Chapter 10
Nearly all the immigrants landed in cities of the American seaboard, especially New York, which during the last decades of the nineteenth century served as port of entry for four newcomers out of every five. Indeed, Ellis Island in New York harbor, where a federal immigration facility opened in 1892, became a symbol of all the immigration (approached in significance only, and then not closely, by Angel Island in San Francisco Bay and Galveston on the Texas Gulf Coast).
Many immigrants remained in the cities of their landing; many others proceeded to different cities. Some found their way to the frontier, but these grew comparatively less numerous as time passed. In 1890 immigrants and their children were three times as likely as the native born to live in cities. Industry was the engine of American growth, the eye of the capitalist storm, and industry centered on the cities. Immigrants might dream of homesteads, and some actually attained them. But the vortex was strong and hard to escape.1
BY THE EARLY 1870s capitalism needed Chicago as much as Chicago needed capitalism. This hadn’t always been so. A military outpost, Fort Dearborn, had been established in the early nineteenth century where the Chicago River enters Lake Michigan, but the post was evacuated during the War of 1812, most of the evacuees were massacred by Indians friendly to Britain, and the stockade was destroyed. It was rebuilt after the war but never amounted to much and was abandoned for good in 1837.
The city, as distinct from the fort, got its start in 1830, after Illinois lawmakers decided to improve on nature and force the Illinois River to run uphill, or at least empty into the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico rather than Lake Michigan and the Atlantic. The projected canal prompted the platting of a city at what amounted to the canal’s lake entrance. The name, Chicago, derived from an Indian term for the wild garlic that grew there. (Town boosters long denied the link to an unpleasant odor, contending that the word simply meant “powerful.”)
By the time the canal was completed, in 1848, the fat days of canalling had passed and railroads were stealing the waterways’ traffic. This development actually benefited Chicago, for while the canal merely facilitated access to neighborhoods already served by boats and barges, railroads—the first of which reached Chicago almost coincident with the completion of the canal—opened entire new districts to efficient transport. Chicago became the queen city of the prairies, the gateway to the West.2
In the process it served as the model for a new generation of American cities. For a quarter millennium in America (and for longer in Europe, Asia, and Africa) cities had been sited on water, which afforded the only economic means of moving heavy cargoes. Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston were seaports; New Orleans, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh were river towns. By putting bulk cargoes on wheels, railroads liberated cities from their transport dependence on water. The cities of the railroad age required water for drinking and bathing and industry, but large wells or small streams sufficed for these purposes. Navigation no longer mattered nearly so much. Chicago blossomed far beyond what the Illinois canal would have supported; Denver transcended the South Platte River, Dallas the Trinity, Minneapolis the upper Mississippi, Kansas City the Missouri, Atlanta the Chattahoochee.
Older cities felt the railroads’ influence too. The center of city life had historically been the waterfront: the Long Wharf in Boston, the Battery and the East River in New York, the foot of Market Street in Philadelphia. The railroads pulled commerce away from the water to warehouses in cheaper districts. Dry land often became more valuable than harbor frontage. Boston filled in much of the surrounding waterways; New York did so to a lesser degree. Philadelphia had grown up looking east to the Delaware and the Atlantic; it settled into middle age looking west along the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Newport disappeared as a commercial presence; the Rhode Island inlets that had made it a splendid port now made it a nightmare for railroad construction. New Orleans was similarly problematic, and if it didn’t become as anachronistic as Newport, it surrendered much pride of Southern place to Atlanta, which simultaneously transformed Charleston nearly into a museum.
THE NEW CITIES faced new problems and some old ones. The latter included fire, which visited every city sooner or later. Philadelphia’s eighteenth-century fires had prompted Benjamin Franklin to organize his famous fire department. New York burned during the American Revolution and recurrently thereafter. San Francisco went up half a dozen times during the first half decade of the Gold Rush, from bad luck, high winds, and the discovery by arsonists that gold mining was easier in the ashes of banks and hotels than in the streams of the Sierra.
Arson aside, the underlying cause of the fires was that Americans built for the moment rather than for the ages, and hence of wood more often than of brick or stone. Beyond this, American civic culture resisted the curbs on construction that might have restricted the use of wood in the most densely populated neighborhoods or guaranteed minimal separation between buildings. Americans begrudged spending money on fire departments (Franklin’s firemen were volunteers). And until the late nineteenth century the most common source of light and heat was open flame. Candles tipped; kerosene spilled; creosote clogged chimneys till they burst into flame. Most such accidents had minor consequences, but when the stars were evilly aligned, devastation could result.
Chicago’s star-crossed moment occurred in October 1871. That summer and early autumn had been dry; between July 3 and October 9 only two and a half inches of rain fell, one-fourth the average. A hot wind began blowing from the southwest in early October, drying the city still more and putting everyone on edge. A fire broke out on Saturday, October 7, in the western division of the city and destroyed nearly a million dollars’ worth of property before the wind blew it into an undeveloped strip of land devoid of fuel and it died. Chicagoans sighed relief at the disaster escaped.3
But the wind kept blowing, and that night another fire began, in a West Side barn owned by Irish immigrants Patrick and Catherine O’Leary. Because cows were known to kick over lanterns, many Chicagoans assumed that one of the O’Leary cows started the fire. This theory was never proved, and Mrs. O’Leary denied it. The official report of the fire declined to specify a cause, although it did pinpoint the location as the O’Leary barn. However the flames originated, they were fanned by the wind and spread rapidly.4
“About two o’clock we were awakened by a very bright light and a great noise of carts and wagons,” Mary Fales, a resident of the city’s North Side, recalled. Because the Faleses’ window faced north and the light seemed to be coming from that direction, Mary and her husband, David, concluded that a fire was burning to the north of them. He went outside to assess the situation. “David found that the fire was not at all on the North Side,” Mary explained, “but was burning so furiously on the South Side that the whole sky was bright.” Mary and David took comfort from the fact that the Chicago River separated their house from the South Side. “But it proved no obstacle, and the North Side was soon on fire, and Wells and La Salle streets were crowded with carts and people going north.”
David told Mary to pack what she valued most and prepare to flee. Mary looked out her window at the clogged, smoky streets and decided packing would be a waste of time. If she loaded a trunk there would be no wagon to haul it. “Every vehicle demanded an enormous price and was engaged. Several livery stables were already burned.” But David somehow found a loose horse and an abandoned buggy, and he and Mary threw their irreplaceables in a trunk and heaved the trunk in the buggy. They climbed aboard and set off.
“I cannot convey to you how the streets looked,” Mary related to her mother the next day. “Everybody was out of their houses, without exception, and the sidewalks were covered with furniture and bundles of every description. The middle of the street was a jam of carts, carriages, wheelbarrows, and every sort of vehicle—many horses being led along, all excited and prancing, some running away. I scarcely looked right or left, as I kept my seat by holding tightly to the trunk. The horse would not be restrained, and I had to use all my powers to keep on. I was glad to go fast, for the fire behind us raged, and the whole earth, or all we saw of it, was a lurid yellowish red.”
