Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [576]
Once properly bejewelled, only a touch of perfume was needed—and by 1858 there were six perfume manufacturers in the city, advertising their wares via scent-soaked cards—and mademoiselle was ready for a ball at Delmonico’s. There she could flaunt her shoulders, display alluring décolletage and voluptuous (if possibly padded) curves, and set her crinoline swinging, revealing a flash of ankle. This was all the more likely as the tempo of dances quickened in the 1840s, with tearing polkas now complementing the waltzes and quadrilles. As George Templeton Strong informed his diary in December 1845 after a gathering at Mrs. Mary Jones’s: “Polka for the first time brought under my inspection. It’s a kind of insane Tartar jig performed to a disagreeable music of an uncivilized character.”
The marriages that flowed from these mating rituals were not prearranged; indeed romantic love had never been more highly touted. However, by excluding all but young men of appropriate status and wealth, upper-class families practically guaranteed their daughters’ choices would be appropriate. In 1856 37 percent of New York’s wealthiest were directly interrelated.
At-home festivities had increased in number and opulence since Mr. and Mrs. Henry Brevoort had set the pace with their famous 1840 costume ball. The grandest affaire de luxe of the new era was the costume ball that took place in 1854 in the Lafayette Place mansion of Mrs. William Colford Schermerhorn. Sparing no expense, that redoubtable lady redecorated her house to resemble the Versailles Palace in the age of Louis XV, then invited six hundred of the city’s richest citizens to dress up like French courtiers for an evening of dining and dancing.
France set the trends in cuisine as well, with Delmonico’s as transmission belt. The Beaver Street establishment remained the preferred setting for balls, assemblies, and family dinners until well into the 1850s. In 1856 the restaurant added an uptown venue on Broadway and Chambers Street. At lunch the new eatery soon drew local influentials like A. T. Stewart (whose store was across the street) and Henry Raymond (whose Times would settle across the park). In the evening, famines strolled down from upper Broadway for social dining. At either location, those eager to explore the creations of Robert Beauvilliers and Careme could be sure Delmonico’s was offering the latest in Parisian dining.
Upper-class entertainments were rehoused in new settings. Wealthy audiences packed into the grand new Lyceum Theater, on Broome and Broadway, where James William Wallack had established a resident company in 1852 and begun staging English productions with his son, Lester Wallack, as leading man. Laura Keene, a local actress who had worked for Wallack, launched her own company in 1856 in a new playhouse on Broadway just below Bleecker. Her polished productions in the 1858-59 season included the drama Our American Cousin, which would be upstaged by tragedy half a decade later when taken on the road to Washington, D.C.
As a bulwark of refinement, however, nothing held out more promise than the establishment of a new opera house in Astor Place. Although they had long shied away from it as an expression of aristocratic decadence, upper-class New Yorkers finally acquired a taste for opera. This was thanks partly to the lyricism of Verdi, Bellini, Donizetti, and other contemporary composers, and partly to the impact of visiting European singers who began flocking to New York via the speedy new steamships and dazzling audiences at the Park Theater and Niblo’s Gardens. Equally weighty was upperten’s expectation that an opera house would provide, in Nathaniel Parker Willis’s words, “a substitute for a general drawing room—a refined