Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [762]
The police accommodated the spread of prostitution, for a price. By 1876 the system of payoffs was so notorious that when police captain Alexander S. “Clubber” Williams was transferred to the 29th Precinct, he almost drooled with delight: “I’ve been having chuck steak ever since I’ve been on the force,” said Clubber, “and now I’m going to have a bit of tenderloin.” His bon mot, then most applicable to the mid-20s between Sixth and Seventh, would come to characterize the entire area between Fifth and Eighth avenues from 23rd to 57th streets—known for the next two generations as the Tenderloin or, alternatively, as Satan’s Circus.
ON THE AVENUE
The new fascination with aristocratic French taste, architecture, and costume also pervaded the sumptuous residences and lavish private entertainments of Manhattan’s haute bourgeoisie, whose precincts were once again in motion. The commercial invasion of Union Square, and the transformation of elegant row houses on Fifth Avenue’s side streets into boardinghouses for the merely middle class, squeezed the rich northward. Soon even Madison Square began to give way on its western edge to shops, clubhouses, and boardinghouses willing to pay tremendous rents, though the square’s eastern side remained lined with fancy residences. Murray Hill remained a secure haven for the moment, and the fashionable quarter between 23rd and 34th quickly filled with well-appointed town houses. Increasingly, however, the rich migrated to the area between Sixth and Third, from the 30s through the 50s, particularly along the vertical axes of Madison, Park, and above all Fifth Avenue.
The latest luxury area’s upper boundary was staked out in 1869 by an unlikely pioneer, Mrs. Mary Mason Jones. This seventy-year-old dowager of impeccable pedigree—Edith Wharton, her niece, would use her as the model for Mrs. Manson Mingot in The House of Mirth—abandoned her venerable Waverly Place establishment and moved to the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. The locale, despite its proximity to the new Central Park, was still undeveloped and filled with shantytowns, slaughterhouses, charitable institutions, the unfinished Catholic cathedral, and, at Fifth and 52nd, the home of abortionist Mme. Restell, now known as the “wickedest woman in New York.” Nevertheless, Mrs. Jones’s mansion, and the new Grand Army Plaza the Tweed regime thoughtfully provided in 1870, were soon surrounded by fine homes of fashionable Fifth Avenoodles (as the irreverent called them).
Fine homes, as before the war, meant three-or four-story Italianate structures (at $75,000 to $150,000 each), only now they had to be topped with a mansard (or “French”) roof. As one commentator noted in 1868, “no man who wants a fashionable house, will be without it,” and some now hopelessly passé Federal, Greek, and Gothic houses were accordingly recapped.
A few pathbreakers built urban chateaux. Leonard Jerome’s flamboyant six-story mansion at 32 East 26th Street included a six-hundred-seat theater (for performances by his protégées), a breakfast room seating seventy, and a white and gold ballroom with fountains that spouted champagne and eau de cologne. A. T. Stewart’s white marble Parisian hôtel, when finished in 1869, was the largest dwelling in New York City and featured a seventy-five-foot-long art gallery for his superb collection. Most wealthy Manhattanites still preferred comfortingly monolithic streetscapes to individualistic architectural statements, though their plain brownstone