David dropped Mary and the trunk at the house of her aunt and returned for another load. “I saw him no more for seven hours,” she said of the harrowing night. Her aunt’s house became a refuge for many in similar straits. “One young lady, who was to have had a fine wedding tomorrow, came dragging along some of her wedding presents. One lady came with four servants, and one with six blankets of clothing. One lady came with nurse and baby, and, missing her little boy, went off to look for him; this was about daylight, and she did not come back at all.” Most of the husbands, like David, were trying to salvage personal property ahead of the blaze; one and then another stopped by the house. “They only stayed long enough to say how far the fire advanced, and assured us of safety.”
David eventually reappeared. He explained that he had buried his and Mary’s china, some books, and even the piano on the grounds of a neighbor family. This family, the Hubbards, thought they were safe, as their lot was large and open and their house was brick. Mr. Hubbard followed the example of many others in hauling the carpets from his house, soaking them in water, and covering such wooden surfaces as the structure possessed. His efforts merely delayed the destruction. The heat grew so intense that it boiled the water from the carpets before bursting them into flame. Superheated air blasted through the windows and doors, and the house caught fire from inside as well as out.
Mary Fales learned from David that their house had been destroyed at the same time, but what she saw for herself was terrifying enough. “In the afternoon the wind blew more furiously”—by now the fire had become a storm itself and was creating its own weather—“the dust was blinding, the sky gray and leaden, and the atmosphere dense with smoke. We watched the swarms of wagons and people pass. All the men, and many of the women, were dragging trunks by cords tied in the handles; the children were carrying and pulling big bundles.”
Mary’s refuge—her aunt’s house—had become a trap. Had she and the others left sooner, the streets would have been clearer and passage more ready. Most had come in by cart or buggy and could have continued rolling. But acquiring a vehicle now was nearly impossible. “Such confusion as there was! Everybody trying to get a cart, and not one to be had at any price.” The husbands who had returned were frantically burying what they and their wives had brought. “Many of the ladies fairly lost their wits.” The buggy David had acquired earlier had been lost, but he managed to locate a soot-blackened man with a run-down cart pulled by a jaded nag. David and Mary loaded their trunk and one of her aunt’s in the cart and set off again.
“The West Side was safe, but to get there was the question,” Mary recorded. Some of the bridges had burned; others were packed solid with refugees and their vehicles. Yet the cart driver thought he knew a way: a bridge more distant but still passable. “Our ride was an anxious one. The horse had been over-used, and when urged on would kick till the old cart bid fair to break in pieces.… Many times we were blocked, and it seemed as if the fire must reach the bridge before we did.” Disabled carts and wagons littered the streets; people carried what the vehicles no longer could. Others dragged boxes and trunks; exhaustion and fear streaked the refugees’ faces almost as grotesquely as the dust, smoke, and their sweat. As their strength failed and their fear continued to rise, they abandoned their possessions and staggered away, leaving these last of their belongings in the road.5
The story was the same across much of the city. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children fled for their lives as the wall of flame advanced. Lambert Tree was a Cook County judge; his first thought was to save his court records. He hurried to his South Side office, stuffed the most important papers into the pockets of his coat, and made his way back to the street. The buildings in this downtown district were built of masonry almost from bottom to top, which was why their owners hadn’t worried much about previous fires. But this time the sparks and embers discovered each structure’s most vulnerable spots. “When I got out of doors I found it literally raining fire,” Tree recalled afterward. “Along Randolph and Clark streets canvas awnings in front of many of the stores, and in several instances the large wooden signs, also, were burning. Here and there where the sparks had found a lodgment small jets of flames were darting out from the wooden cornices on the tops of buildings, while the sparks and cinders which were constantly falling upon the streets were being whirled around in little eddies and scattered down the basement stairways.” Not even the sidewalk beneath his feet was safe. “Along North State and Ohio streets, the dead leaves which the wind had from time to time caught up and deposited against and under the wooden sidewalks had been ignited in many places by the flying sparks, which had in turn set fire to the sidewalks, so that every few yards tongues of fire were starting up between the cracks in the boards.”
Judge Tree’s home lay north of the river, and, like the Faleses and many others, he thought the river would serve as a firebreak. He started to realize he might be wrong just as he was crossing the river and the bridge burst into flames, its wooden planks igniting from the sparks. Still he hoped to save his house. He climbed to the roof and with the help of his servants poured bucket after bucket of water upon the shingles, to cool them and douse any sparks that landed. He found himself under incendiary assault. “A burning mass, which was fully as large as an ordinary bed-pillow, passed over my head.” He realized it was the remains of a hay bale sucked aloft and ignited by the raging updraft on the South Side. “There were also pieces of burning felt, some of which I should say were fully a foot square, flying through the air and dropping upon the roofs of the houses and barns.” Tree himself might yet have stayed, but his servants valued their lives over his property and fled. He finally decided that if he and his family waited any longer they might be surrounded by the inferno. He and his wife buried their silver in a neighbor’s yard, put their jewelry in a tin box small enough to carry, and, with the rest of the household, ventured into the street.
“We had scarcely got out of the door before we were assailed by a hurricane of smoke, sparks, and cinders, which nearly blinded and suffocated us. Fearing separation, I grasped my wife by one hand and my son by the other, and moved around to the west side of the house, intending to pass through one of the gates on Ohio Street. But we had no sooner got from under the protection which the north wall of the house afforded us, than we met the full force of this hurricane of smoke and fire. My wife’s and sister’s bonnets and my father’s and son’s hats were immediately blown from their heads, while the cinders were falling upon heads, hands, and faces and burning them.” The shrubs in the yard burst into flames before their eyes. Judge Tree feared they would be trapped and either suffocated or burned alive. Salvation came, ironically, on the wings of the fire itself. As the heat and smoke drove them toward a corner of the yard from which Tree knew there was no escape, a large section of the fence suddenly collapsed, burned at the base by the flames and toppled by a sudden gust of the inferno. They ran through the gap to freedom.
But their danger hardly diminished on the street. The black sky continued to bombard them with burning missiles, which singed their skin and set their clothing alight. Coughing and running, they proceeded east on Ontario Street to the lake. There, on the shore, amid some fifty acres of open space, they felt reasonably safe.
