Gilded Age New York City’s “Beggars’ Paradise”

New York City’s fortunes rose after the Civil War—the metropolis became the financial capital of the nation, powered by Wall Street and the center of a mighty shipping and manufacturing sector.

But with so much money changing hands, a problem emerged: an uptick in beggars on the city’s most pedestrian-heavy cross streets.

“Twenty-third and Fourteenth street constitute the ‘Beggars’ Paradise,’ the former by day and the latter by night,” wrote journalist James B. McCabe in 1881’s New York by Sunlight and Gaslight.

A beggar could be one of the many tramps who bedded down on park benches for the night, out of sight from the police.

But the category included anonymous, under-the-radar New Yorkers, kids and adults, who populated the late 19th century city.

“The same cripples, hand-organ men, Italian men and women, and professional boy beggars who infest twenty-third Street by day change their quarters to fourteenth street, when the darkness settles down over the city, and the blaze of the electric lights bursts forth over the latter thoroughfare.”

Fourteenth Street’s electric blaze came from the nightly shows at nearby theaters.

But 23rd Street was more lucrative during the day thanks to its fashionable and luxurious stores and hotels, like Stern Brothers and the Fifth Avenue Hotel across Madison Square.

“These beggars constitute an intolerable nuisance, and some of them are characters in their own way,” wrote McCabe.

He described the men who challenge “every passer by with pitiable looks,” collect coins, and then hightail it to a saloon or hand it over to a “pal” waiting out of sight.

While benevolent societies and missions tried to help the “deserving” poor, these institutions couldn’t help unfortunate folks who fell into the hands of con men.

“The most systematic beggar is a man paralyzed from his waist downward. He sits in a four-wheeled wagon, and is drawn to a fresh station each day. He works the thoroughfare between Fourth and Eighth Avenues, on both sides.”

“The creature who wheels the wagon and watches the contributors, is an elderly man with a vicious face.”

“He makes his companion settle up three or four times a day, and is liberal with his oaths if his share does not equal the amount he expected,” added McCabe.

[Top photo: MCNY: 90.13.4.98; second image: New York by Sunlight and Gaslight; third image: NYPL; fourth image: NYPL]

Taking the 3rd Avenue El to the Botanical Garden

We can’t be sure that these genteel New Yorkers actually took the Third Avenue El to get to the New York Botanical Garden, a 250-acre cultural treasure founded in 1891.

But after the turn of the century, when this image was likely taken, there was no easier way to get from Manhattan to the Gardens or the new Zoo opened nearby in 1899.

You could say that the El, the Botanical Garden, and the Bronx or New York Zoological Park, as it was called, are all products of a great late 19th century push to improve city life and its offerings, making New York easier to transverse and giving it world-class cultural institutions—all of which we continue to benefit from.

Step into the remains of a Gilded Age hotel

“Every window in the Holland House, at Fifth Avenue and 30th Street, was glowing with light last night when the doors were opened to hundreds of visitors bidden to see the beauties of the new hostelry,” wrote the New York Times in a gushing review of the newest kid on a luxury block on December 6, 1891.

In a Gilded Age city resplendent with so many sumptuous hotels, the Holland House quickly became the place to live, dine, and enjoy a stretch of Fifth Avenue lined with the mansions of wealthy New Yorkers.

And former mansions, as New York’s richest residents were steadily relocating their residences uptown.

“The Holland House presents many novelties—and extremely attractive ones too . . .” stated the Times.

“In the main hall, leading from the Fifth Avenue entrance, the walls and the carved staircase are of Sienna marble.”

“There are 350 guest rooms in the hotel, and from the bridal suites down are all beautifully furnished and decorated,” wrote the Times.

The writer of the article also noted the novel wine cellar, the banquet and drawing rooms, the restaurant, and the staff of 180 employees.

Holland House offered sumptuous accommodations through the teens, hosting president Taft (and an army of Secret Service guards) in 1912.

