Esther Crain's Blog, page 54

The Murray Hill double house with a link to President Lincoln

During his life, Abraham Lincoln made just a handful of visits to New York City. Little is known about his first two trips to Gotham in 1848 and 1857, according to Lewis E. Lehrman, writing in Mr. Lincoln and New York, but they were likely just pitstops as he made his way north.

It was his third time in Manhattan, a three-day trip in late February 1860, that gave the Kentucky-born lawyer more exposure to the city. On this visit, Lincoln delivered his electrifying Cooper Union speech on slavery, which propelled him to national prominence and helped him win the presidential election later that year.

Speaking at Cooper Union wasn’t the only activity on Lincoln’s agenda. He stayed at the luxurious Astor House hotel on Vesey Street, had his photo taken at Mathew Brady’s Broadway studio, attended services at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, and made an appearance at the Five Points House of Industry, addressing the city’s poorest children in this notorious slum.

Considering that Lincoln’s life was cut short by an assassin’s bullet in 1865, he clearly could never have set foot inside 122-124 East 38th Street, a Georgian-style double house completed in 1904. But the slain president does have a direct link to the house: It was the home of at least one (and possibly two) of the granddaughters he never knew.

The granddaughters, Mary (known as Mamie) and Jessie, were the daughters of Lincoln’s only surviving child, Robert Todd Lincoln—who bought number 122 for his two daughters, states Exploring Manhattan’s Murray Hill, by Alfred and Joyce Pommer.

Mary “Mamie” Isham and her son, Lincoln

However, the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) makes no mention of Jessie living there. According to their report on the Murray Hill Historic District, Mamie bought number 122 in 1906 with her husband, Charles Isham. For many years, Mamie, Charles, and their son, Lincoln, resided in the elegant house in the fashionable Murray Hill neighborhood.

It was Isham who commissioned the attic story, “which contained servants quarters,” per the LPC report.

Lincoln for President poster, 1860

The house apparently held various “relics,” as the New York Sun put it in a 1920 article, that related to the Lincoln presidency. “Both Mr. and Mrs. Isham are deeply interested in the Lincoln traditions and have many interesting and valuable relics of the life of the Emancipator,” stated the article, which focused on Lincoln’s surviving family members.

After Charles Isham’s death in 1919, Mamie remained in the house until 1935, when she moved to Washington D.C., per the LPC report. Mary Lincoln Isham died three years later.

The lovely house on one of Murray Hill’s most beautiful blocks is another Lincoln link in a city with streets, schools, statues, a square, playground, and tunnel all honoring the martyred president.

[Third photo: Lincoln Collection; fourth image: National Park Service]

The steerage passengers immortalized in a 1907 landmark photo

In June 1907, photographer Alfred Stieglitz left New York for Europe with his wife and six-year-old daughter. His “small family,” as he wrote years later, had first-class accommodations on the liner Kaiser Wilhelm II and were headed toward Bremen, Germany.

But Stieglitz felt stifled by the atmosphere in first class. “One couldn’t escape the nouveaux riches,” he explained in his account, reproduced in the 2012 book, The Steerage and Alfred Stieglitz.

After three days he took a walk “as far forward on the deck as I could.” Looking down, he found a scene that left him spellbound: men, women, and children on the lower deck in steerage. These third-class passengers were biding their time by hanging laundry and playing on a staircase. Meanwhile, a man in a round straw hat watched the group amid the iron railings and machinery of the ship.

Stieglitz ran to get his camera. The resulting picture, “The Steerage,” wasn’t published until 1911. “I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life,” he said, per the Library of Congress (LOC) via Wikipedia.

Alfred Stieglitz in 1902, by Gertrude Kasebier

“The Steerage” has since become the most famous photo this pioneering photographer took, “proclaimed by the artist and illustrated in histories of the medium as his first ‘modernist’ photograph,” states Metmuseum.org, which owns a print of the photo. “It marks Stieglitz’s transition away from painterly prints of Symbolist subjects to a more straightforward depiction of quotidian life.”