Yet what they saw as they looked about was heartbreaking. “We found thousands of men, women, and children, and hundreds of horses and dogs, who had already fled there for refuge. The grounds were dotted all over at short intervals with piles of trunks, chairs, tables, beds, and household furniture of every description.” Dawn remained hours distant, yet the light of the conflagration revealed the scene as starkly as day. “Whole families were huddled around their little piles of furniture, which was all they had left that morning of their yesterday’s home. Here and there a mother sat upon the ground clinging to her infant, with one or more little ones, who, exhausted by the prolonged interruptions to their slumbers, were now sleeping, with their heads reclining on her lap, as peacefully as if nothing unusual was transpiring. Several invalids lay helplessly stretched upon mattresses, but still surrounded by relatives, who were endeavoring to soothe their fears. One young girl sat near me, with a cage containing a canary bird in her lap, whose life she was seeking to protect.” Most bore up under the strain; others broke down. “Some men and women who had found liquor among the household stores there, and who sought to drown their present woes in the bottle, were now reeling about drunk.” Tough-looking thugs broke into boxes and trunks, taking what they wanted while demoralized police officers and impotent judges—including Tree—looked on. A poor woman, seriously ill on arrival at the shore, died amid the crowd. “The fact seemed to be received with comparative indifference.”
The eastern sky gradually brightened but none could take their eyes off the burning west. The flames moved closer and closer. A brewery and the city water works caught fire to the north, cutting off one potential avenue of escape. To the south the flames reached a planing mill and several lumber yards; their wood stocks fueled an especially intense blaze that prevented retreat in that direction. Fiery bombs fell among the refugees, igniting their furniture, their bedding, and in some cases their clothes. By tens and then hundreds they retreated toward the water.
“Then came the period of our greatest trial,” Lambert Tree recalled. “Dense clouds of smoke and cinders rolled over and enveloped us, and it seemed almost impossible to breathe. Man and beast alike rushed to the water’s edge, and into the water, to avoid suffocation.… Some persons drove their horses into the lake as far as the poor beasts could safely go, and men, women, and children waded out and clambered upon the wagons to which the horses were attached, while the lake was lined with people who were standing in the water at various depths, from their knees to their waists, all with their backs to the storm of fire which raged behind them.” Everyone realized further retreat was impossible; if the fire continued to advance, the final choice of their lives would be to burn or drown.
For hours the fire pinned them to the lake’s edge. Most had been up all night; the strain and the lack of sleep made them long for rest. Some on the wagons dozed; others lay down in shallow water. Tree’s wife grew utterly exhausted and risked her fate by letting herself collapse on the shore, semiconscious. Tree was slightly more aware, enough to see her clothing catch fire and to beat out the flames with his bare hands. They both realized they had to stay on their feet if they hoped to live.
Ever so gradually the inferno weakened. The heat became less intense and the smoke diminished. Sometime after five o’clock—this was now Monday afternoon—a horse-drawn grocery wagon emerged from the smoke in the direction of Superior Street. Tree ran forward and offered the driver whatever he’d charge to rescue his family. The man might have demanded a thousand dollars but settled for ten. Tree and the others piled in. The driver turned the wagon back toward the smoke, and all aboard covered their heads and mouths as the dutiful horse plunged ahead. The worst of the fire had burned itself out, having consumed everything combustible in its path, but the ruins still smoldered profusely. “We saw enough to know that the North Side at least was destroyed,” Tree wrote, “and that all that was left of the thousands of happy homes of the day before were a few chimney stacks and an occasional broken and cracked wall.”6
The Tree family reached the safety of the West Side not far from where Mary and David Fales had finally crossed the river. Mary, too, remarked the entire devastation. “Every family I know on the North Side is burned out,” she wrote her mother. “I can’t enumerate them. It would be useless. It is sufficient to say every individual one.” Though the fire had burned toward the east and the lake and had there run out of fuel, no one could say for certain that the worst was over. “Everyone felt nervous lest some change of wind might cause another conflagration on the West Side,” Lambert Tree recalled. If it did, the city would be worse off than ever, for the fire had destroyed the water works, leaving firemen little with which to battle the flames. All Chicago spent an anxious evening and night until, about three in the morning, rain began to fall—first lightly, then more heavily. “I never felt so grateful in my life,” Mary Fales recorded the next day, after the rain doused the last of the flames.7
SEVERAL QUESTIONS EMERGED in the wake of the fire. The first involved the extent of the damage. Journalists Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin conducted the most thorough survey and reported that the fire had burned 2,124 acres of urban real estate and destroyed, wholly or in large part, 17,450 buildings. More than 300 people died in the blaze; 100,000 lost their homes. The property damage exceeded $200 million.8
A second question had to do with public order. As Lambert Tree discovered on the shore of Lake Michigan even while the fire was raging, human greed took no time off for civil calamity. If anything, the fire provided opportunities for theft and looting that wouldn’t recur till the next such disaster. (A similar observation had prompted Benjamin Franklin to specify that his Philadelphia firemen carry large leather bags to fire scenes, to preempt the theft of the valuables of those driven from their homes and offices.) Chicago’s police could hardly keep up with crime under normal circumstances; in the extraordinary aftermath of the fire they needed help.
It arrived in Union blue. General Phil Sheridan was in Chicago when the fire broke out; at its height he employed a company of his men and some army gunpowder to blow up buildings in the fire’s path, to deprive the blaze of fuel. The measure did little immediate good, but it reminded Chicago officials that federal help was at hand if necessary. As the flames died down, Sheridan suggested that the small federal force in Chicago could be supplemented by soldiers from forts farther west. Chicago mayor Roswell B. Mason accepted the offer and then some: he placed the city under martial law, with Sheridan in command. The condition lasted two weeks and provoked both opposition, chiefly from Illinois governor John Palmer, who alleged a power grab by Sheridan and contended that if soldiers were needed they should have been state militia, and applause, primarily from property owners. William Bross, a partner in the Chicago Tribune, recalled his reaction upon the arrival of the federal troops. “I saw Sheridan’s boys, with knapsack and musket, march proudly by. Never did deeper emotions of joy overcome me.”9
The third question facing Chicago in the aftermath of the fire was the most challenging. Put simply, could the city be rebuilt? No major American city had ever been so completely destroyed as Chicago (only San Francisco, dealt the double blow of earthquake and fire in 1906, and New Orleans, hammered by hurricane and flood in 2005, have been since). Capitalism had built Chicago; could capitalism rebuild it?
In fact it did, and far more quickly than anyone expected. (So quickly that a popular joke told of an expatriate Chicagoan who rushed to buy a train ticket to his erstwhile home. The ticket agent asked if had lost a loved one in the fire. No, he said; he just wanted to see the ruins before a whole new city was built on top of them.) The first structures erected upon the ruins were not homes or hospitals but businesses. W. D. Kerfoot, a prominent real estate agent, returned to the site of his office at 89 Washington Street, between Dearborn and Clark, on the morning of October 10, with a load of lumber; discovering that the remains of the building were still too hot to allow entry, he built a shack in the street. A sign above the door proclaimed, “W. D. Kerfoot. Everything gone but wife, children, and energy.”
