Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [861]
Way uptown, moreover, plans were under way for the erection of the biggest religious edifice in the city, indeed in the country—indeed in the western hemisphere. Bishop Potter took the first steps toward building the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at the end of the 1880s. The cathedral project gained important support from both prestigious Knickerbocker families and the more recently monied; the biggest contributors included John Jacob Astor, August Belmont, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the man described as “the financial and spiritual force behind the project,” J. P. Morgan.
EXCLUSIONS
The obverse of inclusion being exclusion, the upper class identified itself by the kinds of people to whom it denied access: Catholics and African Americans, of course, but increasingly, departing from prior patrician practice, Jewish New Yorkers as well. During the first postwar decades, most wealthy German Jews had lived amicably among their class counterparts in integrated neighborhoods. They sustained their own institutions, of course. They attended the Byzantine-towered Temple Emanu-El (1868) on Fifth Avenue and 43rd, sent their children to the Sachs Collegiate Institute (1871) on West 59th Street, and joined their own men’s club, the Harmonie Gesellschaft (1852). Many emphasized their Germanness: the Loebs and Lehmans spoke German at home, followed German affairs closely, vacationed at German spas, employed German governesses. But this cultural clustering was not the result of anti-Semitic rebuffs by their Fifth Avenue neighbors, as was evident from the ongoing memberships of assorted Seligmans, Hendrickses, Lazaruses, and Nathans in such exclusive precincts as the Union, the Union League, and the Knickerbocker clubs.
In 1877, moreover, when banker Joseph Seligman arrived at Saratoga Springs by private railroad car only to be turned away from the Grand Union Hotel by Judge Hilton, executor of A. T. Stewart’s estate (and soon-to-be hotel magnate), the incident produced widespread condemnation. Harper’s and the Tribune, Daily Graphic, Commercial Advertiser, Sun, and Herald all denounced anti-Jewish snobbery. When one hundred leading Jewish merchants successfully boycotted Stewart’s Department Store—also administered by Hilton—a Puck Christmas editorial offered “all honor to the Jews for their manly stand in this instance.”
The hotel did not, however, withdraw its exclusion policy, and indeed the practice spread. Starting in 1878 the Greek-letter societies at the City College of New York (as the old Free Academy had been renamed in 1866) barred Jewish members, something Bernard Baruch (class of ‘89) would long remember. And in 1879 Austin Corbin banned Jews from Manhattan Beach Hotel, explaining that such “detestable and vulgar people” were driving away respectable guests. Again, most New York papers denounced Corbin’s policy as mean-spirited, even shockingly un-American, and in 1881 the New York civil rights code that prohibited discrimination in public places for reasons of race was amended to include reasons of creed.
Nevertheless, anti-Semitic social ostracism grew steadily more acceptable during the 1880s, and by the early 1890s it had become a social given. In 1892 Theodore Seligman was blackballed when he sought to join the Union League Club—of which his father had been a founder—without eliciting a word of protest from members