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were prepared to venture farther north, however—as Trinity Church found to its cost. Inspired by the soaring real estate market, the ever alert vestrymen decided to develop part of the old church farm near the Hudson River into an elite residential square of the kind that graced London’s West End. In 1807 the church obtained Common Council permission to enclose a grassy pasture bounded by Varick, Beach, Hudson, and Laight (near what is now the entrance to the Holland Tunnel). To lure the right kind of people so far from the center of town, the vestry hired John McComb to put up a suitably refined chapel in honor of St. John, facing the proposed square from the east side of Varick Street. McComb directed the building of St. John’s between 1803 and 1807 while continuing to supervise construction of City Hall, and it proved to be a gem of patrician neoclassicism. Its pedimented portico, supported by four Corinthian columns and topped by a 214-foot clock tower and steeple, made it the most imposing church in the city; its bells could be heard as far south as the Battery and as far north as Greenwich.

Delighted, the vestrymen of Trinity began laying out, grading, and planting their development on the opposite side of Varick. But Hudson Square, also known as St. John’s Park, failed to attract settlers. The vestry’s terms—ninety-nine-year leaseholds on lots surrounding the park—didn’t appeal to the city’s property-savvy upper classes, and except for a handful of stonecutters and other artisans who settled nearby, McComb’s church was left virtually alone in its pasture for another twenty years.

Genteel families would nonetheless venture farther north for summer homes. Some well-to-do city merchants even built or rented country estates for their families on Brooklyn Heights, from which Washington had so narrowly escaped a scant twenty years before. There they had everything—cool ocean breezes, stunning views of the harbor, and ready access to their places of business. “The men go to New York in the morning,” it was said, “and return . . . after the Stock Exchange closes.” Vacationers also flocked to places like Governors Island, Harlem, and even New Jersey; in 1797 President John Adams came up to Eastchester in the Bronx to escape the yellow fever in Philadelphia.

PARLOR SOCIETY

When James Watson, a wealthy merchant, decided to enlarge his Federal style residence on State Street, he hired John McComb, who embellished it in 1806 with a distinctive curved porch and graceful Ionic columns, purportedly carved from ships’ masts. (Watson’s house still stands, sole survivor of an entire block of elegant town houses that once faced the Battery.) The basic elements of the Federal style—brick facade, high stoop, recessed front door, discreet trim—were nonetheless inherently simple, and from the street it wasn’t usually so easy to gauge who occupied a residence or how it was being used. Indeed, the unpretentiousness of its dwellings was a matter of some pride to an elite that took republicanism seriously and eschewed much of the “reserve and haut ton so prevalent in the old country,” as visiting British astronomer Francis Baily put it.

A Federal-style townhouse, therefore, could easily be sheltering people in relatively modest circumstances. Between 1790 and 1820 master builders erected hundreds, probably thousands, of such residences for the prosperous master craftsmen, smaller merchants, and up-and-coming professionals who constituted the city’s middling classes. Other, almost identical domestic structures accommodated commercial or professional operations or had been recycled into boardinghouses. This very uniformity obscured significant and growing differences in wealth and power among residents of the city, and veiled as well important changes taking place within the buildings themselves.

One such change was the expanded use of genteel homes for socializing. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, well-to-do New Yorkers were accustomed to “entertaining” one another in taverns and coffeehouses (with results often verging on the