Kerfoot rightly guessed that the fire had created opportunities for buying and selling land, which was about the only tangible thing the flames hadn’t destroyed. Merchants were harder pressed, having lost their inventories along with their shops and warehouses. But people still needed what the merchants had sold—needed it now more than ever, in most cases—and this demand was sufficient collateral for the merchants’ creditors. Alfred T. Andreas, a publisher, entrepreneur, and chronicler of Chicago’s growth, destruction, and resurrection, told of merchants receiving telegrams from their creditors even before the extent of the destruction was known. “The general tenor of the dispatches was: ‘We suppose you are burned out. Order what goods you need, and pay what you can. We want your trade.’ ”10
For centuries American Indians had burned the Great Plains to replenish the soil and ensure a fresh crop of grass for the buffalo; white farmers adapted the incendiary technique to their wheat fields. Chicagoans discovered that fire had a similar revivifying effect on a capitalist cityscape. Cities accrete old buildings and infrastructure, to which individuals and firms grow attached for emotional and pecuniary reasons. A fire can clear away the old stuff, making room for buildings that wouldn’t have sprouted otherwise. Chicago sprang up from the ashes of the 1871 fire more vigorous than ever. Voters authorized the reconstruction of the major public buildings, including the post office, the custom house, and the court house. The work served the dual purpose of reasserting the city’s identity and employing thousands of Chicagoans rendered jobless by the flames. Skilled workers did particularly well in the “great rebuilding,” as their talents made them the object of increased demand and won them higher wages. Unskilled workers did less well, but after the Panic of 1873 the continuing construction in Chicago sheltered them from the worst of the depression.11
Chicago’s entrepreneurs competed to hire the best architects, who, lured by the tabula rasa of the post-fire skyline, strove to imprint their particular visions of modern architecture upon the city. They might have built outward, onto the prairie that stretched away to the north, west, and south. But the burned-over district beckoned, and in any event Chicagoans had already defined their commercial area as bounded on the north and west by the Chicago River and on the south by the tangle of rail yards that connected Chicago to the outside world. For this reason, the Chicago Tribune explained, “Chicago must grow upward.”12
It did so, more rapidly and spectacularly than any other city in the world. New York, Philadelphia, London, and Berlin built tall buildings, but they were scattered among existing shorter structures. Chicago’s towers went up wall-to-wall, lining the major thoroughfares for blocks on end. Only the fire made this density possible, accomplishing in two days what deference to the prerogatives of private capital wouldn’t have allowed in two decades. “That part of the burnt district north of Van Buren street and between La Salle street and the South Branch of the River,” an investor recalled, “before the fire was covered with countless old rookeries and miserable shanties, occupied for the past twenty years as dens of infamy and low gambling dives, the resort and rendezvous of thieves, burglars, robbers, and murderers of all grades and colors, to the exclusion of all decency, or business purposes.” Yet because those dens of infamy turned a profit, their landlords resisted their removal. The fire solved the problem.13
In place of the dives rose monuments of commerce. The Columbus Memorial Building soared sixteen stories above State Street; the Masonic Temple Building, at the corner of State and Randolph, became the world’s tallest building (twenty-two stories and 302 feet) upon its completion in 1892. Chicago’s architects and their clients made personal and civic statements with the buildings they erected. “From foundation to roof, every inch of the building bears the impress of superb workmanship,” a contemporary remarked of the Chamber of Commerce Building. “There is not a trace of shoddyism about the structure. There is no veneering. There is no paint. Everything from the mosaic ceiling of the first floor to the Italian marble wainscoting of the thirteenth is real—not an imitation. No cheap substitutes have found their way into this work.” The Chicago Tribune put the matter more succinctly in commenting on plans for the Columbus Memorial project: “A million dollars is a large sum to expend on a lot 100 × 90 feet, when a building costing from $650,000 to 750,000 would in all probability bring in the same rental.”14
The new buildings married art to technology. Steel-frame construction took loads off the walls and allowed the inclusion of large windows, which transformed the interior aesthetics of the buildings. “With the owners, light has been a prime consideration,” an architecture critic for the Tribune remarked. Skylights and multistoried foyers extended the feeling of openness deep into the heart of the structures and diminished the need for artificial lighting. “A perfect flood of light penetrates the central court, so that the interior of the building is almost as brightly illuminated as the exterior during the day,” another critic said of the Chamber of Commerce Building. Elevators whisked visitors to the highest floors, in the highest style. The Hale Elevator Company, based in Chicago, produced a line of elevator cars that ranged in price from $200 to $2,000 and in design from the utilitarian to the baroque. Building lobbies served as portals to the interiors but also as gateways to distant lands and times. “Rising to the height of a story and a half, the walls of the outer vestibule are composed of Numidian, Alps, Green, and Siena marbles,” a guidebook explained of the Unity Building. “Passing through the rotunda, the eye is dazzled by its surprisingly brilliant beauty, designed in the style of the Italian renaissance.”15
The Chicago buildings set new standards for commercial offices. “Dark rooms will not rent, and it therefore does not pay to construct them,” the Tribune explained. “The old practice was to cover the entire lot, and the consequence was dark rooms in a considerable proportion of the space.” That old practice had become uneconomical. “Buildings constructed according to the latest ideas have readily taken tenants away.” The directors of Chicago’s First National Bank, justifying their decision to spare no expense in fitting out their building, described it as a market response to the “demand for perfect office quarters.”16
Many architects left their signatures across Chicago’s skyline, including Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, Frederick Baumann, and William Le Baron Jenney. But the most distinctive autograph belonged to the firm of Burnham and Root. Daniel Burnham was the elder by three years and the face of the firm. “Daniel Hudson Burnham was one of the handsomest men I ever saw,” remembered Paul Starrett, a Burnham and Root associate. “It was easy to see how he got commissions. His very bearing and looks were half the battle. He had only to assert the most commonplace thing and it sounded important and convincing.” When proposing building designs, Burnham rarely asserted the commonplace. “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood,” he told his colleagues. (The message stuck with Starrett, who moved on from Burnham and Root to construct New York’s Empire State Building.)
