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By Root 7802 0

riotous). They continued to do so in the early nineteenth century, taking advantage of the more commodious public rooms in new city hotels to host gatherings of the St. Andrew’s, St. George’s, St. David’s, Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, the German, St. Stephen’s, and New England societies. In 1792 a number of New York gentlemen founded what was perhaps the nation’s first country club, the exclusive Belvedere House, at what is now Cherry and Montgomery streets. It boasted an octagonal ballroom, two private dining parlors, two card rooms, a barroom, and overnight accommodations for members. Dancing-assemblies continued to play a crucial role in determining social status—an invitation from the City Assembly was more highly prized than one from the rival Juvenile Assembly. Subscription concerts were another draw, and at least seven fashionable musical companies—the New York Musical Society, the St. Cecilia Society, the Columbian Anacreontic Society, the Harmonica! Society, the Polyhymnian Society, the Philharmonic Society, and the Euterpean Society—flourished at one time or another during the eighties and nineties. Equally prestigious was the fancy new (1798) two-thousand-seat playhouse on Chatham Street (now Park Row) facing the Common. Designed by emigre engineer Mark Isambard Brunei, the Park Theater, as it came to be known, cost a princely $130,000 and was specifically calculated for the comfort and convenience of the city’s respectable classes.

At the same time, however, the disappearance of clerks, clients, and customers from the genteel household facilitated the redeployment of its interior spaces for less public forms of socializing. Formal parlors, drawing rooms, and dining rooms acquired new prominence as the setting for gentlemen to entertain business associates as well as for those events—suppers, teas, receptions—with which their families solidified ties to others of similar wealth and status. With this shift, too, came a heightened emphasis on the role of upper-class women as domestic managers. On New Year’s Day, when city gentlemen threaded their way through the streets to call at one another’s homes, it was their wives and daughters who remained behind to serve food and drink to visitors—assisted by a growing domestic labor force. The ensuing demand for household help was largely responsible for the brief revival of slavery during the 1790s, after which it fostered the growth of “intelligence offices,” recruiting agencies for waged servants. By the early 1800s, upper-class women in New York were expected to hire, train, and supervise swarms of household workers, overwhelmingly female, who cooked, served, cleaned, washed, drew water, hauled wood, mended clothes, minded children, and emptied the slops. It wasn’t easy, either, as newly wed Eliza Southgate Bown discovered in 1803. “Mercy on me,” she cried, overwhelmed by the myriad details of setting up a proper home, “what work this housekeeping makes! I am half crazed with sempstresses, waiters, chambermaids, and everything else—calling to be hired, enquiring characters, such a fuss.”

LEARNED MEN AND CULTIVATED WOMEN

When the federal capital departed for Philadelphia, Manhattan’s intellectual life suffered a grievous setback. Losing Thomas Jefferson would, alone, have been a blow to any cultured community. But New York had lost the entire federal establishment, something it could ill afford for, as one French traveler remarked, “this city does not abound in men of learning.”

During the 1790s, however, would-be New York philosophes—primarily youthful merchants and professionals who aspired to be men of letters as well as men of affairs—began to create associations to incubate a worthy municipal culture. In the parlors of their new town houses, and in Manhattan’s taverns and coffeehouses, earnest young men gathered to debate and discuss literary, political, and scientific ideas in their Uranian, Horanian, Calliopean, Law, and Philological societies, or their Sub Rosa, Turtle, Black Friars, and Belles Lettres clubs.

The most fruitful of these group efforts at