Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [577]
Designed by Isaiah Rogers (architect of the Astor House, among other buildings), the new Astor Opera House pioneered a frankly elitist organization of theatrical space. The pit was “aristocratized” (Willis’s term) by replacing the usual benches with fixed, upholstered, and numbered chairs sold only by subscription. Above the pit rose two tiers of open boxes, also reserved exclusively for subscribers, where patrons could see and be seen by the entire assembly. A gallery at the very top of the house provided general-admission benches for five hundred people; accessible by a single narrow staircase, this plebeian “cockloft” was almost completely quarantined from the genteel zones below. On opening night in November 1847, amid blazing jewels and rustling silk, New York’s haut monde signaled their approval by turning out en masse for a performance of Ernani. (Brooklynites quickly set to creating equivalent venues, among them the Athenaeum [1853], the Philharmonic Society [1857], and the Academy of Music [1859-61].)
New York’s upper classes now lacked but one thing: a house organ to provide respectful coverage of their doings. Society reportage remained monopolized by James Gordon Bennett’s sardonic reflections in the Herald until 1846, when Nathaniel Parker Willis and his old Mirror partner, George Pope Morris, launched the Home Journal (later Town and Country). The Home Journal announced its intention of keeping New York City’s “more refined individuals” apprised of all that was “new, charming, or instructive in the brilliant circle of city life.” Home Journal featured talk of the town columns like “Prittle Prattle,” “The Season and Society,” and “Uptown Correspondence,” the latter done with the aid of wealthy society ladies (whose lives a grateful Willis then chronicled in serial features). The magazine also provided dramatic and musical reviews, literary notices, and, for gendemen, digests of the week’s news condensed “in small compass.” To report the doings of England’s haut monde, it excerpted London society journals, and French affairs were covered in “Parisian Chit-Chat,” much of it translated (possibly by Edgar Allan Poe) from New York City’s own Frenchlanguage paper, the Courrier des Etats-Unis.
On the whole, uppertendom was quite comfortable with success and indulged in fine wines, fast horses, and voguish clothing with no discernible traces of guilt. Yet in certain quarters, republican suspicions of aristocratic luxury retained considerable sway. Cold-water Yankees had long differed with pleasure-loving Knickerbockers about the proper use of wealth, and still did. Nor had old-stock spokesmen quite resigned themselves to the new monied’s ascendancy, and lampooning the pretensions of Fifth Avenue vulgarians became itself a mark of respectability. James K. Paulding, Irving’s collaborator on Salmagundi, dryly observed that when invited to dinner “I ate out of a set of China, my lady assured me cost seven hundred dollars, and drank out of glasses that cost a guinea a piece. In short, there was nothing on the table of which I did not learn the value.”
Industrialists too tended to decry the growth of luxury, in part because they saw themselves as useful producers, in contrast to superfluous financiers. Peter Cooper, one of New York’s richest men, continued to live at Fourth Avenue and 28th Street even after the New York and Harlem Rail Road began parking cattle cars in front of his house. Even after he moved to Gramercy Park in 1850, Cooper disdained ostentation, dressed simply, and limited the family to two servants; when his wife bought an elaborate carriage, he exchanged it for a more frugal model.
Principled objections to high living required principled rejoinders, and some prestigious churchmen endeavored to supply them. The Rev. Henry W. Bellows, minister of All Souls, editor of the Christian