• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Private equipages, modest in the early 1830s, grew increasingly ostentatious. (Carriage showrooms and harness shops took over the tiny hamlet of Great Kill, on a creek at what is now 42nd Street, and the area above it renamed the Longacre, after London’s equestrian hub.) Four-in-hand carriages were everywhere, their horses driven “chequered”—steeds of matching color arrayed diagonally. In winter, fancy cutters and family sleighs were de rigueur, and wealthy families, wrapped in bearskin robes, rode up to Wintergreen’s in Yorkville for sherry flips. “One would hardly believe he was in a republican country,” said one guidebook author, “to see the escutcheoned panels of the carriages, the liveried coachmen, and the supercilious air of the occupants of the vehicles, as they go pompously and flaringly by.”

Bourgeois brownstones were showy too, but their exteriors were sobriety itself compared to their extravagant interiors. Affluent New Yorkers might easily spend ten thousand dollars on furniture for a single room, reported Lydia Maria Child. “Foreign artistic upholsterers assert that there will soon be more houses in New York furnished according to the fortune and taste of noblemen, than there are either in Paris or London.” Henry Parish’s mansion off Union Square had half a dozen period reception rooms decorated with Italian statuary, Gobelin tapestries, and Sevres porcelain. The mistress of a hundred-thousand-dollar mansion on Fifth Avenue slept in a bed inlaid with pearls and draped with satin and lace.

Portraits of family members, living or dead, often lined these walls, signifying (or confecting) tradition, but more and more elites began collecting old masters to adorn their parlors or private galleries. To serve them, especially after the American Art-Union was scuttled, European dealers began setting up branch offices—the House of Goupil dispatched Michael Knoedler from Paris to New York in 1846—which stimulated the growth of American dealerships as well.

Wealthy households were rich in mechanical marvels, too. An ad for a dwelling off Union Square in 1846 ticked off the new essentials: “Croton water, range, boiler, bath, water closets,. . . furnace, dumb waiter from basement to attic, gas, and every other improvement introduced into modern built houses of the first class.” Water taps, now on every floor, splashed into marble washbasins. Bathing and toilet facilities (virtually unknown outside the major hotels before 1842) supplanted chamber pots and privies. Central heating arrived: cellar furnaces fired with Pennsylvania coal forced hot air through pipes and tin ducts up to cast iron or brass registers (though the upstairs bedrooms still relied on fireplace coal grates).

Maintaining these mechanical marvels required lots of labor power. In the case of central heating, a servant had to rake out the furnace, throw away the ashes, stoke it with coal twice a day, and bank the cinders at night. Fuel and ash had to be carried to and from the new stoves, and the icebox water pan needed emptying. Furniture also demanded upkeep. The very wealthiest families might have six or eight servants, including a cook, butler, waiter, parlor maid, upstairs maid, laundress, houseman, and coachman, though most elites had less than half this number.

The upper class adorned their persons with as much care as they did their houses, though men and women now took different stances on the question of fashion. Most businessmen did not devote undue time or attention to clothing, and indeed considered those who paid attention to fashion as ne’er-do-wells or fools. They simply wrapped themselves in loosely cut waistcoats and frock coats of increasingly somber hue: nineteen out of twenty were of black broadcloth, with claret or mulberry acceptable for weddings. Dark stovepipe hats dignified most heads, while at the neck bourgeois gentlemen sported a “modern high & pointed shirt collar, that fearful sight to an approaching enemy