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By Root 8160 0

newly monied could be drawn into celebrating local history as well. In 1874 the country had kicked off a series of centennial commemorations by honoring the Continental Congress’s first meeting in Philadelphia. By 1883 it was New York’s turn. To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Britain’s exodus from the city, the metropolis revived Evacuation Day—the local holiday that; apart from a brief Tammany-inspired revival in the mid-1860s, had been pretty much supplanted by Independence Day before the Civil War. New Yorkers with Revolutionary ancestry claimed a special role in these ceremonies, but William Astor and William Vanderbilt helped finance the festivities too. The culmination of the event was the unveiling of John Quincy Adams Ward’s twice-life-size statue of Washington on the front steps of the Sub-Treasury, site of Federal Hall. Ward, unusually, depicted Washington as civilian gentleman rather than martial equestrian, a decision that pleased the bankers and brokers over whose Wall Street community the genteel bronze Washington would now preside.

Evacuation Day redivivus proved mere prelude to a full-blown reenactment, six years later, of Washington’s inauguration in 1789. The old-guard New York Historical Society and New York Society of the Sons of the Revolution again tried to preempt the event, but by now the wider New York bourgeoisie had developed a passion for local history almost as strong as their romance with the Renaissance and the world of Marie Antoinette. The Chamber of Commerce demanded a role in the planning, as did many others—so many that in 1887 two hundred interested parties merged in an ecumenical Committee of Citizens, which proceeded to fashion a glittering three-day event honoring the Court of Washington and the Court of Contemporary New York.

The pageantry began on April 29, 1889, with the arrival of President Benjamin Harrison from Washington City. He reprised his predecessor’s cross-harbor voyage from New Jersey on a replica of the original barge, crewed by shipmasters from the New York Marine Society, the organization that had conducted Washington to Manhattan a century earlier. Landfall was followed by a march up Wall Street, a formal reception for four thousand of New York’s business and professional elite at the Lawyers’ Club, and a more intimate French feast for sixty at Café Savarin, whose souvenir menu listed the names of the City Council of yore (noting pointedly the absence of “Divvers, Flynns or Sheas”).

Evening brought seven thousand guests to the Metropolitan Opera House for a grand Centennial Ball. Ladies and gentlemen, selected by Ward McCallister after a careful genealogical search, opened the gala by doing a Centennial Quadrille in colonial costume. To no one’s surprise, Mrs. William Astor led the dance, brilliant in diamonds and a Worth creation. Some women did wear gowns “after the colonial period,” but far more New York aristocrats favored apparel from the courts of Louis XV and XVI.

Not all the events were so exclusive. A reenactment of the swearing-in, which featured an address by New York Central’s Chauncey Depew, attracted huge numbers of spectators, as did the Grand Military Parade. An estimated million people, vast numbers of whom had poured in by excursion trains, watched as fifty thousand members of various state militias marched from Wall Street up to the heart of Châteaux Country at 59th and Fifth. Finally, at the tail end of the events, a second float-filled parade allowed participation by those so far restricted to spectating. Immigrant societies, butchers in knee breeches brandishing sausages, plasterers tossing new-made busts of Washington to the crowd, firemen, policemen, and the sachems of Tammany Hall predominated here, though the accent remained aristocratic.

In the end, the colonial revival provided a way for new money to bow to old money’s values, while old money acknowledged newcomers’ superior resources. Perhaps appropriately, its most lasting legacy proved to be the practice of collecting “antiques”—a craze for amassing historical commodities