Antiques

Magazine Antiques, April, 2004 by Wendell Garrett

In Boston they ask, How much does he know? in New York, How much is he
worth? in Philadelphia, Who were his parents?
Mark Twain, "What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us,"
North American Review, January 1895

By 1900 the city of New York covered more than three hundred square miles and was home to three million people. It was the richest city in the world and second only to London in size. Commerce was the secret of the city's success, and New York's magnificent harbor was the secret to the city's commercial importance.

After the Civil War, New York's old rich were engulfed by a tidal wave of robber barons intent on mining the city's advantages to advance their fortunes. Led by John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and John Pierpont Morgan, they established their company headquarters in New York City. The old guard struck back when Ward McAllister decreed the existence of the Four Hundred--that being the number of people with a traceable lineage of at least three generations who could fit into Mrs. William Astor's ballroom. Thenceforth, the Four Hundred ruled the social scene of winters in New York City and summers in huge "cottages" in Newport, Rhode Island.

The robber barons, by contrast, were autocratic. Their mansions swept up Fifth Avenue. There was an influx of commuter trains in Grand Central Terminal. Large department stores opened so that they could spend their money conveniently in one place. E. L. Godkin, one of the founders of the Nation, described the United States in 1866 as a "gaudy stream of bespangled, belaced, and beruffled barbarians.... Who knows how to be rich in America? Plenty of people know how to get money; but ... to be rich properly is, indeed, a fine art. It requires culture, imagination, and character."

Yet a spirit of noblesse oblige prevailed with the robber barons, who believed it their responsibility to found and support cultural institutions of every stamp. Thus Cornelius Vanderbilt was prompted by his second wife to give the gift that founded Vanderbilt University in Nashville in 1873. The Vanderbilt family was also a prime mover in building the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City in its original Romanesque revival incarnation at Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street. Other New Yorkers had banded together to create the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was incorporated in April 1870, opened at 681 Fifth Avenue two years later, and finally, in 1880, moved into the building it now occupies in Central Park. The same year the New York Free Circulating Library was incorporated "to furnish free reading to the people of the city of New York." It merged with the New York Public Library in 1901, six years after that institution was formed by the consolidation of the Astor Foundation, the Lenox Foundation, and the Tilden Trust.

Although the beaux-arts architects and artists of the Gilded Age were inspired by the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, gold was the symbol of America's new prosperity. As the society author Elizabeth Drexel Lehr explained in "King Lehr" and the Gilded Age (1935): "It merited its name. There was gold everywhere. It adorned the houses of men who had become millionaires overnight, and who were trying to forget with all possible speed the days when they had been poor and unknown.... Gold was the most desirable thing to have because it cost money, and money was the outward and visible sign of success."

Cleopatra before Caesar, by Jean Leon Gerome (1824-1904), photograph by Goupil et Compagnie, Paris, in its Galerie photographique, no. 448, 1866-1867. Musee Goupil, Bordeaux, France.