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Female fashion followed a similar trajectory. Heavy brocaded skirts with whaleboned bodices and hooped petticoats, all the rage in the mid-eighteenth century, yielded during the first two decades of the nineteenth to lighter, neoclassical designs inspired by the French empire and then the Greek struggle for independence. Their objective was a free and natural silhouette: high-waisted dresses of sheer white muslin, featuring low rounded necklines and a bandeau (precursor of the bra) that emphasized the bosom, typically worn with a shawl and with the hair piled up in reckless masses of curls. After 1830, however, the prevailing taste retreated to more constrained, less revealing styles. Waistlines became lower and narrower, necklines rose, and the natural contours of the body were concealed with boned corsets, voluminous skirts, layers of petticoats, padded bustles, and enormous leg-of-mutton sleeves. Modesty now required that hair be pulled back, drawn into a demure knot, and covered with a frilly bonnet.

Shared tastes in costume were accompanied by a similar determination to settle in neighborhoods where the better sort of people, Yankees and Knickerbockers alike, could insulate themselves from the seamier elements of urban life. In 1820 the choicest addresses in town still lay on the lower west side of Manhattan, along Broadway (from Bowling Green up to Chambers), Greenwich Street (which paralleled the Hudson), and the quiet, tree-shaded blocks in between. From here gentlemen could easily walk to their places of business on Wall Street or Hanover Square, and their families could walk to one of the many houses of worship nearby—the great Episcopal bastions of Trinity and St. Paul’s on Broadway, say, or perhaps the First Presbyterian Church on Wall, Brick Presbyterian on Beekman Street, St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church on Barclay Street, John Street Methodist, the Dutch Reform triplets (Old South on Exchange Place, Middle on Liberty Street, and Old North on William Street), South Baptist on Nassau Street, or Shearith Israel on Mill Street, still the only synagogue for New York’s four hundred Jews. Also within easy walking distance was the Battery. Spruced up in the early 1820s with lawns, shade trees, and an ornamental iron railing, it remained the city’s premier park and promenade. Its appeal was further enhanced in 1824, when the city acquired Castle Clinton from the federal government and leased it out as a “place of resort,” tethered to the Battery by a wooden bridge ninety paces long and illuminated by gas lamps. Two years later, refurbished as a theater, it became Castle Garden. The high price of tickets to the Garden’s varied performances guaranteed respectable audiences.

Throughout the 1820s some of New York’s most prominent Yankees and Knicker-bockers nestled around the Battery and its adjacent blocks, so many that Bowling Green was irreverently dubbed Nobs’ Row. Other affluent families settled along Broadway itself. In 1828 over one hundred of the city’s five hundred richest men lived there.

Broadway between Park Place and Barclay Street, 1831 (now the site of the Woolworth Building), directly opposite City Hall. The private house on the right was occupied by Philip Hone, who had settled there a decade earlier, when Broadway was still lined with fashionable private residences. Only a half-dozen years later, surging commercial growth—marked by the expansion of the adjacent American Hotel and construction of Astor House one block to the south—would transform the neighborhood. (© Museum of the Gty of New York)

Among them was Philip Hone, who had retired in 1821 at the age of forty from the auctioneer business with money enough to purchase a house directly across from City Hall (making for an effortless commute during his 1825 term as mayor). Even the censorious Mrs. Trollope loved Broadway, that “noble street.” Though lacking “the gorgeous fronted palaces of Regent-street,” it was nevertheless “magnificent in its extent.” Its “neat awnings, excellent trottoir [sidewalk], and well-dressed