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St. George’s was soon eclipsed by Trinity’s second chapel, St. Paul’s, erected between 1764 and 1766 on the corner of Broadway and Fulton streets. Its builder, Thomas McBean, studied under the London architect James Gibbs, arguably Wren’s most eminent disciple. St. Paul’s closely resembles Gibbs’s elegant St. Martin’s-in-the Fields Church in London. Its dominant features—temple-front portico, giant Ionic columns, massive pediment, and elaborately decorated tower—gave visible expression to the desire for order, balance, and harmony that denoted the genteel way of life. (A second Wren-Gibbs-style building, the North Dutch Church on William Street, went up in 1769 to accommodate members of the Reformed faith who wanted Englishlanguage services.)

St. Paul’s domestic counterparts were the fashionable residences built by well-to-do New Yorkers in imitation of the Georgian-style mansions already ubiquitous in Britain. The most famous of the city’s “Spacious Genteel Houses” (as one visitor called them) was erected in 1752 by William Walton, son of the “Boss,” on the east side of Queen (today Pearl) Street between Peck Slip and Dover Street—not far from the Walton shipyards on the East River. Three stories high, fifty feet wide, and built of costly, yellow-hued “Holland” brick, Walton’s house was a manifesto of Georgian refinement. The details of its facade—including a majestic front door framed with fluted classical columns and topped by a broken pediment with the Walton coat of arms—conveyed not only wealth but good taste, social confidence, and family dignity. The same effect was achieved inside by oak-paneled halls, marble floors, gilt mirrors, silk damask curtains, and drawing rooms wainscoted in black walnut and hung with crystal chandeliers. An ornately carved mahogany staircase led to the second floor, one corner of which was devoted to a ballroom. Outside, to the rear of the house, lay carefully groomed grounds that sloped down past flower gardens and grape arbors to the grassy banks of the East River, where the family had a summer cottage and boathouse.

Nothing like it had ever been seen in New York, and for decades it was considered one of the finest private residences in North America. When Walton threw a victory party for British officers after their conquest of Canada in 1759, the splendor of his home made such an impression that it would be offered to Parliament as proof of the colonies’ ability to pay their fair share of imperial expenses (and of the need to boost the compensation of royal governors and other imperial functionaries, who were finding it more and more difficult to keep up).

As the interior of the Walton house demonstrated, refined standards of sociability necessitated newer, more complex approaches to the organization and furnishing of domestic space. Well-to-do New York families had long since replaced the clunky Dutch-style furniture of the William and Mary period: first with the more graceful walnut pieces in the newer Queen Anne style; then with the self-consciously classical style popularized by the London cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale after 1750; and then again, in the 1760s, with the more ornate classicism advocated by Scottish designer Robert Adam. Out, as well, went the plain, old-fashioned, often home-made canvas floor-cloths once favored by the rich as well as middling classes; in came expensive, imported “Turkey fashion” carpets, no two exactly alike.

Each room now served a specific public or private function, identified by specialized furniture, distinctive imported wallpaper, and suitable pictures. Nothing graced a drawing room or parlor more than a family portrait by Benjamin West or John Singleton Copley, whose blunt materialism appealed to the gentry’s pride in its power and possessions. The hallmarks of a genteel dining room, by contrast, were a sideboard stuffed with Wedgwood china and an abundance of specialized silver, pewter, and crystal implements, many of them associated with