John Root was the better artist and designer, a man who could conjure whole buildings from thin air. “He would grow abstracted and silent,” Burnham said of his partner. “A faraway look would come into his eyes, and the building was there before him—every stone of it.” Together the two built several Chicago landmarks, among them the Montauk, which demanded a novel floating foundation and was the first structure to be called a “skyscraper” (“What Chartres was to the Gothic cathedral,” a critic swooned, “the Montauk Block was to the high commercial building”); the Rookery, whose broad windows seemed to bring Lake Michigan indoors; and the Monadnock, which opened as the world’s largest office building in 1893.17
BUILDINGS ARE THE bones of cities; streets and railways their arteries and veins. America’s older cities suffered atherosclerosis as avenues built for smaller populations clogged with traffic never anticipated by the designers. New York had it worst, constrained as it was by geography and bursting with new arrivals. Writing at the end of the Civil War, a New York editor deplored the state of transit in his city. Horse-driven omnibuses, the primary mode of surface transport, were a formula for “modern martyrdom,” he said. “The discomforts, inconveniences and annoyances of a trip in one of these vehicles are almost intolerable. From the beginning to the end of the journey a constant quarrel is progressing. The driver quarrels with the passengers, and the passengers quarrel with the driver. There are quarrels about getting out and quarrels about getting in. There are quarrels about change and quarrels about the ticket swindle.… Respectable clergymen in white chokers are obliged to listen to loud oaths. Ladies are disgusted, frightened and insulted. Children are alarmed and lift up their voices and weep.” The principal alternative to the omnibuses, steam-driven city railway cars, were differently but comparably odious. “The cars are quieter than the omnibuses, but much more crowded. People are packed in them like sardines in a box, with perspiration for oil. The seats being more than filled, the passengers are placed in rows down the middle, where they hang on by the straps, like smoked hams in a corner grocery. To enter or exit is exceedingly difficult. Silks and broadcloths are ruined in the attempt. As in the omnibuses, pickpockets take advantage of the confusion to ply their vocation.… The foul, close, heated air is poisonous. A healthy person cannot ride a dozen blocks without a headache.”18
This writer wasn’t alone in believing New York would strangle—or New Yorkers strangle one another—if something wasn’t done to alleviate the city’s transit woes. The rectangular grid of avenues and cross streets was jammed from morning till night; pedestrians took their lives into their hands in simply crossing from one curb to the other. The only solution was to burrow beneath the surface or to rise above it.
Burrowing posed two challenges. The first was the trouble and expense of building a trolley line, railroad, or anything else underground. Costs soared the deeper one dug. The second was the difficulty of ventilating steam engines—the obvious power source—beneath the surface. Steam engines consumed oxygen and emitted carbon monoxide and other toxic gases; operating them underground without asphyxiating passengers tested the ingenuity of the era’s best engineers. An underground railway had recently opened in London, and passengers complained of serious breathing distress.
Alfred Ely Beach proposed an ingenious solution to the ventilation problem. Compressed air, rather than the direct application of steam power, would drive his underground system. Passenger cars fitting snugly inside an iron tube would be whisked from station to station by jets of air pumped into the tube from above ground. Steam engines on the surface, vented to the atmosphere, would whirl the fans that produced the jets.
Beach believed his technology unassailable but reckoned that proponents of competing systems might try to scuttle his project. So he arranged—by methods unclear but apparently in conformance with the practices of Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and other transit magnates of the era—for authorization for his scheme to be slipped into an 1868 state transit bill. Then he surreptitiously commenced construction. His crews started in the basement of a clothing store and bored beneath Broadway, removing the dirt under cover of darkness. By early 1870 Beach’s tube was ready for passengers. These were conducted down a stairway to a station lit with gas lamps and lined with frescoes; awaiting their turn the passengers lounged on upholstered sofas and listened to music performed on a grand piano. They entered a car that seated twenty-two in comparative luxury; when the door was closed the car shot silently and rapidly down the three-hundred-foot length of the tube. Nearly all professed delight at the experience and commended it to their friends. During the next several months some four hundred thousand persons paid twenty-five cents apiece for the “atmospheric ride.”19
But there the experiment ended. Property owners complained that their foundations had been compromised; more tellingly, railroad owners, existing and prospective, mobilized to bar Beach from extending his line into something actually useful. Among those railroaders was a group that hoped to entice Cornelius Vanderbilt into financing a subway. The Commodore’s conservatism had kept him out of surface railroads for years; now it prevented him from backing an underground version, which he considered unworkable. “I shall be underground a damned sight sooner than this thing,” he said.20
He turned out to be right. Though various parties continued to press for underground railroads, the immediate future of mass transit in New York lay overhead. Since just after the Civil War, Charles T. Harvey had lobbied for permission to build an elevated railroad in lower Manhattan. In 1867 the legislature authorized an experimental line running north from Battery Place a half mile along Greenwich Street. The experiment was to determine how disruptive and dangerous an aerial railway was; critics forecast fires from embers that rained down on rooftops, fatal accidents of carriages and omnibuses whose horses were terrified by the mechanical thunder overhead, and the collapse of the towers supporting the tracks and trains. Less spectacular but more pervasive would be the plague of blackened laundry from the belching smokestacks lifted so high.
Harvey mollified some of the critics by employing cables rather than locomotives to propel his cars. The cables ran over pulleys from the cars to a central traction engine. This arrangement kept the sparks and noise to a minimum, but it also complicated the motion of the cars, which at first ran hardly faster than a man could walk. Harvey proclaimed the experiment a success in principle and began raising cash to improve the equipment and service. But his backers fell victim to the Gould-Fisk gold raid of 1869, and by the time the finances were reorganized Harvey no longer controlled the project.
Yet his idea was sound enough that others picked it up. In 1872 the New-York Elevated Railroad Company commenced service up Greenwich and Ninth Avenue to the Hudson River Railroad station on Thirtieth Street. The political future of elevated transit remained precarious, though, and the company felt obliged to circulate among passengers a petition to the state legislature asserting that “the trains have been regular, rapid and safe” and praying that “the road may be continued as a public convenience.” The petition, and perhaps other considerations, had the desired effect. The elevated system survived the legislative scrutiny, and it expanded till it carried more than a million passengers a day.21
AS EXCITING AS the sky trains could be—the new elevated dispensed with Harvey’s cables in favor of regular locomotives, which did throw sparks, spook horses, and occasionally jump the rails—they had nothing on sky bridges. For generations the island character of Manhattan had defined the city of New York, which remained administratively separate from Brooklyn, itself one of the largest cities in America and rapidly growing. To reach New York directly from Brooklyn required taking a boat, catching some spray in the face, and feeling at least a bit of the thrill that inspired Walt Whitman’s ode to the East River ferry:
Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sun-set! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me;
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!22
But those crowds grew more countless each year, and the ferries became a bottleneck to the region’s economic growth. Merchants on Manhattan clamored for faster deliveries; industrialists complained that the crowding on the island pushed their wage costs up. Yet it was Brooklyn that really drove the demand for change. Brooklyn’s bakers and brewers wanted easier access to Manhattan’s markets; Brooklyn’s builders sought to house those Manhattan workers; Brooklyn’s land owners lusted after Manhattan’s money.
A bridge would solve everyone’s problems and secure New York’s future. In the half decade after the Civil War, the commerce of the world seemed up for grabs. The Suez Canal drew Atlantic traffic east; the Pacific railroad pulled American traffic west. New Yorkers hoped to command the junction of the two trade routes. “As the great flow of civilization has ever been from East towards the West,” John Augustus Roebling wrote, “with the same certainty will the greatest commercial emporium be located on this continent, which links East to the West, and whose mission it is in the history of mankind to blend the most ancient civilization with the most modern.… Lines of steamers, such as the world never saw before, are now plowing the Atlantic in regular straight line furrows. The same means of communication will unite the western coast of this continent to the eastern coast of Asia. New York will remain the center where these lines meet.”
