Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [757]
These factions mixed and mingled in their social and business dealings, to be sure, and in some respects an ever more homogenized bourgeois culture was emerging. But important stylistic distinctions remained—with old-monied merchants tending toward the understated, and new monied industrialists and financiers favoring the flamboyant. Given the latter groups’ new resources and the intensely competitive nature of Manhattan’s elite socializing, customary constraints fell rapidly away. Upper-class rituals came to resemble those of European—and especially French—aristocrats, far more than they did those of antebellum American republicans. Nowhere was the penchant for princely display more evident than among those metropolitan millionaires who pursued their city’s long-standing love affair with fine horses with heightened fervor, even as they presided over an industrialization of transportation that would terminate the equestrian age.
HOT TO TROT
After a hard morning fighting Gould, Fisk, and Drew in the Erie War, Cornelius Vanderbilt would harness up his team, drive north of Central Park to Harlem Lane (later St. Nicholas Avenue), and spend the afternoon happily racing heats against other whooping and screaming brokers and lawyers—to the cheers of sightseers on porches of inns along the route. Vanderbilt might well find Robert Bonner of the Ledger awaiting him with his new champion trotter, Dexter (for whom he had paid an incredible thirty-three thousand dollars). Certainly his partner Leonard Jerome would be there, a horse fancier of such intensity that he housed his team in a black walnut-paneled stable complete with wall-to-wall carpeting—lodgings that rivaled Napoleon Ill’s Mews in Paris, where Jerome had attended races with French dandies. August Belmont, when not selling railroad or municipal bonds, would be behind his sulky, urging on his prize horses. The actor Lester Wallack and even the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher were known for their fast teams. Indeed so famous an institution was Harlem Lane that when General Grant first visited New York after the war he immediately asked to be taken uptown to see the spectacle.
Fast Trotters on Harlem Lane N.Y., by Currier & Ives, 1870. (© Museum of the City of New York)
A more sedate type of horse-mania was the carriage promenade through Central Park. In the late afternoon the aristocracy climbed aboard their coaches and entered the park at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street; by four P.M. the miles of drives were alive with carriages, so many that “a stranger would think that the whole of New York was out on a grand trotting spree to see which had the fastest pair of horses or the gayest and most costly equipage.”
This mode of elite socializing—an elaboration of the Broadway promenade of the 1850s—embraced both sexes. While plenty of men were delighted to demonstrate that they could afford to curtail their working day, women were more available for these fashionable parades, especially as Central Park was a thoroughly controlled environment, insulated from the indignities of urban street life. By the 1870s even young unmarried women could drive through the park—with a friend, with a suitor, even alone, albeit not without raising an eyebrow or two. As May King Van Rensselaer later recalled, “When I drove the first pony phaeton ever seen on Fifth Avenue, members of the Union Club, as I passed, shook their heads and feared the young Miss King was rather ‘fast.’”
Vehicles varied by class clique. The old patriciate of Jays, Livingstons, and Stuyvesants favored stately black broughams, or perhaps