The photo is also groundbreaking for viewers as well. It might be the first image offering a glimpse into what life was like in steerage class on an ocean liner. The people Stieglitz captured are headed back to Europe—possibly immigrants who were rejected at Ellis Island or “skilled craftsmen and their families heading home after working on temporary visas,” per the LOC.

[Images: Wikipedia]

Clearing Gilded Age Fifth Avenue of its shacks and shantytowns

Fifth Avenue has been New York’s most exclusive thoroughfare almost since the first section of the avenue, between Waverly Place and 13th Street, was laid out in 1824.

Shacks at Fifth Avenue and 89th Street, by Ralph Blakelock in 1868

It’s easy to see why. Fifth Avenue was ideal in terms of privacy and comfort; it’s as far as possible from the industry of the Hudson and East Rivers and removed enough from the retail that crept up Broadway as the decades progressed.

Fifth Avenue also lacked a streetcar line or elevated train, so the slender avenue wasn’t clogged with traffic and crowds of strangers.

A Fifth Avenue shantytown, cross street not known

As the 19th century went on and the Gilded Age was in full swing, a Fifth Avenue address became even more sought after. Old money New Yorkers and new rich titans of industry built their mansions on what was dubbed ‘Millionaire’s Row’—from Fifth Avenue in the 50s to the stretch along Central Park in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

The rows of brownstone mansions and marble chateaus arrived by the early 1900s, and images of these massive houses have come to symbolize the wealth made during the Gilded Age.

Mansions of the old and new rich lining upper Fifth Avenue; that’s Mrs. Astor’s house on the corner of 65th Street in 1895

But what became of the shacks and shanties that formerly lined Fifth Avenue, especially the upper end, before it became a millionaire colony?

Fifth Avenue above 59th Street “at one time…was invaded by more than five thousand ‘wastrels,’ and was known as ‘Shantytown,’ and its queer inhabitants as ‘squatters,'” stated Fifth Avenue Old and New, a book published in 1924 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the avenue.

Fifth Avenue shacks, 1895

Not all of the shanties were residential. A New York Times article from 1901 that focused on the eventual on Upper Fifth Avenue referenced the “relics” of another era, when this section of Fifth was an undeveloped road.

“This upper section of the avenue shows many strange contrasts, for alongside the palaces of millionaires are to be found old-fashioned roadhouses and buildings that are little more than shanties, relics of the former days of the avenue when it was a road,” the Times wrote.

Headline in the New York Times, 1905

A squalid shack next door to Carnegie’s stunning mansion at Fifth and 91st Street was the subject of another Times article in 1905.

“Within a stone’s throw of Andrew Carnegie’s mansion, the marble-colonnaded twin residence of G. L. and C. W. McAlpin, and the somewhat less pretentious home of Carl Schurz stands a gabled shanty within 20 feet of Fifth Avenue of such scant dimensions and poverty-stricken appearance that it would be despised among the hovels that house some of the poorest of the city’s residents.”

The Times goes on to describe the family of 5 kids headed by an Irish father who works as a stevedore (and their dog, an “ugly-tempered canine brute”). “The space of the dwelling that serves as home for those six human beings and the beast is probably something like 20 by 12 feet, divided into two rooms.”

Illustration from “Fifth Avenue Old and New” by Henry Collins Brown via Columbia University Digital Collections

What happened to this family, and other owners and inhabitants elbowed out of upper Fifth Avenue? There’s no follow up, but it’s safe to say their rickety homes, built on land they didn’t own, were condemned once the lot was sold and construction was to begin on another mansion.

“The owners of the land are simply awaiting purchasers at fancy figures, and meanwhile do not care what sort of building remains on the land,” the 1901 Times piece states.

Fifth Avenue wasn’t the only millionaire mile in New York City with shantytowns. Riverside Drive, lined with Queen Anne and Beaux Arts mansions in the early 1900s, was also dotted by shanties and squatter shacks.