But the hotel was eclipsed not long after it opened when the Waldorf and the Astoria Hotels went up a few blocks north on 34th Street.

In 1897, the two joined forces to become the city’s premier hotel, turning the area into kind of a luxury hotel row which played host to the most exclusive balls and parties, like the legendary Bradley Martin Ball.

Today, unlike the original Waldorf-Astoria, Holland House still stands.

Its facade is remarkably unchanged, and mysteriously there is a marble staircase and ornamental motifs in marble visible in the lobby.

The building manager says they are originals.

If so, they’re some of the last remnants of Gilded Age glamour on this once exclusive stretch of Fifth Avenue.

The elite “carriage parade” in 1860s Central Park

By the early 1860s, much of Central Park had opened, particularly the miles of drives meant for recreational carriage rides.

But with only five percent of city residents able to afford a carriage, these drives were mostly used by the very richest New Yorkers—who established an afternoon high-society ritual called the carriage parade.

In what could be considered a foreshadowing of our current celebrity-obsessed culture, poor and middle-class residents often turned out to watch, gawk, and critique the procession day after day.

“The great, fashionable carriage parade—so rightly considered one of the notable ‘sights’ of the city—took place between the hours of four and five,” wrote Lloyd R. Morris in Incredible New York.

“To view this, crowds gathered along the walk that bordered the east carriage drive from Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue to the Mall.”

“In the continuous procession of equipages you saw everyone who counted: the aristocracy, the new smart set, the parvenus, the celebrities, the deplorably notorious.”

“When taking the air in the Park, many of them preferred to be concealed in their broughams, but some had progressed to public exposure in a landau.”

“Their horses were huge, fat, and slow; their coachmen and footmen, soberly liveried, were elderly; their carriages were funereally black.”

Not everyone was impressed by the spectacle of the new rich and their older counterparts on display in $12,000 carriages. One account had it that German schoolkids through rocks at the carriages.

Walt Whitman “found the carriage parade ‘an impressive, rich, interminable circus on a grand scale, full of action and color,'” wrote Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar in The Park and the People.

“[But] as he peered through the windows of the richest carriages, he saw ‘faces almost corpse-like, so ashy and listless.'”

For more information on the building and beginning of Central Park, check out New York City in 3D in the Gilded Age.

[Top and second photo: MCNY Collection; third: NYPL Digital Gallery; fourth: MCNY Colletion]

An “arcade railway” never built below Broadway

Traffic in New York—it’s always been terrible.

But in the years following the Civil War, when mass transit consisted of stages and horse cars (steam engine-powered elevated trains were just getting their start), much hand-wringing went into figuring out how to relieve the growing city’s “continual state of deadlock.”

The answer, according to some officials? Something called the Arcade Railway.

As the colorful lithograph shows, the rail line would run underground beneath Broadway, with branches fanning out east and west at 23rd Street to the northern end of Manhattan.

It was “not merely to tunnel under the street, but to remove the street itself block by block, wall to wall, and construct another street at the depth of fifteen feet, supporting the present street level on arches, and making stores in what are now the basements and sub-basements of buildings,” explained an 1867 article in Scientific American.

The idea, which appeared about the time one engineer was secretly building a short-lived pneumatic tube subway under the same stretch of Broadway, had political support.

But businessmen, especially department store king A.T. Stewart, who had two massive emporiums on Broadway at the time, feared it would kill sales.

The plan circulated for a couple of decades—getting shot down by city lawmakers five times from 1870 to 1889 (above, a slightly modified version from 1886, from the NYPL Digital Collection).

By 1891, city officials and private businessmen embarked on a more wide-reaching, ambitious plan: the creation of a citywide, privately funded subway—which opened 110 years ago as the IRT.

The Arcade Railway is just one of many ill-conceived mass transit-related ideas that didn’t materialize, like these bridges never built.