Roebling was no idle philosopher of history—though he had studied under Hegel in Germany. Born in Saxony to a modestly successful tobacconist and his ambitious wife, young Johann enrolled in the engineering curriculum at the Polytechnic Institute of Berlin, where the great historical philosopher taught. Hegel pondered the trajectory of civilization and determined that America was next in the line of human progress. “It is a land of hope for all who are wearied of the historic armory of old Europe,” he told Roebling and his other students. Roebling took the professor at his word and prepared to emigrate. The Prussian government made difficulties, not liking to lose a bright young man on whom it had lavished educational and technical resources. So Roebling proceeded by stealth, attaching himself to a group of farmers leaving to join their fellow Germans in the Pennsylvania countryside. Roebling lasted long enough behind the plow to watch his brother, another spurious agrarian, die of sunstroke in a wheat field; safely beyond Bismarck’s border guards, he embraced engineering once more. He built canals and dams, then railroads and aqueducts and bridges. He developed a novel form of rope, fabricated of iron wire; his plant at Trenton churned out miles of the stuff and earned its inventor a fortune.
Roebling hoped to make still more money—not to mention a mark of which his philosophy professor would be proud—by building a bridge connecting Brooklyn to New York. Other engineers preferred a tunnel. Scientific American, lately cofounded by Alfred Beach, the pneumatic man, argued that going underground would save time and money. Roebling dismissed the moles with contempt. A soaring bridge would embody the soaring vision of America. “Let it illustrate the grandeur of our age; let it be the Mecca to which foreign peoples shall come.… Babylon had her hanging gardens, Nineveh her towers, and Rome her Coliseum. Let us have this great monument to progress.”23
And such a bridge! The surging currents of the tidal East River, and the endless stream of ships and boats on its surface, required that any bridge leap the channel in a single span. Only a suspension bridge could accomplish the feat. But no suspension bridge of this size had ever been attempted. The towers to hold the main cables must be hundreds of feet high, to accommodate the sag in the cables and still give the tallest ships clearance. The cables themselves must be stronger than any cables ever spun, and the anchorages to hold the cable ends—to balance the immense weight of the cables and the bridge span—must be embedded deep into the living rock on either side of the bridge. Roebling’s earlier bridges included suspension spans; these made his design for the East River Bridge plausible. But between the plausible and the actual yawned a gap that could swallow millions of dollars and hundreds of lives, perhaps to no ultimate avail. Who would shoulder the risk?
The City of Brooklyn, for one. In the spirit of the legislation that funded the Pacific railroad, the Brooklyn city government voted three million dollars toward Roebling’s project. New York City pitched in a million and a half after several aldermen were bribed and Democratic boss William Tweed received a large ownership stake in the bridge construction company.24
Roebling now turned to making his vision real. But before the work began, a freak accident in the summer of 1869 crushed the toes of his right foot. He consented to amputation, lest his convalescence slow the project. He didn’t move fast enough: tetanus set in, and in three weeks he was dead.
His son assumed the mantle. Washington Roebling lacked his father’s sense of destiny, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute having had no Hegel on staff at the time Washington attended the college in Troy, New York. (Though he didn’t correct people who assumed he had been named for the Father of his Country, the younger Roebling’s forename actually honored a friend of his own father.) Washington continued his training under his father, so that by the time of the elder man’s death, Washington Roebling was the logical person to carry the construction forward.
The construction began with the caissons, the large, watertight, airtight compartments set open-bottomed on the river bed that allowed the workers to excavate for the tower foundations. Cofferdams sufficed for other projects, but such comparatively flimsy structures couldn’t withstand the depths, pressures, and currents of the East River. Caissons had been employed in France (as the name suggested), and James Eads used them in St. Louis, where he was building his bridge across the Mississippi. But they remained a temperamental technology, prone to spectacular failure. The key to the caissons was compressed air, supplied by powerful pumps, that held the water at bay and allowed the workers inside the caissons to carve into the river bed till they reached bedrock. Ingenious air locks enabled the workers to enter and exit the caissons without loss of air pressure; separate locks permitted the removal of the excavated material.
The work was hot, heavy, noisy, and exhausting. The workers—mostly Irish, German, and Italian immigrants—labored around the clock, in eight-hour shifts, six days a week. The excavation went slowly, at times only inches per week. In frustration Washington Roebling authorized the men to blast, and they, in equal frustration, agreed. The decision was fraught with danger; if the concussion didn’t kill the men in the caissons or blow out their eardrums, it might upset the balance between the air pressure and the weight of the overlying water, allowing the water to pour under the sides of the caisson and drown everyone inside. Roebling experimented with a revolver before authorizing serious blasts; when the largest round his gun could fire produced a tolerable concussion, he stepped up to black powder. This spared the men’s lives and hearing, but it filled the caissons with blinding smoke. Roebling solved this new problem by switching to smokeless rifle powder, and the excavation accelerated gratifyingly.
Another difficulty developed as the caissons and men descended into the river bed. The farther down they went, the greater the air pressure required to keep the water out. The men manifested strange symptoms on emerging at the ends of their shifts. They began to bleed from the nose and mouth and suffered inexplicable cramps, which gave rise to the name for their affliction: “the bends.” Shortening the shifts afforded some relief, but not always enough. One man died, then another. The workers struck in protest, demanding still shorter shifts and higher pay: $3.00 for four hours. They held out for a few days, until the company threatened to fire them all and hire replacements. They accepted $2.75 and went back to work.
Meanwhile a doctor hired by the company to investigate the malady found nothing conclusive, and the company sought to suppress the truth about what was killing the workers. A number of decompression deaths were attributed to other causes, including spinal meningitis and “corpulence.” Al Smith, the future mayor of New York, grew up on South Street during this period and recalled his mother’s telling of the agonies of the workers dying from the bends during construction of the bridge. “Perhaps if they had known,” she said, “they would never have built it.” Those workers who exited slowly, returning to normal air pressure gradually, exhibited fewer symptoms, and the doctor recommended this for all the workers. But the company was anxious to finish the excavation, the workers were in a hurry to get home at the ends of their shifts, and his recommendation went largely unheeded. Workers continued to collapse and die.
Roebling, at a loss, finally called the digging to a halt. Though the excavation for the tower on the Brooklyn side had hit bedrock, the New York caisson still rested on sand, seventy-eight feet below high tide in the East River. Roebling decided to risk building the New York tower on the sand, relying on its enormous weight to hold the footing firm against the ebb and flow of the currents.