[Top image: Corbis; second image: MCNY, MNY227520; third image: Wikipedia; fourth image: MCNY, MNY219239; fifth image: New York Times; sixth image: Fifth Avenue Old and New via Columbia University Digital Collections]

The final days of a 44th Street Gilded Age gambling house

Places like Canfield’s were the flip side of the Gilded Age—the not-so-secret gambling houses, brothels, and music halls that paid police and politicians to look the other way in the Tenderloin and other unsavory neighborhoods.

But the beginning of the Progressive Era caught up with Canfield’s in 1902, according to a New-York Tribune article. That year, detectives under the direction of District Attorney William Travers Jerome raided this gambling den at 5 East 44th Street and found “roulette tables, poker tables, and other gambling paraphernalia behind a secret panel in the wall,” per the Tribune.

Proprietor Richard Canfield paid a fine and sold the business. It might have been another forgotten vice spot in New York City’s backstory if social realist artist Everett Shinn, who had a knack for depicting the underside and underdogs of New York, had not immortalized it in this slushy scene in 1912.

“Here we are presented with another drab scene of urban life in New York City,” stated theculturetrip.com, in a 2016 commentary. “It’s winter, and by the looks of the couple hurrying away under an umbrella, it’s quite cold outside. A horse, carriage, and driver wait in front of the gambling house, and both figures look rather unhappy to be out in the quiet, snow and ice-covered streets.”

The socialite who built ‘marble row’ and changed the face of Gilded Age Fifth Avenue

Born in 1801, Mary Mason Jones was many things: an old-money heiress, a society doyenne, a great aunt to Edith Wharton (we’ll come back to this later), and the first person in New York City to have a bathtub installed in her residence, per Christopher Gray in the New York Times.

Mary Mason Jones

The bathtub went into her marital house on Chambers Street. Jones later moved to a triple mansion on Waverly Place near Broadway, where she and her sisters entertained other Knickerbocker aristocrats inside the longest ballroom in the city.

Jones was also the owner of land at today’s Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. In 1823, her father, the president of Chemical Bank, purchased the land for $10 a lot, according to househistree.com. Far from the city center in the 1820s, the lots Jones inherited were still considered out in the sticks in the 1860s.

But streets had been laid out by then, and Jones was a trendsetter. She could see the way the residential city, then centered at Madison Square and Murray Hill, was marching northward.

So she commissioned a spectacular new mansion for herself (and produced the design before handing things off to architect Robert Mook) at the northeast corner of Fifth and 57th, along with an entire row of similar marble mansions completed in 1871.

Marble Row decorated for the Admiral Dewey reception in 1899

Nicknamed “Marble Row” for their gleaming cream facades in a city awash in brownstone, the mansard-roof row of mansions were “designed in the mode of a French chateau, by definition a large house erected in the country and therefore surrounded by broad, open spaces,” explained Wayne Craven in his book, Gilded Mansions. “As an architectural form, it was transplanted, in America’s Gilded Age, from a rural to an urban setting.”

Marble Row was likely inspired by Jones’ visits to Paris. “In Parisian fashion, the entire block between 57th and 58th Street was treated as a single unit, though there were actually five houses within the block,” stated Craven. After Jones moved into her corner mansion, she rented the remaining four to others in her social circle (no new money showoffs or shoddyites need apply).

Mary Mason Jones’ mansion in 1917-1918, after her death

What was it like living in a marble chateau so far from the hustle and bustle of the city? Edith Wharton can help us imagine Marble Row in its early years.

In her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, Wharton introduces a character, Mrs. Manson Mingott, who is supposedly based on Jones. “It was her habit to sit in a window of her sitting-room on the ground floor, as if watching calmly for life and fashion to flow northward to her solitary doors,” Wharton wrote. “She seemed in no hurry to have them come, for her patience was equalled by her confidence.”