The most extravagant party of the 19th century

In Gilded Age New York, superrich families like the Astors and the Vanderbilts were known for their opulent balls.

The most over-the-top ball of them all, however, was held by Bradley and Cornelia Martin, a wealthy lawyer and his matron-like wife known as the Bradley Martins.

In the late 19th century, their riches made the Bradley Martins part of the upper crust of city society. And in 1896, the story goes, they had an idea.

The Panic of 1893 still had its grip on the city. Unemployment was high; the economy in the doldrums.

Mrs. Martin believed that hosting a costume ball would lift spirits. And the money spent (about $300,000) would end up benefiting the florists, cooks, and other service workers they had to hire—a trickle-down effect as it were.

So they sent out 1,200 invitations, booked the Waldorf Hotel at 33rd Street and Fifth Avenue for February 10, 1897, and held their legendary “monument to vanity,” as the New York World put it.

About 600 invitees attended. They arrived at a hotel (below) transformed into Versailles. Guests dressed as Kings and Queens of legendary European royalty. Mrs. Martin, at right, went as Mary Queen of Scots.

Attendees dined on champagne, duck, truffles, petit fours, and other delicacies; they danced until 5 a.m.

The next day, the newspapers dutifully reported the details of the ball—but they also excoriated the Bradley Martins for their wastefulness and tacky display of wealth during an economic recession.

“The ball was greeted with a torrent of criticism and the Bradley Martins removed themselves to England; there was much clucking of tongues in the society pages and sermons about foolish ostentation,” wrote Eric Homberger in Mrs. Astor’s New York.

Even a city used to gawking at unrestrained vulgar ostentation had had enough. The Gilded Age was unofficially over.

The men on the facade of the National Arts Club

New York City brownstones don’t come any lovelier than 14 and 15 Gramercy Park South, the combined home of The National Arts Club since 1906.

Flora, fauna, and other ornamentation decorate the warm, handsome buildings. But why are the heads of five literary giants carved into the facade as well?

The names are underneath their sculptural busts: Shakespeare, Dante, Franklin, Milton, and Goethe.

They were among the authors and thinkers whose books were featured in the library of the brownstones’ Gilded Age owner, former New York State governor and 1876 presidential candidate Samuel Tilden.

In the 1870s, Tilden, a wealthy lawyer, commissioned Central Park co-architect Calvert Vaux to combine the two 1840s brownstones into one incredible mansion complete with Gothic Victorian touches, stained glass, and bay windows.

After he died, Tilden’s library, as well as his fortune, helped create the New York Public Library. His homage to five literary legends lives on, greeting passersby on one of the prettiest blocks in the city.

The most famous party dress in New York history

It was the party of the century—the 19th century, that is.

Alva Vanderbilt, the super competitive wife of William K. Vanderbilt, was throwing a masquerade ball at her new Fifth Avenue chateau. On the guest list were the highest members of New York society.

While Alva Vanderbilt went as a Venetian Renaissance Princess and some of the 1,200 guests came as Daniel Boone, Queen Elizabeth, and Father Knickerbocker, her sister-in-law Alice upstaged everyone by showing up as “Electric Light.”

Her stunning gown was made of white satin and trimmed with diamonds. It came with hidden batteries, so Alice could light up like a bulb.

Electricity was all the rage at the time—some streets were now illuminated with electric light, and Thomas Edison’s generating station on Pearl Street had opened the year before.

The ball wasn’t just another social event for rich New Yorkers. It was designed to gain Alva Vanderbilt acceptance into the city’s old-money society world, then ruled by Caroline Astor.

By first denying Caroline Astor’s daughter an invitation to the ball, Vanderbilt forced Astor to pay her a social call and thus deem her worthy of the city’s social scene.

Alva’s plan worked, she officially joined New York society, and her ball became a legend.

The electric ball gown, meanwhile, joined the collection at the Museum of the City of New York, where it is on display now at Gilded New York.

