Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [700]
New York’s upper classes made money in quantities never before seen or even imagined. In 1863 the upper 1 percent of income earners (sixteen hundred families) garnered about 61 percent of the city’s wealth. And where in 1860 there had been a few dozen millionaires in the city, by war’s end there would be several hundred, some of them worth over twenty millions.
In celebration of their expanded or newly minted fortunes, the rich went on a shopping binge. After striking successful deals at the Astor House, speculators decked out in velvet coats, gold chains, breast pins, and rings dined at Delmonico’s on partridge stuffed with truffles. The “shoddy aristocracy” paraded down Fifth Avenue on Sundays or trotted around the new Central Park in their shiny equipages wearing thousand-dollar camel’s hair shawls. Contractor parvenus gloried in liveried servants and imported luxuries. In 1862 the genteel Maria Daly was horrified to hear that “a saddler’s wife went to Tiffany and Young’s . .. and ordered the greatest quantity of pearls and diamonds and plate.”
Among the most prodigious shoppers was Mary Lincoln. When Congress appropriated twenty thousand dollars for her to redecorate the White House, she hastened to New York City’s department stores, overspent her budget, then pleaded with bureaucrats to make up the difference without telling her husband. Throughout the war she went on repeated and increasingly pathological spending sprees in the metropolis. Mrs. Lincoln was driven by personal demons, but in milder form, her ardent consumerism became commonplace.
The grand symbol of the wartime boom was A. T. Stewart’s “New Store.” Abandoning his Marble Palace on Broadway and Chambers, Stewart had architect John Kellum design a structure farther uptown on a plot bounded by Broadway and Fourth Avenue, 9th and 10th streets, just across Astor Place from Cooper Union. The New Store was of cast iron (produced at the Hudson shoreline by the Cornell Iron Works). Painted white, the building rose five stories around a great rotunda. Its graceful molded arches in the Venetian manner—Stewart compared them to “puffs of white clouds”—also permitted rows upon rows of windows, and the building featured two thousand panes of French plate glass.
Stewart put no displays in the ground-floor windows, relying instead on views of the shoppers within to draw additional customers. On opening day, November 10, 1862, crowds entering the largest retail store in the world found countless orderly displays, laid out with “military precision,” Harper’s Monthly noted approvingly, and an army of five hundred clerks and cash boys (who ran back and forth between cashier and clerk) waiting to serve them. On the first floor customers could purchase silks, dress goods, men’s furnishings, linens, and domestics’ clothing. Here the wealthy could buy outfits for balls (like the glittering 1863 reception for officers of the Russian fleet at the Academy of Music) or for the summer season. Though the prices tended to the staggering, the less well heeled could find bargains at the calico and remnant counters.
The upper floors were devoted to production, not consumption. On the fourth, 500 seamstresses and dressmakers labored in well-lit, well-ventilated workrooms considered the finest in the city, though annual wages ranged only from $100 to $250. The fifth floor was given over to a linen service that employed another three hundred women. The store thus had nearly a thousand employees, neatly segregated by gender—eight hundred women or girls on the production side, a hundred supers, cashiers, bookkeepers, ushers, porters,