Marble Row at the turn of the century, with Fifth Avenue built up around it

“She was sure that presently the hoardings, the quarries, the one-storey saloons, the wooden green-houses in ragged gardens, and the rocks from which goats surveyed the scene, would vanish before the advances of residences as stately as her own—perhaps (for she was an impartial woman) even statelier; and that the cobblestones over which the old clattering omnibuses bumped would be replaced by smooth asphalt, such as people have reported seeing in Paris.”

Of course, much of this did happen within the next decade or two. Wealthy New Yorkers built similar marble mansions on Fifth Avenue in the 50s and beyond, turning upper Fifth into the city’s millionaire colony. Meanwhile, Marble Row still maintained its elegance, but boarders and a commercial tenant began moving in.

Mary Mason Jones’ mansion in 1929, before demolition

Jones died in her mansion in 1891. By the 1920s, her corner house was the only part of marble row left, finally bowing to the wrecking ball in 1929 and replaced by an office building, according to Brooklyn Times Union article.

[Top image: National Portrait Gallery; second image: NYPL via househistree.com; third image: NYPL; fourth image: MCNY, X2010.7.2.2097; sixth image: MCNY, X2010.7.2.3751]

This ‘offensive’ 1874 portrait of the Vanderbilts reveals their place in Gilded Age society

Seymour Guy was a UK-born painter who came to New York in 1854. After setting up a studio in the famed Tenth Street Studio Building in Greenwich Village, Guy made a living painting portraits of city residents as well as scenes of home interiors and children in the countryside.

“Going to the Opera,” 1873

In 1874, Guy got the commission of his life: William Henry Vanderbilt asked him to paint a portrait of his family. The portrait would be done in William’s spacious Italianate brownstone home on the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 40th Street (below), across from the Croton Reservoir.

Guy accepted the commission and painted “Going to the Opera.” The portrait shows William, his wife, and their children in their opulent drawing room. An avid art collector, William’s paintings surround the adults and kids in the family, almost all dressed in formal attire.

The former W. H. Vanderbilt mansion at Fifth Avenue and 40th Street, where the portrait was painted

Curiously, one non-family member also appears in the background.

“A closer look at the piece reveals a member of the household staff standing in the back of the room holding coats—an interesting detail to have included in this family painting,” states the website for the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, the former family home of William’s son George Vanderbilt (and likely one of the boys in the painting). “The commission and future exhibition of ‘Going to the Opera’ was a definite statement reflecting the Vanderbilt family’s rise in society.”

Though the Vanderbilt family was rich and William was set to inherit his father’s estate, most individual family members were not household names in 1873. “In the early 1870s [William] Vanderbilt was not well known to the public, having yet to emerge from the large shadow of his father ‘Commodore’ Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877), then considered the wealthiest man in the country,” according to americanartgallery.org.

William Henry “Billy” Vanderbilt, portrait by Jared B. Flagg, 1877

William’s children, however, would soon be all over the society pages. One of his nine kids was W. K. Vanderbilt—future husband of social climbing Alva Vanderbilt, whose desperation to break into old money society culminated in her 1883 infamous fancy dress ball. It’s unlikely Alva made it into the portrait; she and William didn’t marry until 1875.

Another son was Cornelius Vanderbilt II, husband of Alice Vanderbilt, wearer of the famous electric dress at sister-in-law Alva’s ball. Alice could be in the painting, as she married her husband in 1867. (Is that Alice and Cornelius in the background standing together as a couple, looking a little glum?)

Alice Vanderbilt, 1880, by Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta

What the Vanderbilts thought of the painting isn’t clear. But when it was displayed a year later at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, the critics howled. Guy largely escaped attack; the barbs were aimed at the family.

“Several [critics] mentioned that the room was simply too small to gracefully contain such a large group of figures,” wrote americanartgallery.org. “The critic for the Nation also thought that the room was poorly decorated, and criticized ‘the complete want of individuality in the furniture, the expressionlessness of every inch of background, the machine made look of the carvings, the iron oppressiveness of the black arched molding, completely at war with the wall decoration, etc.’”

