While Edwin was consumed with building a profile in the business world, his wife’s world was steadily shrinking—by her own choice. Emily was turning inward. To her alarm, in the middle of her pregnancy she had begun to sense an estrangement from her husband, though he seemed oblivious to any marital discontent. Maybe it was something wrong with her, she worried. But what if Edwin became even more of a stranger as the years progressed? Her parents seemed to have created a companionate partnership, while Emily, increasingly, felt unable to reach her husband. Guiltily perceiving that she actually preferred a certain distance, she became anxious that her child might suffer from her need for solitude and interior space; maybe she would prove to be a bad mother.
Edwin had no such concerns about his impending fatherhood. He was flying high—higher week by week. His acumen paid off, his native shrewdness and expensive education together justifying Josephine’s confidence. Two months after Grover Cleveland took office, delivering the inaugural address in March, yet another stock market swing touched off one of the worst depressions in United States history. Banks failed, factories closed. Prices for farm crops, already low, went lower. Thousands lost their jobs. Layoffs, strikes: while the country’s finances, not to mention its collective morale, continued to fall, Edwin Post’s income, along with his high spirits, rose daily. He had bet just right.
During the subsequent crash and depression, railroad companies defaulted at such a rate that the 1890s would see one-quarter of the nation’s railroads go bankrupt—more than at any other time in American history. In its impact on the entire country, the depression that spanned the nineties was on a par with the Great Depression of the 1930s. Yet in spite of such hard times—or because of them—an astonishing one-third of the nation’s population would attend the Chicago world’s fair that summer and fall. Even for a depressed economy, the fair’s prices were affordable. General admission was 50¢, the rough equivalent of $5 today. The White City recorded 27.5 million visits in a country whose population numbered 65 million.
The exposition was the center of conversation whenever Edwin’s extended family gathered that year. At least Emily, heavy with child, could talk architecture with her relatives: George Post was the man of the hour. The hallmark of the exhibition, the one that would go down in the history books, was the Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building, which Post had engineered. By the end of 1893, anyone in Chicago or New York who followed the news had learned his name. Staged partly in response to Paris’s erection of the Eiffel Tower in 1889, the fair was represented by America’s best, with George Post leading the list.
Some historians consider the Chicago world’s fair of 1893 an epochal event that portended events of the next several decades. Its legacies remain astonishing in both number and breadth: the first elevated electric railway, a movable sidewalk, and a kinetograph (Thomas Edison’s test run for what would be the movie projector), to name just a few. And the more ordinary innovations were no less influential: Cracker Jack, Aunt Jemima syrup (its racist trademark unnoticed), Cream of Wheat, shredded wheat, Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum, soda pop. The hamburger made its national appearance at the fair. Scott Joplin, a child prodigy born to former slaves, gave a show that let everyone know they’d be hearing from him for a long time to come.
Not a few New Yorkers had doubted that Chicago could pull off such an exhibition. Nonetheless, most easterners remembered their manners and expressed their reservations behind their hands. Sure, there was the occasional competitive tabloid jab at the country’s premier slaughterhouse, but there were limits, and everyone seemed to know what they were.
Except for the tutor to high society himself, Ward McAllister.
To New Yorkers’ chagrin, the affected, overbearing McAllister suddenly took it upon himself to pontificate on class—to tell the citizens of Chicago how to get it, how to show it, how to keep it. In an article for the New York World, McAllister even advised the natives on how to behave like New Yorkers. To begin with, suggested the self-appointed Yankee representative with the startling Savannah accent, Chicago hostesses should import French chefs so that eastern visitors could avoid the midwestern mutton he had been told was indigenous to their smelly city.
Emily would later use Ward McAllister, an omnipresent figure in her youth and young adulthood, as the model of a social misfit: “He works himself up into a perfect ecstasy over his own wit, holds his sides over the point of his own stories, and lets the tears run down his cheeks over his own pathos. When he meets with great genius he says he must bow to the dust, so he probably kisses his own shoes before he puts them on his sacred feet. He is clever, but his wit is directed towards the unnatural and distorted, and no subject is too bizarre for his pen. He thinks he is a student of nature, yet he worships only its freaks—himself.”
She despised McAllister’s kind of posturing throughout her life, sharing with her father the disdain for puffed-up self-regard that Bruce had expressed toward Reverend Parkhurst. McAllister’s promise to teach his readers how to “arrive” smacked of the very parvenu behavior he warned people “of quality” to eschew. Emily’s privileged background would at times blind her to her own prejudices, but her childhood training had successfully taught her to shun the pretentious. She sided completely with the irritated but good-natured Chicago journalists who put McAllister in his place by flourishing fulsome apologies in their newspapers for being obviously unworthy of his notice. They hoped, in fact, that their would-be tutor felt no need to ever step foot in their city.
ON JUNE 2, 1893, a day after Edwin and Emily Post’s first wedding anniversary, Edwin Main Post Jr. was born. Although unusually large for the times, at nine pounds, four ounces, he was about the same size Emily had been as an infant. For weeks preceding his son’s arrival, Edwin had talked excitedly about the way the silver market was quaking beneath their feet, and Emily had tried to look interested. Five days after the baby’s birth, while the new mother was still resting in bed, the value of American silver fell dramatically, setting the stage for national disaster. Edwin, triumphant, didn’t see it that way, assuring his wife that he had wagered well on their behalf.
