Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [774]
As cultural possessions piled up in the parlor, along with machine-made upholstery, drapery, and carpeting and heavily carved furniture, they demanded an increasing level of maintenance. The haute bourgeoisie solved this problem with platoons of servants, but most of the middle class could at best afford but one. This required the housewife to take a professional approach to increasing the efficiency of such domestic labor as she had available. Advice books had been telling wives to manage households scientifically since the 1840s, but now the audience for such counsel had grown large enough to support an ongoing journalistic advocacy. Thus Eunice Beecher wrote a regular domestic advice column for the Christian Union in the 1870s, in which she aimed to help a woman “conduct her household as a business, prepare herself for it as a man prepared for his life work.”
When they turned from work to play, more and more middle-class New Yorkers could afford to take in the same operatic and theatrical performances at the Rialto as did the haute bourgeoisie. But they also enjoyed more modest pastimes, like group singing in their parlors or reading aloud from genteel magazines like Harper’s Weekly and Scrib-ner’s. Lectures were popular too: the uplifting or scientific ones at Chickering Hall (Fifth Avenue and 18th Street) and the effusions of humorists like Artemus Ward at Dodworth Hall (just north of Grace Church).
The new Central Park attracted many middling Manhattanites. When flags flew on omnibuses and horsecars, or one heard that “the ball is up in the Park,” it meant that the pond at 59th Street was frozen over and one could go skating (at night the area was illuminated by calcium lights). Park officials enforced respectable behavior, and regulations said that “any person observing any act of indecorum may signalize a park-keeper by holding aloft or waving a handkerchief.” Middle-class New Yorkers couldn’t afford private carriages, but they could rent one from a livery stable for a dollar or two an hour, at least for special occasions. Families of clerks, prosperous shopkeepers, young professionals, and independent artisans (especially Germans) also went for walks, strolled through the Ramble, and took their children to the nascent zoo at the Arsenal. On summer Saturday afternoons, when most of “the mechanic and laboring classes” were still at work, Dodworth’s band concerts attracted crowds of forty-five thousand or more to the Mall. These assemblages, the papers noted, were composed of the “orderly, wellconducted and respectable,” the kinds of people (said the Tribune) “whose tastes are above grog shops and lager bier gardens but whose pockets are not equal to Newport or Saratoga.”
Those who could afford the bicycles produced by several city manufacturers—which retailed for a stiff fifty dollars to three times that—could take classes in biking at the new Velocinasium. Here, the Scientific American observed in 1869, “on any weekday evening may be seen upward of a hundred and fifty gentlemen—doctors, bankers, merchants, and representatives from almost every profession—engaged in this training school preparatory to making their appearance upon the public streets and fashionable promenades.”
Shopkeepers, clerks, and skilled craftsmen (especially butchers) dominated the city’s baseball fields, hailing the sport as a healthful outdoor exercise. Amateur outfits continued to flourish, and by 1867, with the return of veterans who had played in the army, there were over one hundred clubs in Brooklyn and Manhattan, many formed by companies and colleges. But baseball had begun its own professionalization process during the war, when William H. Cammeyer opened the Union Grounds in Brooklyn’s Eastern District, providing a rent-free playing field to three clubs but charging a tencent admission fee to watch the games. His success inspired a competitor in the Capitoline Grounds (once part of the old Lefferts farm). Now the clubs that drew the