Alva Vanderbilt dressed as “Venetian Renaissance Lady” at her infamous fancy dress ball in 1883

“The critic for the New York Evening Express felt impelled to mention Guy’s picture in the context of commenting that family groups ‘on canvas are abominations at the best, but when the figures are dressed up in spic-and-span new clothes, and introduced much after the manner of a fashion-plate they become doubly offensive,’” stated the site.

Guy’s career survived the critics. And the Vanderbilts? It certainly didn’t stop them from rising to Gilded Age New York’s most elite echelon.

William Henry Vanderbilt’s last and final NYC mansion, his “triple palace” on Fifth Avenue and 51st Street

In 1882, William, his wife, son, and two daughters decamped to the family’s new “triple palace” mansion on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street. Not only did it have plenty of space for his art collection, but the mansions were across the block from W. K. and Alva’s French chateau and down the street from Cornelius and Alice’s 57th Street showstopper.

[Second image: Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site/nps.gov; third image: Biltmore Estate; fourth image: wikiart; fifth image: MCNY, X2012.96.2.2; sixth image: New-York Historical Society]

Quiet glimpses of the turn of the century city through an amateur’s camera

On the surface, Robert Bracklow probably appeared to his customers and neighbors to be a typical New Yorker.

Canal Street Between Laight and Varick Streets, 1897

Born in 1849, he immigrated to Gotham with his family when he was a child. He grew up during the Civil War and early Gilded Age, then made his living as a stationer and printer—owning his own legal stationary shop in Lower Manhattan, according to the New-York Historical Society.

He lived in Brooklyn, and though he never married, he seemed devoted to his lady friend of many years, a schoolteacher.

14th Street West of Fifth Avenue

But beneath the ordinariness of his life, Bracklow had a special passion for photography, which he discovered in his early 30s.

During early morning outings around Manhattan and sometimes to outer boroughs like Brooklyn, Bracklow, nicknamed “Daylight Bob” because he was afraid of the dark (and darkrooms too), “created a picture history of New York’s growth at the turn of the century,” according to a 1984 article in Photography.

Brighton Beach, 1895

Contemporaries like Alfred Stieglitz (a fellow member of the Camera Club of New York in the 1890s) were pushing the boundaries of photography as a fine art form.

Yet Bracklow “never embraced Stieglitz’s more abstract artistic vision, nor did he use his photography to expose social ills or make a clear political statement, like his contemporary Jacob Riis,” wrote the New-York Historical Society.

Corner saloon, 163rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue

Instead, most of the thousands of photos Bracklow took were documentary-style, unsentimental glimpses of New York.

His camera captured horse-pulled wagons meandering along rundown streets, new skyscrapers reaching toward the heavens, shantytowns and shacks, corner saloons, beachgoers at Coney Island, and other scenes in a changing city.

Dutch Street

The fascinating part about Bracklow’s photography is how all the images he took of a 19th century city shifting into the modern era made it into the hands of museum curators.

It didn’t happen until decades after he passed away. Bracklow died in 1920, and his possessions went to his lady friend, including “3,000 glass plates and 715 platinum prints in 28 scrapbooks,” states Photography.

Church of the Messiah, 34th Street and Park Avenue

“After the house she lived in was sold 30 years later, the collection came to the attention of Alexander Alland, Sr., who bought the negatives from a second-hand furniture dealer and made silver prints from them,” per Photography.

“In 1982, the scrapbooks were given to the New-York Historical Society by a descendant of the photographer’s sweetheart.”

Boy using a water pump on Edgar Street

In 2015, the New-York Historical Society and Metropolitan New York Library Council digitized the entire collection.

Here are some of Bracklow’s images: They aren’t romantic or necessarily artistic, but they perfectly document with composition and clarity the New York he lived in, which was in flux.

