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Nonequestrian clubs blossomed too, as bourgeois men refurbished old sanctuaries and created new ones—venues one observer classified as “anti-matrimonial and antidomestic” havens. Merchants and lawyers of impeccable pedigree indulged in the sedentary pleasures of conversation and dining at the Union Club, now resituated at Fifth Avenue and 21st Street. Its ten-year waiting list so grated on blueblood potential applicants that Alexander Hamilton, John J. Astor, and Philip Schuyler formed the Knickerbocker Club in 1871, and gentlemen of the Democratic persuasion turned to August Belmont’s Manhattan Club (1865) in the old Benkard residence on Fifth Avenue.

Many of the newly monied flocked to the New York Yacht Club—though the group drew the line at accepting Jay Gould—and their ever bigger boats, including schooners of over two hundred tons, encouraged millionaire members Jerome, Bennett, and Pierre Lorillard to launch racing on a transatlantic scale. Other vigorous Knickerbockers (including some young Roosevelts and DePeysters) were inspired by the London Athletic Club to open a New York version in 1868, and soon the New York Athletic Club was sponsoring track and field meets. Sporting men also turned to the New York Racquet Club or got caught up in the velocipede (early bicycle) craze of 1868 and formed associations dedicated to its development.

When such wholesome diversions palled, gentlemen could gamble at any of a dozen new luxury casinos, equal to Europe’s finest. Here one could dine in splendor—the sumptuous meals and choice wines were free—and then repair to the glass-domed, velvet-carpeted, rosewood-furnished gaming rooms for high-stakes faro and roulette (Belmont reputedly lost sixty thousand dollars in one night). Old-fashioned Knickerbockers considered even the grandest of these establishments, John Morrissey’s on 24th Street near the Fifth Avenue Hotel, to be somewhat indecent. They had not forgotten Morrissey’s brawler origins or Tammany ties. But the frisson of such connections appealed to sporting men like Vanderbilt, Jerome, and Belmont, who had no hesitations about racing Morrissey’s team up at Harlem Lane or playing at his tables.

New York clubmen seeking new ways to shatter old constraints on conspicuous consumption adopted recreational hunting, that favorite pastime of European aristocrats. The ever energetic Bennett Junior, assisted by his good friend General Phil Sheridan, organized one such expedition in 1871. The party whose sleeping car chugged out of the newly completed Grand Central Depot in mid-September included such members of the “fastest society set” as Leonard Jerome, John G. Hecksher, Carrol Livingston, and J. Schuyler Crosby. Awaiting them at Fort McPherson, Nebraska, was a supply train of sixteen wagons to carry tents and provisions (including ice for the wine), three hundred Fifth Cavalry troopers to ward off Indians, and a guide, gorgeously resplendent in a white buckskin suit and crimson shirt, by the name of William Frederick Cody—better known, since the 1869 New York publication of Ned Buntline’s dime novel about him, as Buffalo Bill. The “dudes” proceeded to “rough it” in style, shooting up behemoths, dining under prairie sunsets on filet of buffalo aux champignons, and leaving behind campsites littered with Mumm’s champagne bottles. Buffalo Bill made such a hit with the New Yorkers that they invited him to the metropolis, where for six weeks he was trotted around town from party to party. Hostesses lionized him, papers reported his every word, and Cody became the smash hit of the social season, the quintessence of western equestrian chic.

LES GIRLS

The unbuttoned, not to say raucous, sexual hedonism of upper-class males—in marked contrast to the growing prudishness of the merely well-to-do—was yet another way that the haute bourgeoisie pleasurably demarcated itself in the Gilded Age. New peaks of public promiscuity were attained at masked balls (also known as French balls), which began just after the