Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [764]
Stalls at Wallack’s, the nation’s leading playhouse, were in equal demand, and first nights in particular brought out the aristocracy of wealth in full plumage. Concerts similarly drew the wealthy to Union Square. At Irving Hall, designed (in 1860) for “miscellaneous entertainments of a high character,” one could hear both the Philharmonic Society—the old German co-op—and Theodore Thomas’s new orchestra. Thomas had been brought to America in 1845, at the age of ten, by his German parents. During the Civil War the young man, with the aid of wealthy backers, founded and trained his own orchestra, paying the musicians a regular salary rather than sharing box office takings as the Philharmonic’s members did. This stable income allowed Thomas’s artists to rehearse and play together on a full-time basis, and the well-drilled performers soon surpassed their part-time competitors. The new group also felt freer to go beyond the Philharmonic’s more old-fashioned (but crowd-pleasing) repertoire: it was the Thomas Orchestra that introduced Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony to America in 1867.
Both orchestras soon deserted Irving Hall in favor of the new Steinway Hall (1866), an exceptionally comfortable three-thousand-seat theater the piano manufacturer opened at the rear of his showroom on 14th Street. It also became the favorite stage for touring opera singers (Christine Nilsson made her American concert debut there in 1870), instrumentalists (such as Anton Rubinstein, the legendary Russian pianist), and lecturers (Dickens, on his 1867 visit, read selections from Christmas Sketches, Pickwick Papers, and Nicholas Nickkby).
MCCALLISTER AMONG THE PATRIARCHS
The trouble with the torrent of competitive postwar socializing was that it dissolved society into a welter of competing epicenters, none of which seemed to hold. Its innermost precincts—swollen but manageable in the 1850s—were now (as May King Van Rensselaer recalled) “assailed from every side by persons who sought to climb boldly over the walls of social exclusiveness.” Arriviste hostesses, backed by their husbands’ cash, threw ever more lavish and unorthodox affairs. Mrs. Paran Stevens (her husband a real estate tycoon) held parties on Sunday nights! Scandalized matrons ostracized her, but gentlemen flocked to her parlor. Mrs. William Colford Schermerhorn, a still more disturbing renegade, drew guests to her Madison Square drawing room with musicales.
Men were equally combative. Jerome, Belmont, and wealthy clubman William R. Travers each engaged Lorenzo Delmonico to offer the most perfect dinner, at any cost. His Silver, Gold, and Diamond affairs were so equally magnificent that Jerome, to win the race, gave each lady in attendance a gold bracelet. Still worse was the way a social unknown like millionaire importer Edward Luckemeyer could barge his way into society with a coup de table. Luckemeyer simply gave Charles Delmonico free rein (and ten thousand dollars), and voilá. Seventy-two distinguished guests turned out to boggle at the gigantic oval dining table, of virtually ballroom size, landscaped with flowers, with a thirty-foot lake at its center, upon which paddled four swans from the new Prospect Park.
In the 1870s only one family had the financial and social resources to bring some order to this chaos: the Astors. John Jacob had passed on his land and liquid assets to William Backhouse Astor, who during his lifetime had doubled his inheritance by assiduous extraction of rents from his acres and tenements. When he died in the mid-1870s, he in turn bequeathed roughly forty million dollars to his two heirs, John Jacob III and William. John Jacob (elder of the two) received two-thirds of the estate, but