Robert Bracklow’s last known photograph of himself

[All photos New-York Historical Society Robert L. Bracklow Photograph Collection]

All the terra cotta beauty of an early uptown apartment building

Sometimes you come across a building so rich with decoration, it knocks you out. That was my reaction when I found myself at 45 Tiemann Place, near the corner of Broadway and just below 125th Street.

The building appears to be just another early 1900s apartment residence in the slightly askew neighborhood of Manhattanville—where the grid plan doesn’t necessarily hold and streets tend to have names based on early people and places in the area, not just numbers.

But see the doorway and first floor level: both are decorated with rich, blue-green terra cotta leaves interspersed with lion heads. On the second floor, geometric shapes between and above the windows give the building almost an Aztec or Mayan feel.

The ornamentation doesn’t end with the facade. Inside the front doorway are what look like terra cotta panels of great sailing ships and seagulls flying between them.

What’s with all the artistic trimmings? It might simply come from the imagination of the architect. The building was designed by Emery Roth, the man behind so many distinguished New York apartment buildings of the 1920s and 1930s, such as the Beresford and the San Remo on Central Park West and 2 Sutton Place.

Roth designed the building early in his career in 1909. When it opened that year, the six-story dwelling was called the Whitestone, and the address was 609 West 127th Street, per a newspaper advertisement reprinted in Eric K. Washington’s book, Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem.

The ad described the Whitestone as “one of the richest ornaments to a neighborhood full of fine, high-class apartment houses.”

I wonder if the Whitestone’s colorful entryway with the ship images was inspired by the terra cotta plaques installed in many of the new subway stations of the decade.

Sailing ships were (and still are) a popular motif: the Columbus Circle stop features plaques of the Santa Maria; the Fulton Street Station downtown depicts Robert Fulton’s steamboat, the Clermont. The South Ferry station also has sailing ship plaques.

The plaques in the entryway likely made sense in 1909 (above, when the building opened). That’s the year the entire city turned out for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, honoring the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon navigating the river that bears his name, as well as the 100th anniversary of Fulton’s steamboat.

There’s another feature at the entrance that deserves a closer look: the two lantern-like lights flanking the front door. Why are they significant? It has to do with Daniel Tiemann (below), the Manhattanville industrialist this two-block street is named for.

Tiemann served as New York’s mayor from 1858 to 1860. Since Dutch colonial days, tradition had it that twin lanterns would be installed outside the front door of the mayor’s home.

“The custom dates back to the early days of the Dutch Burgomasters,” according to the New York Times in 1917. “It is supposed to have originated with the lantern bearers who were accustomed to escort the Burgomaster home with proper dignity from the historic city tavern or other places of genial entertainment.”

Roth may have installed the lamps as a tribute to Tiemann and to a tradition kept up in the early 20th century—until Gracie Mansion became the official mayor’s residence in the 1940s.

[Fifth photo: MCNY, X2010.28.211; sixth photo: NYPL]

The two very different mansions where Mrs. Astor hosted New York society

In the 1880s, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor asserted her position as the grand dame of of New York society. Mrs. Astor, as she became known, presided over a November through February social season for the city’s old-money elite who could trace their lineage to the colonial era.

Mrs. Astor’s understated mansion, 350 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street

You’d think that a woman with her money and influence would host her weekly dinners and fabulous annual ball in a spectacular palace. But the “mansion” where she lived for most of her married life as she ascended the throne of society was surprisingly understated.

The house, on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, was built in 1856 on former farmland owned by the Astor family. The family gifted it to Mrs. Astor and her husband, William Backhouse Astor, after the couple married.

Mrs. Astor’s portrait greeted guests at 350 Fifth Avenue

On that lot the couple built a “plain four-story town house,” as Eric Homberger, author of Mrs. Astor’s New York, described it. “At 50 by 107 feet, and with Nova Scotia freestone used in window dressings, architraves, cornices, Corinthian columns, and a double stoop, the building certainly had an imposing air,” stated Homberger.

