Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [568]
The old monied even accepted August Belmont. Favored by an unrivaled knowledge of high finance and access to Rothshild credit, the German-Jewish Belmont had amassed a major fortune since his arrival in 1837. One of the leading private bankers in the country, he had also become one of the most colorful figures on the New York social scene. He was multilingual, handsome, and suave, a connoisseur of food and wine and art and horses and dogs. He hosted fancy soirees and led a pack of young uptown bachelors in late-night adventures around town. He limped romantically, the result of a duel over the attentions of a certain Mrs. Coles. His position improved even further in 1849 when he married nineteen-year-old Caroline Perry, daughter of Commodore Matthew Perry. Jewishness was not yet a bar to genteel status—the Hendrickses were honored members of the Union and St. Nicholas—but polite society took comfort from the fact that the wedding occurred in an Episcopal church (not to mention that he gave the bride an entire city block as a wedding present).
Other such alliances—such as the 1853 nuptials of William Backhouse Astor and Caroline Webster Schermerhorn—further blurred the distinction between arrivistes and aristocrats. Sniping at social climbers would continue, to be sure, as when Episcopal Bishop William Kip tartly observed that “wealth came in and created social distinctions which took the place of family, and thus society became vulgarized.” But New York’s pragmatic patricians accommodated newcomers and thereby made themselves a more durable and coherent elite.
But what to call themselves? Some were quite happy to be known as “aristocrats,” though this was still a fighting word in republican America. Others preferred more neutral, though still hierarchical, language: “best society,” “higher classes,” and (given the craze for things French) “ban ton.” “Bourgeoisie” had some appeal, though it had disparaging connotations: one local informant told Francis Grund, Viennese-born author of Aristocracy in America, that the “aristocracy here is itself nothing but a wealthy overgrown bourgeoisie, composed of a few families who have been more successful in trade than the rest.” The most New York City-specific solution was a numerological one. The phrase “upper ten thousand” (often awkwardly abbreviated as “uppertendom”) was originated by social arbiter Nathaniel Parker Willis and ratified by Charles Astor Bristed, Cambridge-educated grandson of John Jacob Astor, who used The Upper Ten Thousand as the tide for his 1852 sketch of elite life in New York City.
Membership in uppertendom required but two things: having a lot of money and spending it in approved ways. Willis’s checklist of appropriate consumption patterns awarded upperten status to those “who keep carriages, live above Bleecker, are subscribers to the opera, go to Grace Church, have a town house and country house, give balls and parties.” There were rival definitions, but all focused on measurable behavior: one had only to observe how—and especially where—an aspirant for elitehood lived.
“FLED BY DIGNIFIED DEGREES UP BROADWAY”
“Startled and disgusted with the near approach of plebeian trade,” one observer noted in 1853, New York’s wealthiest “fled by dignified degrees up Broadway.” By the midfifties private residences had virtually disappeared from once fashionable blocks around lower Broadway, Greenwich Street, and Park Place. Amos Eno, the hotel builder, stuck it out on Greenwich (his daughter recalled) “until we were surrounded by immigrant boarding houses, and then went uptown to live.” Yachtsman John Cox