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In June 1836 a little group met at the athenaeum and formed the Union Club, choosing as first president Samuel Jones, chief justice of the Superior Court of New York City. As Hone explained to his diary, the intention was to create an establishment of four hundred “of our most distinguished citizens.” It would “be similar in its plan and regulations to the great clubs of London, which give a tone and character to the society of the London metropolis.” The Union Club was an instant success. Merchants and lawyers from the city’s established families flocked to it. Even James Gordon Bennett was asked to join, though he declined, publicly and noisily, in the pages of his Herald, on the grounds it refused to admit females (“Society without woman is a farce,” he declared). Undeterred, the Union Club leased the Le Roy house at Broadway and Leonard, where local businessmen, out-of-town visitors, and bachelor men-about-town could entertain in exclusive and comfortable surroundings, which included the services of a chef from Paris and a cellar stocked with excellent wines.

Not all Knickerbocker nightlife was so relentlessly male. Soirees were all the rage in the boom era, as gentry couples gathered at the homes of their friends for late supper, music, and games. Hone regularly invited sixty or so to evenings featuring tableaux vivants. Costumed ladies and gentlemen arrayed themselves before elaborate backdrops as “Madonna” or “Lady Jane Grey” or “Highland Chief” or formed groups to depict a “Scene from Waverly” or “Cato’s Death.” Women also attended the round of elaborate parlor parties customarily triggered by society weddings, such as the 1834 union of Charles Augustus Heckscher with the daughter of John G. Coster, which dismayed even Hone with its costliness.

In 1833 the Knickerbockracy flirted with grand opera. Lorenzo Da Ponte, librettist of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, had introduced the masterpiece to New York in the mid-1820s, arranging a staging of it thirty-nine years after its world premiere. (Da Ponte translated his libretto into English and sold copies in the lobby.) Opera had not proved a social success, however, which the dogged Da Ponte put down to the absence of a proper theater. He therefore convinced a group of patricians to subscribe $150,000 and construct the Italian Opera House, the first building in the United States designed exclusively for that purpose. But its multicolumned, Greek-white exterior and sumptuous, gas-lit interior drew but a few hundred regular attendees. The first season ran a deficit; the second was a terminal disaster. New York simply lacked the social and cultural structures—state subsidies, aristocratic patronage—that underlay Europe’s operatic system. Its burghers were prepared to consume culture as aristocrats did, but not to underwrite it as aristocrats were expected to do. Besides, the whole business still seemed a bit culturally rich for Knickerbocker blood. No matter how much they envied European elites their prestigious cultural emblems, Knickerbockers were not yet prepared to emulate them. The New York Opera Company was liquidated, its palace sold off.

Pleasure gardens were more the local style, and here too exclusiveness was key to success. After 1830 the upper classes deserted the déclassé Vauxhall and turned to William Niblo’s new concern, established in 1828 at the northeast corner of Broadway and Prince. Niblo’s Garden surpassed all others in elegance and respectability, its status sustained by high entrance fees, expensive food, and urbane entertainments. Its only competitor for posh patronage was Contoit’s New York Garden, across from the Park, a cozy and quiet resort for wealthy and well-bred ladies and unchaperoned genteel couples. Waiters in white jackets and aprons dispensed lemonade, pound cake, and vanilla, lemon, or strawberry ice cream of a Sunday afternoon, and from sundown to midnight it was illuminated by colored whale-oil lamps on stanchions and branches of trees.

Broadway, etching by Thomas Horner, 1836. This view, looking north from Canal Street,