New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [298]
Then there was the question of noise. After the terrible blizzard of 1888 had brought the city to a standstill, everyone had agreed that the telegraph wires should be buried underground. This was easy to do, and it had improved the look of the place. Many people also argued for underground transport, which would be out of sight, and impervious to weather. But this was taking much longer. So for the time being, the El trains, with their noise and smoke, and tracks running past everyone’s windows, were still puffing and clattering up the avenues on the East Side of the island, and up parts of the West Side too.
As fashionable New York advanced northward, therefore, it avoided the smoke and noise, and hugged the quieter center. Fifth and Madison avenues, and the streets close to them, were the best residential quarters.
“What about Park Avenue?” William had suggested.
“Park?” she had cried, before she’d realized he was teasing her. “Nobody lives on Park.”
The trouble with Park Avenue went back thirty years, to when old Commodore Vanderbilt had erected a big railroad shed on Fourth Avenue at Forty-second Street, to act as a kind of terminal. Fourth had changed its name to Park Avenue these days, which sounded well enough. But the terminal was a mess, and the railroad yards spread in a hideous swathe for a dozen blocks to the north of it. Even above Fifty-sixth Street, where the tracks narrowed and were covered over, the noise and smoke rising from the center of the avenue indicated that the infernal regions were only just below.
“What about the West Side then?” he’d said. “It’s better value there.”
She knew he was gently teasing her. Not that the West Side was to be despised; gone already were the days when the Dakota was in the wilderness. The West Side was quieter and land prices were lower; the big family houses in the side streets were often larger than their equivalents on the East Side, and some real mansions were arising there too.
But who lived there? That was the point. What was the tone of the place? Would a West Side address sound as perfect as the cottage in Newport?
No, it had to be somewhere close to Fifth and Madison. The question was, how far up?
Almost twenty years had passed since the Vanderbilts built their mighty mansions on Fifth, in the Fifties. Since then, people had been building further north. Palaces in all kinds of styles, designed by architects like Carrère & Hastings, Richard Morris Hunt, and Kimball & Thompson, had arisen in the Sixties and Seventies, on Madison and Fifth. French chateaux, Renaissance palaces, the greatest styles from the architectural menu of Old Europe were being splendidly plundered and copied so that their owners could gaze over Central Park like the merchant princes they were.
The Masters couldn’t afford a palace like that. They could live near one, though. But should they?
J. P. Morgan didn’t live up there. Pierpont Morgan’s mansion was on the east side of Madison, down at Thirty-sixth Street. Mr. Morgan had openly stated his opinion that some of the mansions going up on Fifth were vulgar monstrosities. And one couldn’t deny that he had a point. Most of those mansions were being built by new money. Very new money indeed. Morgan’s great fortune might only derive from his father Junius, but it had come from banking in London, in the grandest manner. The Morgans, besides, had been well-to-do in Connecticut since the seventeenth century. Compared to all but the oldest Dutch families, they were old money.
And that was the point.
Rose was always grateful to her father-in-law for the names he had chosen for his son. The fact that it had come about by chance, that for some reason Tom’s wife had taken a fancy to the name