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By Root 8135 0

—a breakaway group from the National Academy of Design—was Albert Pinkham Ryder, a red-bearded, dreamy-eyed visionary. Ryder had begun his art career in the customary way, studying at the National Academy and setting up a studio near Washington Square. But after 1880 he was drawn to New York’s “nightbird” tradition, best exemplified by Poe, and his canvases veered toward the romantic, the mysterious, even the sinister. He loved to walk around the city at night, soaking up the effects of moonlight on clouds, though his work never dealt with metropolitan “reality” in any but the most mediated way. Ryder was ignored by critics and public alike.

MAKING HISTORY

In the mid-1870s, as de facto editor of the New York Sketch Book of Architecture, Charles McKim reprinted images of old Manhattan treasures, especially Mangin and McComb’s City Hall, which he called the “most admirable public building in the city.” In revaluing the city’s built remains, McKim helped fashion a turn toward the past, one that particularly appealed to old Knickerbocker and mercantile families who couldn’t muster the financial resources for the social arms race. “Life here,” rued Frederic J. DePeyster in the early 1890s, “has become so exhausting and so expensive that but few of those whose birth or education fit them to adorn any gathering have either strength or wealth enough to go at the headlong pace of that gilded band of immigrants and natives, ‘The Four Hundred.’”

There were, of course, many old-timers who could well afford to “go the pace.” Descendants of Knickerbockers and merchant princes who owned large amounts of Manhattan real estate had profited from the city’s transformation into a corporate headquarters. Others had invested wisely in the new industrials. When the Tribune Monthly published a list of millionaires in 1892, a respectable one-fifth of the names belonged to antebellum families: Livingstons, Schermerhorns, Rhinelanders, Stuyvesants, Astors, Beekmans, DePeysters, Morrises, and Van Rensselaers. Even more tellingly, 60 percent of the leaders of New York’s national corporations, investment banks, and railroads were descendants of old-monied families.

Still, out of penury or principle, many of those caught up in the status struggle emphasized what they had and upstarts didn’t— a pedigree. Ever since the confrontation in the 1820s between Knickerbockers and New Englanders, bluebloods at bay had organized social bastions based not on wealth, or even accomplishment, but on heredity. Now the St. Nicholas Society (1835) and the Knickerbocker Club (1871) were joined by a host of others, like the Society of the Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York (1884) and the Holland Society (1885), which required a colonial ancestor in each member’s closet. As Knickerbocker Robert B. Roosevelt told the Holland Society men in 1886, theirs was a haven for the “old residents of New York”—a race, added William D. DeWitt, that was “being outnumbered and overrun in its own land.”

Soon such sanctuaries abounded, and members snuggled into their pedigrees, hunted up coats of arms at the Genealogical Society, and burnished their forebears’ image the better to shine by reflected glory. Patrician women—like those in the New York chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (organized at Sherry’s in 1891)—reenacted colonial teas using their ancestors’ cups and wearing their greatgrandmothers’ gowns.

Some ancestral societies, however, adopted a more activist stance toward New York’s history. Noting (with Frederic DePeyster) that “the mighty city of today knows little or nothing of our traditions,” the old guard turned to publicly promoting them. They placed tablets at historic sites, raised commemorative statues in public parks, and in 1889 began publishing Old New York, a journal of city history and antiquities. Documentary reclamation projects got underway as well: in 1891 the state legislature authorized verbatim republication of the colonial laws, and in 1894 the Society of Iconophiles set out to publish both contemporary and facsimiles of early