Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [758]
Jerome and others also organized the more formal Coaching Club, which sponsored semiannual parades organized according to strict protocols. Drivers dressed in bottle-green cutaways with brass buttons and tall white hats and were accompanied by ladies under frilly parasols. When all was ready members would roll four-in-hand up Fifth Avenue, past crowds of gawking onlookers, many clutching The Tally-ho, a pamphlet that identified the heraldic colors of each participant. Gossip columnists reported on the doings for those who couldn’t afford the trip uptown.
The pleasures of coaching, with its opportunities for social primping, and of trotting, with its hard-driving manly competitions, merged neatly in thoroughbred racing. Before the war, as sectional relations curdled, southern horse breeders had refused to send their steeds to northern competitions, and the sport had declined. Now southerners were back at Saratoga, and New York turfmen returned to building up racing stables.
What they lacked, however, was a proper setting, Long Island’s Union Course and Fashion Park having been taken over by the hoi polloi. Leonard Jerome, a familiar of Parisian courses, set out to fill the need. In 1865 he and wealthy horse fanciers August Belmont and William Travers formed the American Jockey Club (AJC). Jerome then purchased a 230-acre Bathgate estate in Fordham and laid out a track, an eightthousand-seat grandstand, and a clubhouse patterned after elaborate European models. With his brother, Lawrence, Jerome had a wide avenue cut from Macomb’s Dam to the track (today at the bottom of Jerome Park Reservoir). Local authorities named it Murphy Avenue, after a local alderman, but Lawrence’s infuriated wife ordered bronze plates bearing the words JEROME AVENUE and had them riveted in place—a fait accompli in which the authorities acquiesced.
Jerome Park opened on September 25, 1866. Everyone was there: old money and new, swells and politicos, Vanderbilt and Fisk, Tweed and Morrissey, sportsmen from around the country, all in white hats and gloves. Grant was guest of honor. Ladies attended too—“ladies of fashion, ladies domestic, ladies professionally literary, ladies of birth and culture” (in the words of a Harper’s reporter). They felt protected in Jerome’s elegant clubhouse, despite the presence of people who arrived via the Harlem Rail Road, and their participation rendered racing both fashionable and respectable.
Too fashionable, some thought. Complaints emerged about the AJC’s “aristocratic” policies. Opponents sniped at its governing clique of fifty life members, calling it the “House of Lords,” and objected to having the main section of the grandstand restricted to members only. The AJC dealt with such adverse press by inducting publishers (Henry Raymond, Man ton Marble, and James Gordon Bennett Jr.) into the ruling group and permitting nonmembers to enter the club section if introduced by a member. But mainly they hung tough: “Racing is for the rich,” Belmont said bluntly.
Racing was also faster than ever. The AJC abandoned four-mile heats in favor of the British system of “dashing” over short distances, an “urban” approach that emphasized speed. In 1867 the Belmont Stakes was inaugurated, named for the AJC’s first president, and the size of prize monies mounted steadily. Soon New York’s purses, largest in the nation, were drawing entrants from around the country, and