Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [571]
Other wealthy New Yorkers attended the Unitarian Church of All Souls on the corner of Fourth Avenue and 20th Street, close to Gramercy Park. Erected in 1855 at a cost of over a hundred thousand dollars, All Souls was vaguely Romanesque in appearance, with alternating bands of black and white stone and a 106-foot dome that towered over the neighborhood—the irreverent called it the Church of the Holy Zebra—and prominent pewholders were attracted by its dynamic minister, Henry Bellows.
SUBURBS AND SUMMER SPOTS
The rich were prepared to abandon downtown Manhattan, but not the city itself. Though surrounded by vast open spaces, newly accessible by speedier transport, most of the wealthy preferred to cluster together, living literally side by side, cooped up in narrow row houses on relatively tiny lots. The urbane inclinations bequeathed by the Dutch remained vibrant as ever.
A minority, however, did defect to the countryside, seduced by the siren song of Andrew Jackson Downing. A Newburgh-based landscape gardener for the Hudson Valley gentry, Downing wrote a series of books in the forties advocating villa living as an antidote to “the too great bustle and excitement of our commercial cities.” Villas—asymmetrical, natural-hued country mansions—really belonged on properties of several hundred acres, Downing admitted. But he allowed that one might opt for a smaller villa (with as few as three servants) if grouped with others around a common park, in the manner of English “romantic suburbs.” When Downing died in 1852, his close friend Alexander Jackson Davis took up the campaign for rural residency. Hitherto a Greek Revival man, Davis nimbly embraced the Gothic and received several commissions for baronial homes in quasi-rustic settings.
In Brooklyn, Edwin Clark Litchfield, a lawyer who made a fortune in midwestern railroad development, had Davis erect Grace Hall, a grand Italianate villa, on the crest of Prospect Heights from where he could survey his square mile of virtually vacant land. Costly villas and sloping lawns also began to dot the Bronx (Richard March Hoe’s Brightside in Hunt’s Point), Riverdale (actor Edwin Forrest’s Font Hill), Queens’s East River shore (a cluster at Ravenswood), and far-off hillsides in Staten Island.
In New Jersey one venturesome contingent of affluent New Yorkers experimented with Downingesque suburban living. In the mid-1850s, aided by Davis, Llewellyn Haskell, a wealthy drug merchant, built Llewellyn Park, a collection of villas set along curving roads ranged around a fifty-acre park called the Ramble. Situated in the Jersey foothills of the Orange Mountains, the elaborately landscaped suburb succeeded, but there would be no more planned communities in this era. Those willing to leave Manhattan preferred to settle in nearby, already established villages made newly accessible by rail, and depot towns such as Mott Haven, Morrisania, Tremont, and Fordham experienced substantial growth during the 1850s. Deeper Westchester was deemed inconvenient; it took ninety minutes to do the nineteen miles to Bronxville.
Outlying villages in Queens were even less enticing to uppertens, though real estate speculators hoping to boom Maspeth, Newtown, and Flushing tried hard to woo them. Even when bumpy stagecoach rides over plank roads gave way to rail connections direct from the Hunter’s Point ferry landing, these county towns remained too far out. As one commuter complained in 1854: “The inability to get to a meeting or a lecture—to a place of amusement, or to do a little shopping are tolerable; but to be half a day in getting to and from business is a bore.”
The only suburb that really enticed elite New Yorkers lay a scant ten minutes away, in Brooklyn Heights,