Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [773]
The presence of this African-American elite was felt most strongly in Brooklyn’s black churches, which moved away from religious enthusiasm toward a more urbane and intellectual Christianity. Their trained and educated ministers focused heavily on promoting learning, literacy, and culture. Concord Baptist, Bridge Street African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal (AWME), and Siloam Presbyterian took the lead in providing libraries, classes, lectures, and concerts of classical music. The black Brooklyn community also developed autonomous institutions, like the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum (1866), the African Civilization Society, which began publishing the newspaper Freedman’s Torchlight the same year, and the Zion Home for Colored Aged (1869).
THE CULTIVATED LIFE
In the 1870s Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote novels about New York life—like We and Our Neighbors; or, the Record of an Unfashionable Street (1875), which featured heroines like Eva, “a child of wealth and fashion” whose father had gone bankrupt. Eva married a journalist, moved to an unfashionable street, made do with only one servant, and moderated her expectations to middle-class levels-. Referring to the posh Elmores she said: “We must keep in sight of them. All I ask is to be decent. I never expect to run into the extremes those Elmores do.”
Middling New Yorkers adhered to values that, like their jobs and residencies, set them off from vulgar lower classes and dissipated upper ones. “Decent” was an imprecise term, more or less interchangeable with “genteel,” “cultured,” “refined,” “civilized,” “respectable,” and “cultivated,” but all the near-synonyms suggested an earned status. “Cultivation” implied self-development, a purposeful pursuit of “higher things.” It prized intellect and sensibilities tutored in arts, letters, and manners. It was an identity rooted in education rather than in labor or wealth.
Not that the middle class had anything against wealth as such: prosperity was an indispensable precondition for gentility. Indeed it was the growing purchasing power of the postwar middle class that allowed ever greater numbers of New Yorkers to acquire the trappings of gentility: to live in tasteful homes in good neighborhoods, wear respectable clothes, attend refined schools, cultivate the arts and graces. Only “mere” or “vulgar” wealth was objectionable, wasted as it was on display rather than development, squandered in private hedonism rather than promotion of the public good.
Wherever they settled, therefore, middle-class New Yorkers decorated their quarters with objects that betokened their cultivation. Art galleries á la A. T. Stewart were out of the question, but mass-produced artwork was readily available. In his studio at 212 Fifth Avenue, John Rogers fashioned sculptural tableaux in clay, then churned out reproductions in plaster and bronze, which sold throughout the city and, via advertising and railroad delivery, across the continent. Rogers used industrial methods to evoke preindustrial life—The Village Post-Office, Coming to the Parson—along with more topical, even political themes, which balanced realism and sentimentality. Contemporary critics noted that his was not a “high art” but lauded the “Rogers groups” for their “elevated meaning” and “true feeling,” which were “alike satisfying to head and heart.” Metropolitan middle-class parlors were embellished as well with Currier and Ives chromolithographs that limned the triumphal expansion of Christian