theatrical and musical performing spaces be licensed and that the sale of

liquor and employment of “waitresses” be banned wherever a curtain separated performers from

customers. Entrepreneurs of leisure promptly dove through this loophole by inaugurating nightspots

that featured a raised platform in the rear, a piano, and an open dance floor surrounded by tables and

chairs. In larger establishments, balconies overlooked the floor and “stage” and were ringed with

private rooms.

By 1872 there were roughly eighty of these concert saloons in New York City, many of them with

names—Cremorne, Strand, and Buckingham Palace—that evoked the London scene. They featured

traditional entertainment turns drawn from French vaudeville, Italian opera, and German beer gardens

—and a novel form of audience participation, encouraged by the legally mandated absence of

curtains. Patrons sang along with the chorus, singers sat at tables between acts or danced with

customers, and “waiter-girls” with low bodices, short skirts, and high tasseled red boots took orders

for drinks at the tables. They often sold sex as well, and waiter-girls, many of whom had been camp

followers during the war, might accompany a guest to one of the upstairs rooms or arrange an

assignation in a nearby brothel.



Concert saloons appealed to males of all classes but tended to be segregated by social rank. Some

fast young gentlemen liked to go slumming, dropping in at workingclass haunts like Billy McGlory’s

Armory Hall on Hester Street, a thrilling but potentially dangerous experience. At McGlory’s, parties

of uptown visitors could sit in a special balcony above the dance floor and gaze in fascination at

brawls between gangsters and thugs, but they might also be robbed on leaving.

Most gentlemen, therefore, stuck to concert saloons like the Gaiety, on Broadway near Houston,

which advertised its audience as “respectable, though by no means stilted in manners,” or the Louvre,

on Broadway and 23rd, a marble-columned establishment with an ornate mirrored bar, where rich

men could more safely meet beautiful demimondaines or waiter-girls. But the most popular spot—

famous throughout the country—was Harry Hill’s, on Houston just east of Broadway.

Hill, born in Epsom, England, had been working there as a jockey and horse trainer when in 1850

a visiting American turfman invited him to manage a model horse farm in Astoria. Hill did so for two

years, then moved to Manhattan and opened his own sporting house. After the war Hill’s place drew

“judges, lawyers, merchants, members of Congress and the State Legislature, doctors and other

professional men” who liked to mingle with pugilists, politicians, and the racetrack crowd and to

dance and drink with fast women (not all of them professionals). Harry’s prominent patrons were

reassured by the proprietor’s tight surveillance—a prominent sign warned that “no one violating

decency, will be permitted to remain in the room”—and his provision of a private room in which to

sober up, lest they be waylaid by thugs outdoors.



It was getting ever harder to “violate decency,” however, as the continuing relaxation of standards

helped expand the commercial sex industry rapidly. After the Civil War, brothels traipsed north along

with the department stores and theaters, pursuing their upwardly mobile clientele and fleeing a SoHo

now overrun with factories and warehouses. Scores of whorehouses remained behind on Crosby,

Howard, and Grand to service the arriving working class, but others overleaped the Rialto to the area

above Madison Square, where a raft of new hotel construction was in progress. By the early 1870s

the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which had once been a venturesome frontier outpost, found competitors

springing up north of it along Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Visiting congressmen, military officers,

coal mine operators, and railroad magnates could take their pick among the Hoffman House on 24th

Street, the Brunswick (favorite of the horsey set) on 26th, the Victoria at 27th, the Gilsey House at

29th, the Grand at 31st, and—just opposite Vanderbilt’s Grand Central Depot on 42nd Street—the

Grand Union Hotel.

Anywhere that hotels went, the whores were sure to follow. On West 25th Street, the so-called

Seven Sisters opened seven adjacent brothels in a residential brownstone neighborhood. The Sisters

sent engraved invitations to sojourners whose arrival was announced in the press. Guests, often

attired in formal evening clothes, were received by girls as well versed in society etiquette as in the

tricks of their trade; some were accomplished pianists or singers. Josie Woods, proprietor of an

exquisite brothel, donned elegant dresses, wore magnificent diamonds, went to Saratoga in the

summers, rode in the Central Park carriage promenades, and kept open house on New Year’s Day to

receive her aristocratic neighbors (and clients).

