Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [145]
Probably the most challenging environment for the observation and exercise of gentility was the theater. Beginning in the early 1750s a succession of theatrical companies occupied the New Theater on Nassau Street, abandoned fifteen years earlier, where they indulged enthusiastic audiences with performances of The Recruiting Officer, Richard III, The Beggar’s Opera, Beau in the Suds, The Intriguing Chambermaid, and other favorites of the contemporary London stage. The renowned Lewis Hallam, a Covent Garden veteran, brought his London Company of Comedians to Manhattan in 1753 and erected a new New Theater on the same site as the first, only bigger, and with more attractive accommodations for the gentry. The gentry turned out in force—“a player is a new thing under the sun in our good province,” explained the young Philip Schuyler—even though they didn’t have the players to themselves. Occupants of the cheaper gallery seats frequently interrupted performances by talking, singing, fighting, and hurling eggs at the well-dressed boxholders below. The experience wasn’t lost on David Douglass, Hallam’s successor as manager of the London Company: when he put up a new playhouse on the corner of Nassau and Chapel (now Beekman) streets in 1761, he wisely added partitions to the boxes for the protection of “select Companies.”
GENTEEL RESORTS
To partisans of refinement everywhere in the Anglo-American world, the noise, squalor, and capricious intimacy of city life—the unpredictable, unintended encounters with people beneath one’s station—were sources of constant irritation. Country estates afforded occasional relief, above all in the summer, but year-round rural isolation had obvious disadvantages. A more practical solution was to define places within cities where polite people could promenade, ride carriages, converse, and socialize among themselves without having to take notice of their inferiors. Prototypes of such “resorts” already existed. The Mall in London’s St. James Park and the Tuilleries in Paris, for example, were restricted to the refined classes. London also had its “pleasure gardens” like Vauxhall and Ranelagh, ornate sanctuaries where properly dressed and well-behaved visitors could stroll, take refreshments, attend musical concerts, and the like.
In 1732 the Common Council of New York leased a portion of the large open space fronting the fort to three prominent citizens—John Chambers, Peter Bayard, and Peter Jay—who agreed to lay out and maintain a “Bowling-Green” on the site, with “Walks therein.” The little park was intended for “the delight of the inhabitants of this city,” the council said, besides which it would enhance the “Beauty & Ornament” of lower Broadway. Abigail Franks, wife of the wealthy Jewish merchant Lewis Franks, affirmed a couple of years later that Bowling Green’s “handsome Walk of trees” and neatly painted fence did indeed make a “very Pretty” retreat from the hustle and bustle of the waterfront.
By the 1760s some of the city’s most fashionable residences could be found in the immediate vicinity of Bowling Green, including those of the Van Cortlandts, Livingstons, De Lanceys, Morrises, Bayards, and De Peysters. Since the governor’s mansion stood there as well, some residents referred to this as the “court” end of town. Yet Bowling Green was neither large enough nor exclusive enough to function as a truly genteel resort.
Because few private residences had rooms of sufficient size for entertaining on a grand scale, committees of leading citizens in towns all over England and America organized the construction of special assembly rooms. As early as 1751 “several gentlemen” of New York hit upon a plan to replace the tottering eighty-year-old market house on Broad Street with a structure that could serve both commerce and genteel society. They had no