Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [848]
Hunt had long been wishing New Yorkers would take an architectural leap forward. Now, with three million dollars at his command, he showed them how to do it, producing a palatial residence that, in the opinion of the Times, went way beyond anything “heretofore attempted in New York.” Well aware how mock-castles like Chambery and Chenonceaux had delighted the parvenu bankers and merchants of the Renaissance, Hunt erected an adaptation of Francis I’s sixteenth-century Château de Blois, filled it full of Renaissance and medieval furniture, tapestries, and armor, and had it ready for Alva’s ball in 1883.
The city’s elite gave itself over to a flurry of preparations. A hundred-plus dressmakers labored night and day for weeks. Groups of young women practiced “quadrilles”—complex dance presentations—among them Miss Caroline (Carrie) Astor and her friends, who planned to appear as pairs of stars. As daughter of the Queen of Society, she simply assumed, rashly, that her invitation was on the way.
It was not. As the magic night of March 26 approached, Mrs. Vanderbilt casually let it be known that no invitation would be forthcoming for the charming Miss Astor as, alas, she had never properly made her acquaintance, or that of her mother. The queen surrendered forthwith. A footman in Astor-blue livery was dispatched from the 34th Street mansion to deliver, a mile up Fifth Avenue, an engraved calling card to a servant in Vanderbilt-maroon livery. With her arrival in society thus duly certified, Alva Vanderbilt authorized a return delivery of the last of the twelve hundred invitations.
The affair, as every New York paper blared in front-page next-day stories, was the grandest social event to date in the city’s history. The barely completed halls and rooms, lined with roses, orchids, palm fronds, and bougainvillea, had been transformed into a tropical wonderland. The Louis XV salon was resplendent with Gobelin tapestries, and wainscoting ripped from old French châteaux. The triumphant hostess, costumed as a Renaissance princess, welcomed her equally gorgeously attired guests—including an array of Mary Stuarts, Marie Antoinettes, and Queen Elizabeths; her brother-in-law Cornelius was dressed as Louis XVI, but his wife, more au courant, came as The Electric Light. Alva presided happily over a spectacular dinner and a round of dancing. Many gave highest accolades to Mrs. S. S. Howland’s group for their Hobby-Horse Quadrille, in which the dancers appeared mounted on life-size model horses made of genuine hides, but Mrs. Vanderbilt perhaps warmed most to the graceful moves of Carrie Astor’s Star Quadrille.
FROM THE FOUR HUNDRED TO THE TWO THOUSAND
By her grudging accommodation of Vanderbilts and other new Medici, Mrs. Astor preserved her hegemony for another decade. She became, in fact, something of a national institution. Over the next years, as the country followed with awe (or outrage) the shimmering doings of New York Society, Mrs. Astor’s verdicts and edicts as conveyed by the press—her remarks invariably couched in the third person—enthralled readers from coast to coast.
With the assistance of her chamberlain, Ward McCallister, she sustained, for a time, an unfortunately enlarged but still acceptably exclusive inner circle. In 1888 McCallister opined to a Tribune reporter that the core group was in fact small enough to fit comfortably into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom: “Why, there are only about 400 people in fashionable New York Society. If you go outside that number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease. See the point?” This pronunciamento created something of a stir and led to rampant speculation