The police accommodated the spread of prostitution, for a price. By 1876 the system of payoffs

was so notorious that when police captain Alexander S. “Clubber” Williams was transferred to the

29th Precinct, he almost drooled with delight: “I’ve been having chuck steak ever since I’ve been on

the force,” said Clubber, “and now I’m going to have a bit of tenderloin.” His bon mot, then most

applicable to the mid-20s between Sixth and Seventh, would come to characterize the entire area

between Fifth and Eighth avenues from 23rd to 57th streets—known for the next two generations as

the Tenderloin or, alternatively, as Satan’s Circus.

ON THE AVENUE



The new fascination with aristocratic French taste, architecture, and costume also pervaded the

sumptuous residences and lavish private entertainments of Manhattan’s haute bourgeoisie, whose

precincts were once again in motion. The commercial invasion of Union Square, and the

transformation of elegant row houses on Fifth Avenue’s side streets into boardinghouses for the

merely middle class, squeezed the rich northward. Soon even Madison Square began to give way on

its western edge to shops, clubhouses, and boardinghouses willing to pay tremendous rents, though the

square’s eastern side remained lined with fancy residences. Murray Hill remained a secure haven for

the moment, and the fashionable quarter between 23rd and 34th quickly filled with well-appointed

town houses. Increasingly, however, the rich migrated to the area between Sixth and Third, from the

30s through the 50s, particularly along the vertical axes of Madison, Park, and above all Fifth

Avenue.

The latest luxury area’s upper boundary was staked out in 1869 by an unlikely pioneer, Mrs. Mary

Mason Jones. This seventy-year-old dowager of impeccable pedigree—Edith Wharton, her niece,

would use her as the model for Mrs. Manson Mingot in The House of Mirth—abandoned her

venerable Waverly Place establishment and moved to the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th



Street. The locale, despite its proximity to the new Central Park, was still undeveloped and filled

with shantytowns, slaughterhouses, charitable institutions, the unfinished Catholic cathedral, and, at

Fifth and 52nd, the home of abortionist Mme. Restell, now known as the “wickedest woman in New

York.” Nevertheless, Mrs. Jones’s mansion, and the new Grand Army Plaza the Tweed regime

thoughtfully provided in 1870, were soon surrounded by fine homes of fashionable Fifth Avenoodles

(as the irreverent called them).

Fine homes, as before the war, meant three-or four-story Italianate structures (at $75,000 to

$150,000 each), only now they had to be topped with a mansard (or “French”) roof. As one

commentator noted in 1868, “no man who wants a fashionable house, will be without it,” and some

now hopelessly passé Federal, Greek, and Gothic houses were accordingly recapped.

A few pathbreakers built urban chateaux. Leonard Jerome’s flamboyant six-story mansion at 32

East 26th Street included a six-hundred-seat theater (for performances by his protégées), a breakfast

room seating seventy, and a white and gold ballroom with fountains that spouted champagne and eau

de cologne. A. T. Stewart’s white marble Parisian hôtel, when finished in 1869, was the largest

dwelling in New York City and featured a seventy-five-foot-long art gallery for his superb collection.

Most wealthy Manhattanites still preferred comfortingly monolithic streetscapes to individualistic

architectural statements, though their plain brownstone fronts masked increasingly extravagant

interiors. Gilt-covered walls, marble, mirrors, frescoes, bric-a-brac, cabinets of porcelain

curiosities, and ponderous furniture upholstered with opulent fabrics became standard issue along the

avenue.

The social events held in these mansions grew ever more elaborate and competitive. The season

just after the war featured six hundred balls, for which seven million dollars was laid out for dresses

and jewelry. The ultimate arbiters of fashion were still European monarchs, though less Victoria now

(since her beloved Albert died in 1861, she had taken to mourning clothes) than the Empress Eugénie.