A fenced-in garden on the left side of Mrs. Astor’s house (350 Fifth Avenue) was shared with the neighboring house on the block, constructed and occupied by William’s brother, John Jacob Astor III (338 Fifth Avenue). The area was the most fashionable residential part of the city in the Gilded Age.

Mrs. Astor’s first ballroom, 1894

Though the exterior wasn’t impressive, the interior, however, was a different story. In Incredible New York, author Lloyd Harris explains what guests of Mrs. Astor’s annual January ball would experience as they made their way inside the house, which was “ablaze with lights.”

“Through a wide hall, guests proceeded to the first of three connected drawing rooms, where their hostess received them, standing before the life-size portrait (above) which she had recently commissioned from [portrait painter] Carolus Duran.

Mrs. Astor’s house, overshadowed by the new Waldorf Hotel in 1893

“Cordially greeted by this scintillant idol, her guests made their way through two more thronged drawing rooms to the spacious art gallery which served as a ballroom. Lander’s costly orchestra was playing in the musicians’ gallery, and the walls were hung with works of art which had acquired fame, if not merit, from Mrs. Astor’s favor.”

Supper would then be served in a “grand dining room from an immense table,” wrote Harris. The upper floors aren’t described, but with five children and his and hers bedrooms (the Astors spent very little time together), it must have been roomy.

Mrs. Astor’s second Fifth Avenue mansion bears a better resemblance to the kind of luxurious Gilded Age house you would expect.

Mrs. Astor’s second and last Fifth Avenue mansion, at 65th Street, was a marble palace.

In the early 1890s, her brother-in-law razed his mansion and built the Waldorf Hotel in its place. (The hotel was intentionally designed to overshadow Mrs. Astor’s house—these two Astor families didn’t get along, as you can imagine.)

The now-widowed Mrs. Astor and her son then sold her house at 350 Fifth Avenue and moved to a stunning French Renaissance double mansion at 840 and 841 Fifth Avenue, at 65th Street. Designed by Richard Hunt, the new mansion was Mrs. Astor’s final residence in New York City, situated on posh upper Fifth Avenue. She died there in 1908, and it was demolished in 1926.

[Top photo: New-York Historical Society; second image: Metmuseum.org; third and fourth images: MCNY; fifth image: Wikipedia]

The crossroads of Gilded Age life, as seen by a little-known New York painter

By 1895, just about all of Manhattan was urbanized. Central Park, completed only 30 years earlier far north of the main city, was now centrally located. In three years, the consolidation of Greater New York would be complete, and the city would take the shape we know today.

But the heart of the Gilded Age city was still Madison Square, a crossroads of business, shopping, nightlife, and culture. Above, artist Theodore Robinson painted the corner of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street with all the action and activity to be expected in the mid-1890s.

Missing from Robinson’s painting is the Flatiron Building, of course; the iconic skyscraper didn’t open until 1902. But to the left in the foreground is the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the meeting place of business and political movers and shakers. Farther up is Marble Collegiate Church, built in the 1850s and one of the city’s oldest most elite congregations.

Horses power carriages along the paved avenue. Skirt hems skim the sidewalks. You can practically hear the conversation between the smartly dressed young man and the driver. Streetcars travel up and down 23rd Street, ferrying daytime shoppers to grand department stores like Stern Brothers and nighttime theatergoers.

Robinson is a new name for me. Born in Vermont, he came to New York in the 1870s and returned again after stints in Europe, according to the National Gallery of Art. His depiction of Union Square (above), also an important Gilded Age location, seems closer to his pioneering Impressionist style.

Robinson died in New York in 1896 at age 43 after a lifelong fight with severe asthma, per a New York Times review of an exhibit held in 2005. His name isn’t well known, but his work capturing the street life of the Gilded Age lets us feel the energy and excitement of the city on the cusp of the 20th century.