As society shifted and changed around her, Caroline Astor’s primacy waned. Around 1895, she decamped farther north, to a lavish, elegant palace at 841 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Sixty-Fifth Street, facing “the Central Park,” as it was then known. That same year, she gave a ball in her new home, hosting six hundred people, a newsworthy event in that she hadn’t done it for some time. All went off in true Gilded Age, Old World, Astor style. The ball didn’t begin until midnight, as all the guests were first attending a performance of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera. The ball was held in the
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