[Top photo: Alice and her electric gown; middle, from the MCNY; bottom, Alice and her husband, Cornelius, who came to the ball as Louis XVI]

The racy painting at a Madison Square bar

In 1880s New York City, few hotels could match the elegance of Hoffman House, on Broadway between 24th and 25th Streets (at left).

And the hotel’s mahogany-walled grand bar and salon was famous in the city.

This was where New York’s titans of industry and political power brokers congregated. Boss Tweed was a regular, along with Grover Cleveland, William Randolph Hearst, and Ulysses S. Grant.

Part of the reason they made the venue their regular haunt was its sense of privacy and luxury—plus the famous cocktails.

But it may also had to do with the nude paintings hanging along the walls, especially “Nymphs and Satyr,” a suggestive, eight-foot depiction of voluptuous young women by French artist Adolphe Bouguerneau.

This was racy stuff (if not exactly great art) to Victorian-era New Yorkers.

Usually the painting was covered by a thick velvet drape, but when it was open, patrons could discreetly view it by looking in the mirror on the opposite wall.

“Nymphs and Satyr” became a huge tourist attraction. It was such a sensation, even women were allowed to peek at it—but only one day a week, as ladies were normally barred from the bar.

“A quartet of ripe, naked maidens prancing around a preoccupied faun was for 24 years the despair of Victorian moralists and the delight of the clubmen who crowded Manhattan’s Hoffman House bar,” wrote Time in 1943.

By 1901, the painting was in storage, and after the Hoffman House closed in 1915, it remained there. In the 1940s, it was purchased at auction and given to the Clark Institute in Massachusetts

Until 2014, you can see for yourself the painting that titillated Gilded Age New York at the Met, where “Nymphs and Satyr” is currently on display.

Old Fifth Avenue’s rich, most reclusive siblings

New York has had lots of crazy-rich families.

But few were as mysterious as the Wendels, siblings born in the 19th century who never married, rarely socialized, and grew old together behind brick walls inside the last private mansion on Fifth Avenue.

Their father made his fortune in fur and real estate. In the 1850s, like other wealthy city residents at the time, he built himself and his family a big house on fashionable, once-residential Fifth Avenue, at 39th Street.

With all their money, you would expect the Wendel siblings—brother John and his six (some sources say seven) sisters—to live it up among high society in late 19th century New York.

But the siblings kept to themselves, and rumors spread. John, who collected rent from his father’s real-estate holdings, became known as the “recluse of Fifth Avenue.”

“[John] frowned on marriage for his sisters and decreed they should stay out of society, live in the simplest possible style and wear the fashions of their youth,” a newspaper wrote.

The siblings resided “in an antiquated house of mystery amid the cacophonous commerce of midtown Manhattan,” stated a recent article in Drew [University] Magazine (where the photo montage above comes from).

“There, starved of society by a tyrannical brother, the [sic] sisters cuddled lapdogs instead of sweethearts. With stingy allowances and shabby clothes, they slipped into spinsterhood—and perhaps, it was whispered, insanity.”

As the 20th century arrived and Fifth Avenue’s mansions were replaced by office buildings, the Wendel home—without electricity, telephones, or other conveniences—and its occupants fueled rumors.

“Spouses meant dispersal of the family fortune, so gossiped the gossips, and thus the seven Wendel sisters were kept moldering in the upper stories of their mansion, as brother John pinched their pennies,” the article explained.

John died in 1914 in his 70s. Over the next decades the sisters began dying off as well (one did get married—in her 60s!).

By the 1930s, Ella was left, seen only at night to give her poodle a chance to run around the backyard (a backyard she constantly turned down huge sums of money for).

Ella died in her sleep at age 80 in 1931. The public finally learned where at least part of the Wendel fortune would go: to Drew University in New Jersey.

Drew inherited the Fifth Avenue property where the Wendel mansion, the last of its kind, was razed in 1934.

The school put up this plaque there in the family’s memory.