By contrast to the battle against the river bed and the bends, which took place largely out of sight, the building of the towers occurred in plain view. The Brooklyn tower broke the surface first, followed by the New York tower. Slowly the workers piled the masonry higher, stone upon stone. The Panic of 1873 retarded but didn’t stop the work. In June 1875 the Brooklyn tower topped out, 276 feet above flood tide, and a year later the New York tower achieved the same final height. Cables—not the waist-thick main cables yet but smaller preliminaries—were floated across the river and hoisted into place. In August the first crossing was made by master mechanic Edwin Farrington in a bosun’s chair hung from one of the cables. “The crowds below him held their breath in fearful suspense for a moment,” a local correspondent related, “and then a wild shout went up, showing their appreciation at the boldness of the voyager.… He kissed his hand to the populace in response to their cheers.”25
Spinning the main cables, hanging the suspenders (the vertical lines connecting the main cables to the bridge span), and constructing the span itself took several more years. Not till May 1883 did the bridge open to traffic. When it did, it provoked celebrations like nothing since the end of the Civil War. Brooklyn congratulated itself on reaching the acme of civilization. A large banner paraphrased John Roebling: “Babylon had her hanging gardens, Egypt her Pyramids, Athens her Acropolis, Rome her Coliseum—so Brooklyn has her bridge. Over its broad roadway the teeming millions of the two cities may pass; under its spacious arch the commerce of the world may pass.” Hundreds of thousands turned out from both Brooklyn and New York to commemorate the wonderful day; hundreds of politicians elbowed onto reviewing stands to capture the glory reflected from the cables and girders. Ferryboats and fireboats and lighters and yachts and smacks and scows filled the East River; special trains delivered guests from the suburbs. Nightfall brought “illuminations”—fireworks—that dazzled the multitude and might have ignited the woodwork of the bridge had the fireboats not hosed it down. “A grand line of fire shot up into the air and burst into a shower of golden rain and blue, red, and emerald stars, which dropped gently down into the river,” a witness recorded. “The two towers of the bridge became ablaze with light. Fountains of gold and silver stars were set in motion on the towers, and from the western roadway Japanese shells were fired in rapid succession. These shells soared to a height of about 800 feet and then burst, scattering gold and silver rain, stars of gold, blue, emerald, and red, and writhing serpents which reached the water before their strength was spent.” The grand finale to the show, which consumed fourteen tons of fireworks, was the simultaneous launch of five hundred “monster rockets” that exploded with a force that shook the bridge but, doing no damage, confirmed the consensus that this monument to American greatness would stand forever.26
AS PROUD AS urban achievements like the Brooklyn Bridge could make Americans, many viewed the emergence of big cities as a fall from grace. Cities were something Americans had long associated with vice and decay and Europe. “I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man,” Thomas Jefferson told Benjamin Rush. “True, they nourish some of the elegant arts, but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue & freedom, would be my choice.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, in an essay praising the pastoral life, declared, “Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.” Herman Melville decried the insidious effect of cities on the most personal relations. “In our cities families rise and burst like bubbles in a vat,” he observed in Pierre. Horace Greeley famously told his young man to go west if he wished to flourish, not to venture into the great city at the New York editor’s feet. Walt Whitman was the exception that proved the rule: Whitman extolled city life but in a poetry collection—Leaves of Grass—judged obscene by many contemporaries.27
When Americans did move to cities, they initially tried to make them look like villages. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the model residence for all who could afford it was the single-family home, sometimes attached to its neighbors in a row but often standing apart. In planned cities like Philadelphia (laid out at the end of the seventeenth century almost before anyone set foot on that part of the Delaware River shore) and New York (platted from Fourteenth Street to 155th in the second decade of the nineteenth century), houses stretched along streets and avenues as far as the eye could see or the foot walk. At the end of the Civil War the tallest structures in New York were the church steeples, with the spire of Trinity Church, at Broadway and Wall Street, overtopping the rest.
But gradually growth caught up with the cities. Empty lots filled in, driving real estate prices higher. Families of modest means strained to afford homes within the city limits. Some New York families crossed the East River to Brooklyn, consigning their breadwinners to daily ferry commutes (and prayers for a bridge). Others took refuge in a novel style of residence, imported from Europe.
New York’s first apartment house was the Stuyvesant, designed by Richard Morris Hunt, completed in 1869, and named for the founder of New York by the builder, who happened to share Peter Stuyvesant’s last name (although only by a quirk: Rutherfurd Stuyvesant had been Stuyvesant Rutherfurd until he transposed his names to satisfy a condition of the will under which he inherited the large Stuyvesant holdings of his mother’s family). The Stuyvesant was located on East Eighteenth Street, in a neighborhood dominated by row houses. It didn’t look much different from the buildings on either side and across the street, being five stories tall (many of the neighboring houses had that many floors) with a façade that betrayed the apartment building’s true nature only by the fact of having a single exterior door where an equal frontage of the row houses had five or six.28
It was the idea of apartment living that required getting used to. George Templeton Strong, a conservative in most things, thought the Stuyvesant attractive in its modest way. He didn’t want to move there but allowed that others might. “This substitute for householding seems to work well.… Rutherfurd is a public benefactor, especially to young people who want to marry on moderate means. Nothing could be brighter, more comfortable, or more refined-looking than these tiny, cosy drawing rooms.” Other observers, however, warned that nothing good could come of “cohabitation,” as they called apartment living. Unrelated people residing under the same roof suggested all manner of disturbing activities, starting with fornication and escalating unspeakably from there. Immigrants and the native poor shared accommodations, but they had no choice—and everyone knew, or at least suspected, what kind of immorality flourished on the Lower East Side. Farther up the island one expected better.29
Yet the economics of apartments were irrefutable. More units per lot meant lower prices for each. Within a year of the Stuyvesant’s completion, two more apartment houses opened nearby. One was a renovation of a pair of adjoining houses; the other—the Stevens House—was purpose-built and towered eight stories, a feat made possible, or at least marketable, by the inclusion of an elevator. To mitigate concern that apartment living was déclassé, the eighteen suites in the new building contained quarters for servants, and the communal areas included a fine restaurant and frescoed walls. In fact, in striving for luxury it broke its business model; within a few years it was converted to a hotel.30
By then other apartment houses had sprung up. Generically called “French flats” after the residential buildings that graced the boulevards of Paris (where Richard Hunt had studied architecture, at the École des Beaux-Arts), they grew taller and broader and attracted an ever-expanding clientele. The upper class still snubbed them; one member proclaimed huffily, “Gentlemen will never consent to live on mere shelves under a common roof!” Families with children preferred larger spaces, indoors and out, than the apartments afforded. But single men (single women usually lived with their parents) and couples without children came to consider them a perfectly acceptable solution to the problem of urban affordability.31
“IT HAS BEEN represented to me that America is not ready for the Fine Arts,” Richard Hunt had written his mother from Paris as he was completing his studies. “But I think they are mistaken. There is no place in the world where they are more needed.” They were still needed when Hunt turned from apartment houses to mansions for the wealthiest of the Gilded Age capitalists.32
Not long after he inherited the New York Central Railroad from his father, William Vanderbilt decided he required new digs. He commissioned Hunt to design a house for a lot on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-second Street. Hunt broke from the brownstone tradition of midcentury New York, which employed the Triassic sandstone of New Jersey and Connecticut that quarried easily and weathered to a rich chocolate color. He broke even more dramatically from the understated conventions of New York’s burgher past, which dictated that money be reinvested in one’s business rather than employed in conspicuous display. The house Hunt designed for Vanderbilt was modeled on a French château of the early Renaissance, and it employed silvery Indiana limestone that seemed to glow against the dark backdrop of its neighbors. The mansard roof sported spires and gables; carved stonework ornamented a three-story porch and numerous balconies. Like an American gargoyle, a statue of Hunt disguised as a stonemason stared down from the roof.
