Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [569]
Neighborhoods thought immune from urban squalor as recently as the 1820s and 1830s became undesirable in the 1840s and 1850s. St. John’s Park denizens fled in droves, especially after Vanderbilt’s Hudson River Railroad ran tracks down its west side in 1851. A few blocks to the east, so many beer halls and tobacco shops had spilled off Broadway onto Bleecker and Bond streets that those addresses, as one paper put it in 1853, could no longer be considered “the ultima thule of aristocracy.” Even in the Astor Place district, Charles Astor Bristed wrote sadly, “the dwellings are interspersed with shops; elegant mansions are beginning to be elbowed by dentists and boarding houses, and to assume an appearance of having been in the aristocratic precincts.”
Willis had warned wealthy New Yorkers that they must settle “above Bleecker” to be socially acceptable. But how far above Bleecker? One answer was the brand-new neighborhood around Union Square Park, the three-and-a-half-acre elliptical oasis laid out in the 1830s on the northern frontier of the city at the instigation of developer Sam Ruggles. Building, halted by the panic, began anew with recovery. The park itself was fitted up with a fountain, gas lights, birdhouses named for prominent municipal buildings, and a bronze equestrian statue of Washington on the exact spot where he’d been received by citizens on Evacuation Day in 1783. In 1848 the Herald announced that 14th Street, the square’s southern boundary, was “now nearly the center of the fashion-able faubourgs.”
Gramercy Park, another panic-stalled Ruggles project, took off as well. By the midfifties the discreet little square was snugly enveloped by expensive residences. Among the wealthy new arrivals were Peter Cooper, Cyrus Field, James Harper (who relocated his mayor’s lamps to the front of Number 4), and George Templeton Strong, who had married Ellen Ruggles, the developer’s daughter.
But it was Fifth Avenue, a block west of Union Square, that drew the very wealthiest New Yorkers. When Henry Brevoort had built his mansion on 9th Street in 1834, the “avenue” was a near-deserted country lane running up from Washington Square to the municipal parade-ground on 23rd Street. In 1847 the city replaced the parade-ground with Madison Square, a seven-acre park that by the early fifties was being touted in the press as a sure bet to become “the most fashionable part of our rapidly increasing city.” A parade of commodious row houses and ornate mansions advanced quickly up Fifth, lodging the likes of August Belmont, Moses Grinnell, and William Lenox. By the end of the fifties, when Caroline Schermerhorn Astor convinced her husband, William Backhouse Astor Jr., to erect a mansion (with a capacious ballroom) between 33rd and 34th streets, next door to that of his brother, John Jacob Astor III, it qualified as the richest thoroughfare in America.
Union Square, 1849, looking south across 4th Street. Lithograph by Sarony & Major. On the square’s east side, between 15th and 16th streets, is the row of fancy bow-fronted residences erected by Samuel B. Ruggles. (© Museum of the City of New York)
Upperten housing was as distinctive for its architecture as its location. Economic depression had put paid to the reigning Greek Revival style, and returning prosperity brought to the fore designers captivated by the Italian Renaissance. A. T. Stewart’s Marble Palace had been the first New York structure inspired by fifteenth-century palazzos, a style with which Londoners and Parisians had been experimenting for a decade. Now Herman Thome, who had lived stylishly in France, engaged Stewart’s architects, Trench and Snook, to design him an Italianate residence. Completed in 1848, the freestanding mansion, sited on 16th Street just