The failure of the railroads earlier that year had helped precipitate one of the worst panics the country had known, resulting in nonstop runs on banks in Chicago and New York. But though the subsequent silver panic of ’93 would ruin many investors, it would reward Edwin Post with his first million. Shrewdly, patiently, he extracted a killing from the calamity when it finally occurred. Not only he but, with his advice, Josephine had bought President Cleveland’s new government bonds just before the market crashed. Bruce’s predilection for letting his wife deal with the family income paid off handsomely, as Josie and Edwin both sold their bonds with an eighteen-point increase a few months later. With his profits, Edwin was headed for a Stock Exchange seat and the purchase of the dream yacht he talked about incessantly.
By September, Josie, always up for adventure, felt secure enough about Emily’s postpartum expertise that she and Bruce headed west for the Chicago exhibition. Though they had lived in Staten Island for several months before the baby’s birth that summer, Emily had still not changed her social register address from the Manhattan apartment. The register requested an update that October, a query that Edwin, not the harried new mother, finally answered six months later. His renewal indicated the Posts’ “summer address” only as New Brighton, Staten Island, though they intended to stay throughout the winter of 1893–94. Edwin had invested his silver profits for social good: this year, in contrast to last year, when he’d answered “0,” he listed two fairly prestigious men’s club memberships, the Union and the downtown St. Anthony. Edwin Post was on the move.
That October 13, the young stockbroker, trying hard to impress his imposing father-in-law, took Bruce Price to a yacht race. Along with nearly four hundred other members and guests of the New York Yacht Club, among them wives who, unlike Emily, enjoyed sailing with their husbands, the two men boarded the steamer St. John, follo
wing just behind the yachts that were racing. The roll of the boat from side to side caused several men to lose their lunches, the turmoil almost seeming to reflect the tense relationship between Emily’s two leading men.
The Prices and the Posts saw relatively little of one another anyway; both couples were always busy. As the season progressed, the first early snowfall made Emily nostalgic, briefly, for the times she had participated in the occasional winter sport, especially the iceboating so popular at Tuxedo Park. This year, however, she wouldn’t have many hours to indulge in an activity best shared by lovers anyway, the glow of Tuxedo Park’s new electric lights transforming the ordinary into the fantastic. She was too busy supervising her servants and tending to her infant. Decades later, she would emphasize that the regularity of a baby’s routine leads to a healthier, “more tranquil,” and better-adjusted individual. Everything from daily baths to exercise to bedtimes and meals to playing with family members and pets served children best by being predictable. No, she would not be iceboating anytime soon.
When her son was six months old, she put him (and herself ) to the test. On December 10, 1893, Edwin Main Post Jr. (known from his youngest days as Ned, in order to distinguish him from his father) was baptized at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Tuxedo Park. He performed beautifully. Because Bruce Price and Caroline McLean Post were still at odds over their disagreement about Dr. Parkhurst, Emily arranged the ceremony, with her parents’ complete agreement, to coincide with her parents’ unfortunate prior commitment. They needed to attend the official opening in Old Quebec of the Château Frontenac, Bruce’s most recent building. Of course everyone knew that the baptism date could have been changed, but they pretended otherwise. After all, to save people’s feelings, granting “loose rein” to the imagination was sometimes called for. “Toujours la politesse, jamais la vérité” (always courtesy, never the bare truth) was the motto Emily endorsed. As she later explained, it was incumbent upon decent people everywhere to avoid hurting others’ feelings.
In any case, Bruce Price was always happy whenever his work took him back to Canada. Especially now that he had finished the Château Frontenac, high on a bluff overlooking the appropriately grandiose St. Lawrence River, he was treated as one of the country’s own. Even three years earlier, when he’d toured the dominion with the Duke of Connaught (Queen Victoria’s son, later governor-general of Canada), he had been mistaken for the duke himself when they exited the train side by side. The cheering crowds believed him princely looking, Emily later explained. Bruce had apologized to His Royal Highness for the confusion, only to be told “Never mind, Bruce. It isn’t your fault that God made you in the perfect image of a duke.” It was a story recounted by the daughter of the “duke” throughout her life.
EMILY STILL HAD PLENTY to distract her, her parents’ expedient absence only one puzzle piece among many that needed to be set in place. The evening before the christening, the uncharacteristically nervous wife gave a lavish dinner at Tuxedo Park for family and friends, including Edwin’s cousins Regis Post and Esther Voss and his best friend, Lyman Colt, all godparents to Ned. Delmonico’s cookbook once again provided the menu, with a few southern flourishes. Among Emily’s choices were doxie Rockaway oysters, consommé imperial, braised sweetbreads, sauce duxelles, spinach, roast canvasback duck with hominy, and apple fritters. The weekend was a success, just as Josie, before leaving town, had assured her daughter it would be. In her ledger, Emily entered, “Things about the Baby: Ned was christened Sun . . . at 11:20 A.M. . . . He was as good as gold until the water was put on him and then he howled. He threw Regis’s matchbox around all during prayer.”
