by H. W. Brands
AS PROUD AS urban achievements like the Brooklyn Bridge could make Americans, many viewed the emergence of big cities as a fall from grace. Cities were something Americans had long associated with vice and decay and Europe. “I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man,” Thomas Jefferson told Benjamin Rush. “True, they nourish some of the elegant arts, but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue & freedom, would be my choice.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, in an essay praising the pastoral life, declared, “Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.” Herman Melville decried the insidious effect of cities on the most personal relations. “In our cities families rise and burst like bubbles in a vat,” he observed in Pierre. Horace Greeley famously told his young man to go west if he wished to flourish, not to venture into the great city at the New York editor’s feet. Walt Whitman was the exception that proved the rule: Whitman extolled city life but in a poetry collection—Leaves of Grass—judged obscene by many contemporaries.27
When Americans did move to cities, they initially tried to make them look like villages. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the model residence for all who could afford it was the single-family home, sometimes attached to its neighbors in a row but often standing apart. In planned cities like Philadelphia (laid out at the end of the seventeenth century almost before anyone set foot on that part of the Delaware River shore) and New York (platted from Fourteenth Street to 155th in the second decade of the nineteenth century), houses stretched along streets and avenues as far as the eye could see or the foot walk. At the end of the Civil War the tallest structures in New York were the church steeples, with the spire of Trinity Church, at Broadway and Wall Street, overtopping the rest.
But gradually growth caught up with the cities. Empty lots filled in, driving real estate prices higher. Families of modest means strained to afford homes within the city limits. Some New York families crossed the East River to Brooklyn, consigning their breadwinners to daily ferry commutes (and prayers for a bridge). Others took refuge in a novel style of residence, imported from Europe.
New York’s first apartment house was the Stuyvesant, designed by Richard Morris Hunt, completed in 1869, and named for the founder of New York by the builder, who happened to share Peter Stuyvesant’s last name (although only by a quirk: Rutherfurd Stuyvesant had been Stuyvesant Rutherfurd until he transposed his names to satisfy a condition of the will under which he inherited the large Stuyvesant holdings of his mother’s family). The Stuyvesant was located on East Eighteenth Street, in a neighborhood dominated by row houses. It didn’t look much different from the buildings on either side and across the street, being five stories tall (many of the neighboring houses had that many floors) with a façade that betrayed the apartment building’s true nature only by the fact of having a single exterior door where an equal frontage of the row houses had five or six.28
It was the idea of apartment living that required getting used to. George Templeton Strong, a conservative in most things, thought the Stuyvesant attractive in its modest way. He didn’t want to move there but allowed that others might. “This substitute for householding seems to work well.… Rutherfurd is a public benefactor, especially to young people who want to marry on moderate means. Nothing could be brighter, more comfortable, or more refined-looking than these tiny, cosy drawing rooms.” Other observers, however, warned that nothing good could come of “cohabitation,” as they called apartment living. Unrelated people residing under the same roof suggested all manner of disturbing activities, starting with fornication and escalating unspeakably from there. Immigrants and the native poor shared accommodations, but they had no choice—and everyone knew, or at least suspected, what kind of immorality flourished on the Lower East Side. Farther up the island one expected better.29
Yet the economics of apartments were irrefutable. More units per lot meant lower prices for each. Within a year of the Stuyvesant’s completion, two more apartment houses opened nearby. One was a renovation of a pair of adjoining houses; the other—the Stevens House—was purpose-built and towered eight stories, a feat made possible, or at least marketable, by the inclusion of an elevator. To mitigate concern that apartment living was déclassé, the eighteen suites in the new building contained quarters for servants, and the communal areas included a fine restaurant and frescoed walls. In fact, in striving for luxury it broke its business model; within a few years it was converted to a hotel.30
By then other apartment houses had sprung up. Generically called “French flats” after the residential buildings that graced the boulevards of Paris (where Richard Hunt had studied architecture, at the École des Beaux-Arts), they grew taller and broader and attracted an ever-expanding clientele. The upper class still snubbed them; one member proclaimed huffily, “Gentlemen will never consent to live on mere shelves under a common roof!” Families with children preferred larger spaces, indoors and out, than the apartments afforded. But single men (single women usually lived with their parents) and couples without children came to consider them a perfectly acceptable solution to the problem of urban affordability.31
“IT HAS BEEN represented to me that America is not ready for the Fine Arts,” Richard Hunt had written his mother from Paris as he was completing his studies. “But I think they are mistaken. There is no place in the world where they are more needed.” They were still needed when Hunt turned from apartment houses to mansions for the wealthiest of the Gilded Age capitalists.32
Not long after he inherited the New York Central Railroad from his father, William Vanderbilt decided he required new digs. He commissioned Hunt to design a house for a lot on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-second Street. Hunt broke from the brownstone tradition of midcentury New York, which employed the Triassic sandstone of New Jersey and Connecticut that quarried easily and weathered to a rich chocolate color. He broke even more dramatically from the understated conventions of New York’s burgher past, which dictated that money be reinvested in one’s business rather than employed in conspicuous display. The house Hunt designed for Vanderbilt was modeled on a French château of the early Renaissance, and it employed silvery Indiana limestone that seemed to glow against the dark backdrop of its neighbors. The mansard roof sported spires and gables; carved stonework ornamented a three-story porch and numerous balconies. Like an American gargoyle, a statue of Hunt disguised as a stonemason stared down from the roof.
