Growing up in the Gilded Age: the remarkable memoir of a prosperous girl in 1880s New York
When Ethel Nathalie Dana (née Smith) was born in June 1878 in a brownstone on East 71st Street, her Lenox Hill neighborhood was so sparsely populated, “the only building west of it was a bright blue farmhouse opposite Central Park,” wrote Nathalie, as she was known.
The Steinway piano factory and Ruppert’s Brewery sat on the outskirts of Lenox Hill, she wrote, and new brownstone rows with their “heavy stoops” “stood starkly among vacant lots where squatters had built themselves shanties, since room no longer existed downtown for the thousands of immigrants who landed at the Battery each year.”
So begins the first pages of Nathalie’s beautifully written book, Young in New York: A Memoir of a Victorian Girlhood. Published in the early 1960s, it’s the story of a girl (above with her siblings, second from left) navigating childhood during the transformative years at the end of the 19th century, in a society “which was sure that it had found the answers.”
The day-to-day personal details Nathalie recalls offer a descriptive peek into life for well-off children during the Gilded Age.
Nathalie’s family—educated and comfortable, but not rich—settled in Lenox Hill (above, in 1880) after her Episcopalian minister father, Cornelius B. Smith, became the rector of St. James Church. At the time, St. James was located on a hill between 68th and 69th Street at today’s Lexington Avenue.
The congregation grew so large, a new church was constructed in 1884 on Madison Avenue, which still stands today (below).
As a small child, Nathalie’s earliest recollections include living near smoky, gritty Fourth Avenue, now Park Avenue, where the trains of the New York Central ran overground. “When a train was approaching, warning was given by an Irishman who stepped out and waved a flag” to let pedestrians know to stay on the sidewalk until the train passed.
She remembers the activity on the street outside her window, watching delivery wagons in the morning and hearing the clip-clopping of horse hoofs on the cobblestone pavement.
“Later in the day the cry, ‘rags and bottles’ accompanied by the sound of bells and the rattle of wheels, announced the arrival of a cart,” she wrote. “From time to time the organ grinder appeared, with a monkey dressed in a red jacket and a little cap with a feather.” German bands also entertained the block, playing popular songs in the evening.
As was the custom at the time, Nathalie was born in her mother’s “dark carved oak” bed and slept in her mother’s room in a crib until she was old enough to have a room of her own. Extended family members visited often and helped take care of Nathalie and her siblings, while Irish servants were employed to cook and tend to the home.
Her older siblings walked to school, greeting other school kids and shopkeepers during the mile and a half walk. “In the afternoons the boys played baseball in the vacant lots of the neighborhoods with their friends, or sailed a series of boats on the pond at Central Park.” Watching the fireworks at the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 was a special adventure.
In 1884, the family home on East 71st Street burned down, thanks to a gust of wind that blew an open window’s lace curtains into a gas jet. The Smiths’ new residence stood on the corner of Park Avenue and East 69th Street (fourth photo). The brick house had stained-glass windows and a cast iron mansard roof—much more stylish than the brownstone.
Life for young Nathalie (above, age 3) revolved around her family and her parish. The women in her family did not work, because “in the 1880s a woman who earned money lost her status as a lady.”
Her parents entertained members of the parish and other clergymen and their wives with dinners at their home. Summers were spent in Connecticut and Maine, which kept her family away from the stifling city heat.
This was the fabled era of Gilded Age society, but the social swirl of old money or the new rich seemed to have little meaning in her household. Nathalie and her friends, however, couldn’t help ogle the stunning mansions lining Fifth Avenue. After school, she and a friend would walk down Fifth Avenue until they got to 17th Street, where they stopped at Huyler’s (below, in 1905) for ice cream sodas.
Walking was the preferred way to get around the city. “In the age of walking and horseback riding the pace was slow,” she recalls. “Men walked to their offices even when they were several miles away, and only occasionally did women take the long trip to the shops in a horsecar. Most activities were local and life was leisurely.”
Nathalie made a bold move when she was 12. Curious and intelligent, she’d heard about a new school, Brearley, which was founded to give girls the same level of education boys received. “There was a revolution in education, as the belief that women could think without injuring their brains was only partially accepted,” she explained.
Nathalie asked her parents if she could leave her current school and apply. They were hesitant, but she was accepted. At Brearley, her education truly began. “I felt that I had found the life of the mind in the Brearley….When I was 16, the field of music and art was opened to me by my music teacher….To be young in a growing world which was full of new ideas was stimulating and exciting.”
During her years at Brearley, she studied music. After graduating, she turned a European tour with her mother and father (above) into a solo adventure, visiting Germany and Italy to study music and art. Back in New York, Nathalie pursued the arts and befriended other artistic young adults.
After she was introduced to a young architect named Richard Dana, the two married in 1911. She had a son and a daughter and for the rest of her life remained involved in the arts, serving on the board of the Whitney Foundation and the Municipal Art Society.
Two chapters of what became this remarkable memoir were published in a journal put out by the New-York Historical Society in 1962. The jacket copy of her book states that in her sixties, Nathalie enrolled at Columbia to study the history of New York City, which led her to write her book.
Nathalie passed away in 1972 at 93 years old. Her memoir offers an incredible perspective not just on the changing mores and habits of children in New York City but also of a bygone era of a slower-paced city steeped in religiosity.
“We lived by a code, based on religion, which told us what was right and what was wrong,” she wrote. “Today we decide on our own ethics and, when something goes wrong, we try to discover whether circumstances, society, or ourselves are to blame instead of asking what immutable law, as interpreted by the church, we have broken.”
“To one who has not lived through the change it is hard to realize how great is the shift in orientation.”
Nathalie’s memoir of her Gilded Age girlhood is a topic on the latest episode of The Gilded Gentleman podcast, “Children of the Gilded Age: Seen and Not Heard (Until Now).” This link will take you to the episode, available starting October 1. Visit The Gilded Gentleman home page for more information on this very insightful and entertaining episode featuring myself and the excellent Carl Raymond!
[Top photo: Napoleon Sarony via Young in New York; second photo: Young in New York; fourth photo: Young in New York; fifth photo: Young in New York; sixth photo: MCNY, 93.1.1.18028; seventh photo: Century Association Archives Foundation; eighth photo: Cover, Young in New York]