Successfully handling such potential minefields as her baby’s baptism, Emily grew in confidence. In her accounts book—which she repeatedly explained was not a diary but a practical record—she nonetheless began to record her thoughts, analyzing what made her especially happy. Thriving on the approval sure to follow her finely tuned dinner parties, she realized that she gained great fulfillment by supporting her husband’s efforts to shine. Increasingly reflective, she noted what she had discovered about her own needs and desires: “I don’t want men to be in love with me, but to enjoy me, admire me, love me a little. But not make demands. I don’t want to be emotionally stirred up. I want to be left to myself. Perhaps that’s why I wanted to be an actress. An actress has, or she should have, the footlights between her and her audience. I think I don’t want anyone to come too close.”
It seems likely that such reflections were defensive, the disillusioned young wife hiding from herself the depth of her marital disappointment. From observing Bruce and Josie, she had assumed that she and Edwin would naturally accompany each other to most social events, or that she at least would receive Edwin’s sincere gratitude for enabling him to succeed in society while she stayed home. In part, she had simply failed to consider that by the time she observed her parents she herself was no longer a baby in need of constant care. The other conflict drew upon Emily’s nature, private in spite of her extroverted personality. Recently, as the December balls and the season’s society pages had focused on the season’s new debutantes, she’d realized with a start, as she’d listened to Edwin brag about how his gallant older brother, A.V.Z. Post, led Mrs. Twombly’s dance for the “younger set,” that she was oddly content with her solitude.
The energies she had once used dancing until the early morning hours she redirected to the demanding routines of a new mother and an exemplary wife. Determined to be a perfect spouse for a successful man to come home to, she was more likely these days to be overseeing the apple fritters Edwin relished than learning a new dance step. She never liked to do less than her best. That Edwin had been attracted to her precisely because of her dramatic sensibility escaped her notice. Determined to please, Emily gave up the very part of herself that had seduced the man she’d married.
WHILE EMILY WAS immersed in the quotidian, her father was at the peak of his professional and social power. Bruce Price would return from Montreal that December to work on what would be the highest structure in his own country, the American Surety Building. Located in lower Manhattan, at the southeast corner of Pine and Broadway, the skyscraper was the prize won in a fierce competition. The contestants had been told that the first priority was to plan “the greatest possible amount of renting area . . . on each floor, and then to give an outward form in keeping with the importance and height of the structure.” In order for the $1.25 million construction to be economically feasible, it needed to be at least fifteen stories high.
Bruce had been honored, even surprised, to be invited to compete against the city’s nine most important architects, including McKim, Mead and White, Carrère and Hastings, and N. LeBrun and Sons. Of course, as always, George Post had been asked to submit designs as well. If going up against Edwin’s older, illustrious cousin bothered Bruce—he had lost to him many times in the past—he knew that such feelings were self-indulgent. George Post was considered a giant among the New York group, and a worthy man to lose to.
But Bruce Price had won instead. His design was the simplest and most severe of all the proposals, exceptional for its flat roof. Though no one in the Price family recalled the circumstances of the commission, years later, the architect Warren Briggs, Bruce’s friend, cheerfully filled in the details. As he recounted how Bruce had been selected to design the skyscraper, he clearly meant to flatter Emily’s father, but the story demotes him professionally instead. The competition narrowed to two renderings, with the committee certain that they recognized the architects behind their preference. They agreed to act surprised when McKim, Mead and White was pronounced the winner, the design’s mannerisms speaking distinctly of its firm’s provenance. In private, the committee was pleased they had chosen a firm that would pose no risk, given the size of this project. The men “were more than astonished, upon opening the sealed envelopes containing the authors’ names” to find that the award was going to Bruce Price. “So a new architectural star
of the first magnitude was born. My friend had reached his goal, his perseverance was finally rewarded,” Briggs remembered happily.
It was particularly sweet justice at that. Four years earlier, Bruce had created a building proposal for the New York Sun newspaper, the city’s largest daily, a thirty-one-story version of the campanile in Venice’s St. Mark’s Square, complete with a three-story triumphal arch. Though the building was never constructed, it would remain a point of reference for architects for the next fifty years. More important to Emily’s father, it was a design to revisit in 1894, when he transformed the much lauded but unexecuted Sun building plans into his even stronger vision for the American Surety skyscraper, recycling those blueprints into a little bit of Italy down near Wall Street.
Hundreds of spectators, enabled by new mass transportation, gathered daily to watch Bruce’s building in progress. Modernity had staked its ground: the els ran the length of Manhattan and through the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, each day moving several hundred thousand passengers for modest fares. Getting into and out of Manhattan no longer required elaborate planning. Now the yard of Trinity Church, across the street from Bruce’s building, filled each morning with anxious onlookers who believed the odds were against the behemoth standing once it conquered twenty stories. But it did. The original steel-frame superstructure sheathed with Maine granite (altered through the years) measured 312 feet high, its bulk resting on concrete and brick caissons sunk 72 feet in order to rest on bedrock.
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