Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [573]
Traditional customs like New Year’s Day visits were becoming increasingly unwieldy. “The extent of the visiting circle in New York has become too great for the operations of one day,” Philip Hone lamented as early as 1840. The grand promenade hour along Broadway served as a partial substitute. In the late afternoon, reporter George Foster observed in 1849, the street became “a perfect Mississippi, with a double current up and down” of bourgeois ladies and gentlemen acknowledging—or not acknowledging—one another in prescribed ways. This ritual did help define and police social boundaries. But it remained awkwardly open to disruption—performed as it was on a very public stage—by any rowdies who declined to accept their assigned roles as awed spectators.
Uppertens began to rely more heavily on the summer season and the summer resort, and as a result, Saratoga Springs blossomed in the boom. Far from the hoi polloi—and Coney Island, even the Catskills, were no longer far away enough—the city’s elite constructed a town-away-from-town, a place to mix and mingle among themselves. At first the notion of spending an entire summer lolling in leisure grated on still-sensitive republican nerves, so Saratoga’s properties as a restorative health spa were emphasized (the “Bath of America,” Willis called it). In the 1850s such scruples dropped away, and visitors to the elegant United States Hotel devoted themselves to matchmaking, horse racing, gambling, and gamboling in what was universally agreed to be the nation’s most brilliantly fashionable resort. So popular did it become that by decade’s end, New York’s crème de la crème—the Fish, Rhinelander, Lenox, Schermerhorn, Taylor, and Belmont families—began moving on to Newport, Rhode Island, settling into a growing number of “country houses” there.
Uppertens routinely traveled to Europe, too. The entire family might go, or just the wives and children, or bourgeois scions would decamp by themselves on extensive grand tours. Foreign travel provided the extra bonus of allowing the New York rich to keep abreast of the forms of display currently fashionable among Europe’s titled aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie—forms they set about duplicating the minute they got home.
“I NEVER SAW SUCH LUXURY AND EXTRAVAGANCE”
The elite’s retreat from downtown Manhattan was also a farewell to older standards of reticence and restraint. By 1850 prosperous New Yorkers, particularly younger ones, were wallowing in luxury with a nonchalance unknown among prior generations. Much of this took place in private, behind Italianate walls, but some uppertens didn’t hesitate to flaunt their wealth. They adopted theatrical forms of conspicuous display, which provided yet another reason to live in town, not the suburbs.
“The first thing, as a general rule, that a young Gothamite does is to get a horse; the second, to get a wife,” wrote Charles Astor Bristed, only half jokingly, about elite New York males’ passion for fine horses. Young men loved harnessing their blood chestnut colts and beautiful bays, then heading over to Third Avenue, Manhattan’s de facto exercise and racing track. From where the town’s cobblestones ended, Third’s newly macadamized surface, flanked by soft earthen trails for trotters, ran north for nearly five uninterrupted miles to Harlem Bridge. Every day from three o’clock until dark, fast horses and fast men climbed steadily up the gradual hills, then quick-timed to the bottom, where convivial taverns awaited, as well as blacksmiths and coachmakers who could repair a broken wheel or replace a lost shoe. Trotting—taken up by the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt and magazinist