Her every move was monitored and interpreted by Mme. Demorest, the reigning monarch of New

York fashion, in her Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly Magazine and Mme. Demorest’s Mirror of

Fashions (as well as in, after 1867, the new Harper’s Bazaar). Madame’s correspondents reported

instantly on every new Worth gown the empress wore to a Tuileries ball, and in New York the

imperial styles were reproduced, exhibited in semiannual shows, and sold as finished garments or as

patterns for seamstresses to follow. (Mme. Demorest’s 14th Street workshops generated tons of these

multicolored tissue-paper patterns and distributed them throughout the country via three hundred

agents and by catalog mailings). The more daring fashions of the Parisian demimondaines received

similar treatment, though modulated appropriately for American women (in Mme. Demorest’s words,

stripped of “coarseness or exaggerations” so as not “to vitiate and deprave the public taste”). In

fashion, as in finance, New York remained Europe’s gateway to the American continent.

Fashion dictated the demise of the crinoline and the birth of the bustle. Dresses (both day and

evening) gradually flattened in front while gathering at the back, assisted by the bustle, a half-cage or

puff filled with horsehair or stiffened gauze and net. (This was not a new invention, having been

favored in the eighteenth century, when it was known more forthrightly as a “false bum.”) Dresses

cascaded down over this precipice to flow out (by the mid-1870s) into a trailing train. This

appendage proved something of a safety hazard as, in an age of open fireplaces, it tended to catch fire

while the wearer was dancing. Ladies’ advice books urged fireproofing trams with a mixture of

whitening and starch.



While it was acceptable to flaunt wealth by having diamonds sown into one’s dress, moralists did

raise alarms at the way 1870s fashions—and their underlying corsets, bustles, and breast-heavers—

created a voluptuous display of propped-up bosoms. In 1868 Harriet Beecher Stowe launched a

violent attack on “outré unnatural fashion,” claiming that despite all Demorest’s modifications, trends

were being set by “the most dissipated foreign circles”—those immoral Parisian demimondaines who

“live[d] only for the senses,” lacked “family ties,” and adorned themselves “to attract men and hide

the ravages of dissipation.” Such admonitions got nowhere. Indeed, very rich women began buying

some of the forty gowns they would need each Season directly from Worth in Paris, at twenty-five

hundred dollars a dress.

Dresses like these were too good to waste on small private parties, and social events increasingly

switched to more public spaces. In the early 1870s Archibald Grade King gave a debutante ball for

his daughter at Delmonico’s; Belmont threw one there in 1875 for his daughter that was reportedly

“more splendid than the famous one given the previous year in London by the Prince of Wales.” The

only thing better than outdoing European aristocrats was marrying them. The first “dollar princesses”

appeared as cash-poor Eurocrats lined up to wed Manhattan’s daughters: among the first was Leonard

Jerome’s Jennie, who, after lengthy negotiations over her dowry, was married off to Lord Randolph

Churchill in 1874.

Substantial wardrobes were de rigueur as well for appearances at theater and concert hall.

Wealthy New Yorkers mingled with other classes in the Union Square Rialto. They would take in an

opera there at the Academy of Music, which in addition to offering luscious music—the hall hosted

the American premieres of Aida (1873), Lohengrin (1874), Die Walküre (1877), and Carmen (1878)

—provided a place for debutante daughters to meet eligible gentlemen during the intervals. Boxes at

the Academy were as eagerly sought after as seats on the Stock Exchange.

Stalls at Wallack’s, the nation’s leading playhouse, were in equal demand, and first nights in

particular brought out the aristocracy of wealth in full plumage. Concerts similarly drew the wealthy

to Union Square. At Irving Hall, designed (in 1860) for “miscellaneous entertainments of a high

character,” one could hear both the Philharmonic Society—the old German co-op—and Theodore

Thomas’s new orchestra. Thomas had been brought to America in 1845, at the age of ten, by his

German parents. During the Civil War the young man, with the aid of wealthy backers, founded and

trained his own orchestra, paying the musicians a regular salary rather than sharing box office takings

as the Philharmonic’s members did. This stable income allowed Thomas’s artists to rehearse and

play together on a full-time basis, and the well-drilled performers soon surpassed their part-time

competitors. The new group also felt freer to go beyond the Philharmonic’s more old-fashioned (but

crowd-pleasing) repertoire: it was the Thomas Orchestra that introduced Schubert’s Unfinished

Symphony to America in 1867.