Neither New York nor anywhere else in America had seen the like of the Vanderbilt mansion, which the Vanderbilts celebrated with an 1883 ball that reminded some of the guests and more of those not invited that the centennial of the French Revolution was approaching. Hired dancers came dressed as horses and performed a “Hobby Horse Quadrille.” William’s wife, Alva, appeared as a Venetian princess. His sister-in-law wore a white satin gown trimmed with diamonds, and a diamond headdress, that made her, in her own characterization, “The Electric Light.” A close friend dressed up as Queen Elizabeth. The ball put New York in a tizzy before and after. “It has been on every tongue and a fixed idea in every head,” the New York Times reported. “It has disturbed the sleep and occupied the waking hours of social butterflies, both male and female, for over six weeks.… Amid the rush and excitement of business, men have found their minds haunted by uncontrollable thoughts as to whether they should appear as Robert Le Diable, Cardinal Richelieu, Otho the barbarian, or the Count of Monte Cristo, while the ladies have been driven to the verge of distraction in the effort to settle the comparative advantages of ancient, medieval, and modern costumes.” Invitations were in high demand; the Vanderbilts finally settled on opening their doors to twelve hundred of their dearest friends. Hordes who didn’t make the list crowded behind police lines to savor the event from afar.
On entry, the guests were transported to an urban Eden. “Throughout the hall and parlors on the first floor were distributed vases and gilded baskets filled with
natural roses of extraordinary size,” the Times reporter wrote. “Grouped around the clustered columns which ornament either side of the stately hall were tall palms overtopping a dense mass of ferns and ornamental grasses.” The hall led to the gymnasium, a large apartment where a buffet dinner was served. “But it had not the appearance of an apartment last night; it was like a garden in a tropical forest. The walls were nowhere to be seen, but in their places an impenetrable thicket of fern above fern and palm above palm, while from the branches of the palms hung a profusion of lovely orchids.… Two beautiful fountains played in opposite corners of the apartment. The doors of the apartment, thrown back against the walls, were completely covered with roses and lilies of the valley.”
Those who fought past the flora found an interior architecture more sumptuous than anything any had seen west of the Atlantic. A carved stairway of Caen stone rose fifty feet above the polished Echaillon stone floor. Italian tapestries lined the walls, topped by rich oak panels on the ceiling. Walnut replaced the oak elsewhere, and intricate paintings of scenes from classical mythology replaced the walnut. The furniture unselfconsciously recalled the ancien régime; a magnificent stained-glass window opposite the main doorway depicted the meeting of Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France on the Field of the Cloth of Gold.33
The night was accounted a stunning success. The Vanderbilts had planted their flag at the summit of New York society, where it would remain till someone built something grander.
———
THIS DIDN’T TAKE LONG. The Vanderbilt gala kicked off an orgy of conspicuous construction as the captains of industry converted their profits into assets more tangible—and visible. The move was partly strategic, for in an era of chronic financial turmoil, real estate promised a comparatively safe harbor. But it was also psychological, in that the clearest sign of material success was a home its master could be proud of. In every city and in many suburbs existing buildings were razed or empty lots developed to afford room for the mansions of the rich. Soon no mogul, actual or aspiring, felt comfortable without a large, gaudy residence. And each round of construction produced houses more opulent and expensive than those of the last; when the point of building was to make a statement, the buildings had to shout louder and louder to be heard.
The competition crossed generations and set members of families against one another. William Vanderbilt’s son Cornelius II liked the ocean air of Newport, Rhode Island, where he built a summer place that dwarfed his father’s Manhattan home. “The Breakers” comprised seventy rooms and put sixty-five thousand square feet under its Italian Renaissance roof. Construction required two years, including time to transport much of the wood and stone from Europe. The paneling in one of the smaller reception rooms came from a Paris house built for Marie Antoinette. The dining room featured two massive crystal chandeliers, twelve columns with gilded bronze capitals, and an oak table that seated thirty-four guests in elbow-swinging comfort. The billiard room had marble walls and alabaster arches; a weighing chair from England let the players determine their weight in stone. The ceiling of the grand salon riffed the Sistine Chapel, albeit with a secular twist; its figures symbolized Music, Harmony, Song, and Melody. The kitchen was bigger than most ordinary homes; the stables were roomier and cleaner than many urban apartments.
But this wasn’t even the biggest house in the family. George Washington Vanderbilt, William’s youngest son, preferred the Carolina piedmont to the New England shore; at Asheville he constructed a country home that could have swallowed his father’s and brother’s houses and several office buildings besides. Whether the name he gave the place—Biltmore—was intended to convey comparison was a matter of conjecture, but as a matter of fact no one ever built more home than George Vanderbilt. The 250 rooms and 175,000 square feet, in exaggerated imitation of the grandest French châteaux, made the house the symbol of Gilded Age excess; its 125,000 acres, replete with farms, village, church, and peasants, conjured alarming new images of France on the eve of the revolution.
