“When I was a boy,” George Templeton Strong reflected in early 1865, “the aristocracy lived around the Battery, on Bowling Green.” So it had been since New York was named New Amsterdam, two centuries earlier. Young Cornelius and Sophia Vanderbilt had lived on Broad and Stone streets, in buildings and circumstances that might have been recognizable to Pieter Stuyvesant himself. Then, in the 1820s, the transformation of New York began, as immigrants swarmed in from Germany, Ireland, and the American countryside. The elite relocated, and kept on relocating every decade or so. In 1864, Strong
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