Both orchestras soon deserted Irving Hall in favor of the new Steinway Hall (1866), an

exceptionally comfortable three-thousand-seat theater the piano manufacturer opened at the rear of his

showroom on 14th Street. It also became the favorite stage for touring opera singers (Christine

Nilsson made her American concert debut there in 1870), instrumentalists (such as Anton Rubinstein,

the legendary Russian pianist), and lecturers (Dickens, on his 1867 visit, read selections from

Christmas Sketches, Pickwick Papers, and Nicholas Nickkby).

MCCALLISTER AMONG THE PATRIARCHS



The trouble with the torrent of competitive postwar socializing was that it dissolved society into a

welter of competing epicenters, none of which seemed to hold. Its innermost precincts—swollen but

manageable in the 1850s—were now (as May King Van Rensselaer recalled) “assailed from every

side by persons who sought to climb boldly over the walls of social exclusiveness.” Arriviste

hostesses, backed by their husbands’ cash, threw ever more lavish and unorthodox affairs. Mrs. Paran

Stevens (her husband a real estate tycoon) held parties on Sunday nights! Scandalized matrons

ostracized her, but gentlemen flocked to her parlor. Mrs. William Colford Schermerhorn, a still more

disturbing renegade, drew guests to her Madison Square drawing room with musicales.

Men were equally combative. Jerome, Belmont, and wealthy clubman William R. Travers each

engaged Lorenzo Delmonico to offer the most perfect dinner, at any cost. His Silver, Gold, and

Diamond affairs were so equally magnificent that Jerome, to win the race, gave each lady in

attendance a gold bracelet. Still worse was the way a social unknown like millionaire importer

Edward Luckemeyer could barge his way into society with a coup de table. Luckemeyer simply gave

Charles Delmonico free rein (and ten thousand dollars), and voilá. Seventy-two distinguished guests

turned out to boggle at the gigantic oval dining table, of virtually ballroom size, landscaped with

flowers, with a thirty-foot lake at its center, upon which paddled four swans from the new Prospect

Park.

In the 1870s only one family had the financial and social resources to bring some order to this

chaos: the Astors. John Jacob had passed on his land and liquid assets to William Backhouse Astor,

who during his lifetime had doubled his inheritance by assiduous extraction of rents from his acres

and tenements. When he died in the mid-1870s, he in turn bequeathed roughly forty million dollars to

his two heirs, John Jacob III and William. John Jacob (elder of the two) received two-thirds of the

estate, but neither he nor his wife was willing to take on the role of social dictator. Nor was William

—a playboy who spent his days at the track, or pursuing women, or yachting in distant waters. It was

his frustrated and furious wife, Caroline, possessed of wealth and status too (she was a

Schermerhorn), who set out to impose her authority on New York society.

As her chamberlain she chose Ward McCallister, a man who became known as the “Autocrat of

Drawing Rooms” but was really more a steward of the elite, on the order of Isaac Brown.

McCallister’s own pedigree was most unaristocratic; the son of a Savannah attorney, he had moved to

New York in the 1840s and worked as a bookkeeper. Society-struck, and desperate to break into the

inner circles, McCallister found he lacked the economic wherewithal or social cachet to sustain a

position among the smart set. Resolved to correct both deficiencies, he went to California, made a

modest fortune, and married an heiress. Then he traveled extensively in Europe, memorizing the

manners of the great courts and studying heraldry, genealogy, and cookery.

After the war, McCallister came to Caroline’s attention through his elaborate Newport parties and

his revival, in the winter of 1866-67, of cotillion suppers—an old New York tradition dating back to

the colonial-era Dancing Assembly. The metropolitan patriciate was delighted at the idea of a secure

space in which its daughters could meet eligible men. In the winter of 1872-73, McCallister, with

Caroline Astor as special adviser, executed his masterstroke, the creation of the Patriarchs. He

selected a group of twenty-five men, headed by the Astor brothers, that included both Old

Knickerbockers and newly monied—a group that collectively commanded unrivaled respect. Each

Patriarch was invested with the right and responsibility of inviting four ladies and five gentlemen to

periodic Patriarch’s Balls. Fastidious exclusion soon made these affairs the city’s cultural pinnacle,

the goal of every social climber. They were also—along with balls given by the Assembly, the old