By the time Biltmore was finished, the nation was mired in the depression of the 1890s. America’s nouveaux riches weren’t famous for their sensitivity to the feelings of lesser sorts, but even they realized there were limits to what one could do in a republic without inflaming public opinion unduly. As a result, when Mrs. Bradley Martin wanted to impress the neighbors she opted for something more ephemeral: a ball, after the fashion of the William Vanderbilts. And even then she defended her fun as being good for the economy of New York. The event took place at the Waldorf Hotel in the winter of 1897. “Mrs. Martin received the salutations of more than 600 men and women, one and all members of the society worlds of New York and other large American cities, and all in their gorgeous robes and garbs personating those kings and queens, nobles, knights, and courtiers whose names and personalities take up the pages of history,” the society reporter for the New York Times recorded breathlessly. “The grand ballroom was quite a scene of splendor. The eye scarcely knew where to look or what to study, it was such a bewildering maze of gorgeous dames and gentlemen on the floor, such a flood of light from the ceiling, paneled in terra cotta and gold, and such an entrancing picture of garlands that hung everywhere in rich festoons.” The guests danced past midnight, then dined on filet de boeuf jardinière, terrapène désossée, poularde farcie aux truffes, and other French delicacies.
The Times had been covering such events since the Vanderbilt ball, and it placed the Martin affair in historical context. “As the society of the metropolis has grown larger, and wealth, luxury, and the knowledge of the art of living have increased, these successive costume balls have in every instance surpassed in elegance of dress and in lavishness and perfection of appointment their predecessors,” the paper declared. The event at the Waldorf “may truthfully be said to have been the climax in this form of entertainment thus far reached in the metropolis.”34
Chapter 11
BELOW THE EL
After their joyful reunion at the Boston pier, Mary Antin’s father led his family to the flat he had rented on Union Place. That this wasn’t Polotzk became evident at once. “The first meal was an object lesson of much variety,” Mary remembered.
My father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them. He attempted to introduce us to a queer, slippery kind of fruit, which he called “banana,” but had to give it up for the time being. After the meal, he had better luck with a curious piece of furniture on runners, which he called “rocking-chair.” There were five of us newcomers, and we found five different ways of getting into the American machine of perpetual motion, and as many ways of getting out of it. One born and bred to the use of a rocking-chair cannot imagine how ludicrous people can make themselves when attempting to use it for the first time.
Novelties, like the bananas they encountered that first day, came in bunches. Public baths allowed even the poor to keep clean. At night no one needed to carry a lantern, for the city lit street lamps. “In America, then, everything was free, as we had heard in Russia,” Mary marveled. “Light was free; the streets were as bright as a synagogue on a holy day. Music was free; we had been serenaded, to our gaping delight, by a brass band of many pieces, soon after our installation on Union Place.”
Mary’s father insisted that they become American as quickly as possible. He taught them the word greenhorn and explained that it was what they didn’t want to be. He had saved enough to buy them new clothes like the ones American children wore; they visited a department store—another novelty—and came out looking like the children of natives. Mary’s mother needed help learning how to use the stove in their apartment; a neighbor lady—an “angel of deliverance,” to Mary—stoked the first fire for them. The whole family grew accustomed to the idea that the policeman who walked their street was a friend and not a Cossack.
Much like Booker Washington and other emancipated slaves, many immigrants marked their new lives wit
h new names. Yiddish names were simply too hard for Americans to understand or pronounce; these had to go, as Mary Antin explained.
A committee of our friends, several years ahead of us in American experience, put their heads together and concocted American names for us all. Those of our real names that had no pleasing American equivalents they ruthlessly discarded, content if they retained the initials. My mother, possessing a name that was not easily translatable, was punished with the undignified nickname of Annie. Fetchke, Joseph, and Deborah issued as Frieda, Joseph, and Dora, respectively. As for poor me, I was simply cheated. The name they gave me was hardly new. My Hebrew name being Maryashe in full, Mashke for short, Russianized into Marya (Mar-ya), my friends said that it would hold good in English as Mary; which was very disappointing, as I longed to possess a strange-sounding American name like the others.
Mary’s disappointment was mitigated by the American habit of employing surnames as a matter of course. “I found on my arrival that my father was ‘Mr. Antin’ on the slightest provocation and not, as in Polotzk, on state occasions alone. And so I was ‘Mary Antin,’ and I felt very important to answer to such a dignified title. It was just like America that even plain people should wear their surnames on week days.”1
For Mary’s father, the essence of America was the opportunity for his children to be educated in useful knowledge. He had imbibed from his parents a love of learning, but the learning he acquired in the old country did him little good in the new. Americans weren’t interested in his knowledge of the Torah and the Talmud; they asked what he could do. Mary remembered his frustration. “ ‘Give me bread!’ he cried to America. ‘What will you do to earn it?’ the challenge came back.” He stumbled over English, never acquiring facility, and his daily struggle left him scant time to read in any language. He felt what he once knew slipping away.