Neither New York nor anywhere else in America had seen the like of the Vanderbilt mansion, which the Vanderbilts celebrated with an 1883 ball that reminded some of the guests and more of those not invited that the centennial of the French Revolution was approaching. Hired dancers came dressed as horses and performed a “Hobby Horse Quadrille.” William’s wife, Alva, appeared as a Venetian princess. His sister-in-law wore a white satin gown trimmed with diamonds, and a diamond headdress, that made her, in her own characterization, “The Electric Light.” A close friend dressed up as Queen Elizabeth. The ball put New York in a tizzy before and after. “It has been on every tongue and a fixed idea in every head,” the New York Times reported. “It has disturbed the sleep and occupied the waking hours of social butterflies, both male and female, for over six weeks.… Amid the rush and excitement of business, men have found their minds haunted by uncontrollable thoughts as to whether they should appear as Robert Le Diable, Cardinal Richelieu, Otho the barbarian, or the Count of Monte Cristo, while the ladies have been driven to the verge of distraction in the effort to settle the comparative advantages of ancient, medieval, and modern costumes.” Invitations were in high demand; the Vanderbilts finally settled on opening their doors to twelve hundred of their dearest friends. Hordes who didn’t make the list crowded behind police lines to savor the event from afar.
On entry, the guests were transported to an urban Eden. “Throughout the hall and parlors on the first floor were distributed vases and gilded baskets filled with natural roses of extraordinary size,” the Times reporter wrote. “Grouped around the clustered columns which ornament either side of the stately hall were tall palms overtopping a dense mass of ferns and ornamental grasses.” The hall led to the gymnasium, a large apartment where a buffet dinner was served. “But it had not the appearance of an apartment last night; it was like a garden in a tropical forest. The walls were nowhere to be seen, but in their places an impenetrable thicket of fern above fern and palm above palm, while from the branches of the palms hung a profusion of lovely orchids.… Two beautiful fountains played in opposite corners of the apartment. The doors of the apartment, thrown back against the walls, were completely covered with roses and lilies of the valley.”
Those who fought past the flora found an interior architecture more sumptuous than anything any had seen west of the Atlantic. A carved stairway of Caen stone rose fifty feet above the polished Echaillon stone floor. Italian tapestries lined the walls, topped by rich oak panels on the ceiling. Walnut replaced the oak elsewhere, and intricate paintings of scenes from classical mythology replaced the walnut. The furniture unselfconsciously recalled the ancien régime; a magnificent stained-glass window opposite the main doorway depicted the meeting of Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France on the Field of the Cloth of Gold.33
The night was accounted a stunning success. The Vanderbilts had planted their flag at the summit of New York society, where it would remain till someone built something grander.
———
THIS DIDN’T TAKE LONG. The Vanderbilt gala kicked off an orgy of conspicuous construction as the captains of industry converted their profits into assets more tangible—and visible. The move was partly strategic, for in an era of chronic financial turmoil, real estate promised a comparatively safe harbor. But it was also psychological, in that the clearest sign of material success was a home its master could be proud of. In every city and in many suburbs existing buildings were razed or empty lots developed to afford room for the mansions of the rich. Soon no mogul, actual or aspiring, felt comfortable without a large, gaudy residence. And each round of construction produced houses more opulent and expensive than those of the last; when the point of building was to make a statement, the buildings had to shout louder and louder to be heard.
The competition crossed generations and set members of families against one another. William Vanderbilt’s son Cornelius II liked the ocean air of Newport, Rhode Island, where he built a summer place that dwarfed his father’s Manhattan home. “The Breakers” comprised seventy rooms and put sixty-five thousand square feet under its Italian Renaissance roof. Construction required two years, including time to transport much of the wood and stone from Europe. The paneling in one of the smaller reception rooms came from a Paris house built for Marie Antoinette. The dining room featured two massive crystal chandeliers, twelve columns with gilded bronze capitals, and an oak table that seated thirty-four guests in elbow-swinging comfort. The billiard room had marble walls and alabaster arches; a weighing chair from England let the players determine their weight in stone. The ceiling of the grand salon riffed the Sistine Chapel, albeit with a secular twist; its figures symbolized Music, Harmony, Song, and Melody. The kitchen was bigger than most ordinary homes; the stables were roomier and cleaner than many urban apartments.
But this wasn’t even the biggest house in the family. George Washington Vanderbilt, William’s youngest son, preferred the Carolina piedmont to the New England shore; at Asheville he constructed a country home that could have swallowed his father’s and brother’s houses and several office buildings besides. Whether the name he gave the place—Biltmore—was intended to convey comparison was a matter of conjecture, but as a matter of fact no one ever built more home than George Vanderbilt. The 250 rooms and 175,000 square feet, in exaggerated imitation of the grandest French châteaux, made the house the symbol of Gilded Age excess; its 125,000 acres, replete with farms, village, church, and peasants, conjured alarming new images of France on the eve of the revolution.
By the time Biltmore was finished, the nation was mired in the depression of the 1890s. America’s nouveaux riches weren’t famous for their sensitivity to the feelings of lesser sorts, but even they realized there were limits to what one could do in a republic without inflaming public opinion unduly. As a result, when Mrs. Bradley Martin wanted to impress the neighbors she opted for something more ephemeral: a ball, after the fashion of the William Vanderbilts. And even then she defended her fun as being good for the economy of New York. The event took place at the Waldorf Hotel in the winter of 1897. “Mrs. Martin received the salutations of more than 600 men and women, one and all members of the society worlds of New York and other large American cities, and all in their gorgeous robes and garbs personating those kings and queens, nobles, knights, and courtiers whose names and personalities take up the pages of history,” the society reporter for the New York Times recorded breathlessly. “The grand ballroom was quite a scene of splendor. The eye scarcely knew where to look or what to study, it was such a bewildering maze of gorgeous dames and gentlemen on the floor, such a flood of light from the ceiling, paneled in terra cotta and gold, and such an entrancing picture of garlands that hung everywhere in rich festoons.” The guests danced past midnight, then dined on filet de boeuf jardinière, terrapène désossée, poularde farcie aux truffes, and other French delicacies.
The Times had been covering such events since the Vanderbilt ball, and it placed the Martin affair in historical context. “As the society of the metropolis has grown larger, and wealth, luxury, and the knowledge of the art of living have increased, these successive costume balls have in every instance surpassed in elegance of dress and in lavishness and perfection of appointment their predecessors,” the paper declared. The event at the Waldorf “may truthfully be said to have been the climax in this form of entertainment thus far reached in the metropolis.”34