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I hate this video so much. The streets just weren't that clean. That's really bad. I hate that image. I'm the host of The Gilded Gentleman podcast. Let's fact-check some AI slop. Let's watch the first video. You think you'd survive the Gilded Age? Girl, let me show you something. In the Gilded Age, no one referred to each other as girl. I would have, but [clears throat] Gloves, a hat, and a vial of self-confidence. Retail therapy. Oh, you have no idea. This was the thing about buying coke at the department store. Like, what is this? This is like twisted. While certainly there were some questionable substances that were sold out there, I
have never seen any evidence of something like this actually being sold in a major department store. So, where you shopped in New York in the Gilded Age, well, that told you a lot about who you were, too. The stretch of Broadway from Union Square up to Madison Square was called Ladies' Mile. And that's where some of the most famous retailers that we've even come to know today were located. Near Union Square, you had Tiffany & Company. You also had Lord & Taylor and Brooks Brothers. Now, this was called the carriage trade, which means that it catered to ladies in carriages. You would arrive in your carriage, you would do your shopping, and then you would pile your packages into your carriage, and off they would
go back home. Two streets over, on 6th Avenue, that was for another class of clientele because that's where in the early 1870s they built the elevated rail trains. And some of the early, what we would call today, big-box retailers were these big cast-iron palaces. All the big windows, where all the wonderful offerings were merchandised, were up on the second level because that's where the level of the trains were. So, as you went by on the train, you could look out the window and find the next purchase that you wanted to buy. The idea of a department store was a brand new concept that you could buy so many things in one place. And what's even more interesting about that is women could go shopping by
themselves. And that gave women a sense of agency and power. They didn't need their husbands and they didn't need a chaperone. Darling, it's 12 pounds of silk, six cracked ribs, and not even a single pocket. Now, that's interesting. Here, she talks about how tight the corsets were. That's pretty true. The perfect shape for a woman was often this hourglass where you were singed in. But one of the things you have to remember is what those corsets were made of. Some of them were made of whalebone or other natural fibers that actually gave and allowed you to have a more comfortable fit.
My nanny feeds the baby beer and tells it to man up. I don't ask questions. In the Gilded Age, no one told anyone to man up. Yeah, they probably like rubbed their kids gums with whiskey. I think my mother did that. Memorized 14 forks and 37 rules. Still forgot how to chew in front of rich people. When you went to a dinner party in the Gilded Age, it was not about having a good time. If you were new in town and someone important invited you to a dinner, that was a test to see how you managed all the glasses, all the forks. And if you failed, you would not be admitted into society. Sometimes people got really stumped. One of my favorite stories is the finger bowl, the little
crystal bowls with a little bit of citrus where you would dab your fingers, clean your fingers between courses. Some people who didn't know what they were doing drank them. They failed. The doctor removed my appendix in a back room. He said I was too dramatic the whole time. The inference here that there was no anesthesia is not 100% correct. Things like chloroform were used. It would put you out, sometimes way out. I really hate this video. Next. We are in New York City, the explosive electric heart of the richest nation on Earth. America has just clawed its way out of the Civil War. In 1900, the Civil War had been over for 30 years. Here we have some clearly
computer-generated imagery that doesn't really begin to capture the spirit at all of the time. And transformed in a single generation into an industrial colossus. Railroads stitch the continent together. So here we see what's representing an oil refinery. And let's remember the great oil fortune, creator of Standard Oil, was Rockefeller. And a tiny handful of men, the so-called robber barons, have seized control of it all, amassing the largest private fortunes in human history. One of the things that I'd really question here is this gentleman, handsome though he is, looks very, very modern. If you look back at the images of many of the robber barons and the late Gilded Age tycoons, they all had facial hair, mutton chops, long beards.
And here we have a very modern look. You wake in your mansion on Fifth Avenue, on the stretch they call Millionaires' Row. Fifth Avenue, certainly in the area around St. Patrick's Cathedral going up to Central Park, was the home to many, many, many famous Gilded Age families. I'm not even sure that's New York, but anyway, never mind. It is not a house. It is a French chateau, or an Italian palazzo, or a Loire Valley castle.
Oh, that's really bad. So here we have an example of a supposed Fifth Avenue mansion. Well, it's reflecting the French style, all right, but completely wrong. This is actually representing the great French chateau of Chambord in the Loire Valley. No mansion on Fifth Avenue ever looked like this. That's really bad. I hate that image. Ripped from Europe stone by stone and reassembled in Manhattan by the most fashionable architects in America. I think it's a misrepresentation to imply that mansions were torn down in Europe and then reassembled over here. This was new architecture. Certain interior details such as fireplaces and staircases were brought from crumbling European chateaus and palaces and
castles, but all those American palaces were constructed brand new here. The walls are hung with genuine old master paintings snapped up by the crate from cash-poor European aristocrats. What they're showing here is one of the great Gilded Age barons buying art and collecting art. That's very true. People like J.P. Morgan, Jay Gould, Mrs. Astor, Henry Clay Frick. All of them assembled extraordinary collections. When you were building your collection, it was also important to rely on an art consultant, someone that you knew you could trust in buying up old master art from Europe.
People like Bernard Berenson, people like Joseph Duveen, who advised Henry Clay Frick, and even Belle da Costa Greene, the famous librarian of the Morgan Library. She assisted J.P. Morgan in creating and collecting some of the most priceless manuscripts in the world. You have telephones, central heating, an elevator, and marble bathrooms with hot and cold running water, while the families in the tenements downtown share a single cold tap among dozens. That's true. That's very true. Butlers, footmen in powdered wigs and silk stockings, ladies-maids, valets, and a French chef lured from a European court. For a lady of the Gilded Age elite, hiring a French chef for the kitchen was also a sign of status. This was a great
gig. If you were a chef in Paris, you could get snapped up and arrive in New York and have a whole new career. In fact, it's said that Caroline Astor did exactly that. She enjoyed a meal at a French restaurant and snapped up the chef. The old families, the original Dutch and English New York aristocracy, guard the gates ferociously and they look upon the new industrial fortunes with open contempt. I'm so surprised to see a grand dame sitting in a leather chair. A leather chair would have been found in the library or in the smoking rooms and usually occupied by one of the gentlemen of the family. A lady would be sitting
in perhaps a Venetian or French tapestry chair, not a leather one. That just seems wrong to me. One legendary heiress, frozen out by the old guard, built a fairy tale chateau on 5th Avenue. So, the house that they're talking about right here was Alva Vanderbilt's petit chateau, the little chateau, which was built in 1882 and it was actually designed by one of the great architects of the Gilded Age before Stanford White, Richard Morris Hunt. Alva loved everything French. After all, she was educated in Paris and she wanted to copy her house after the chateaus of the Loire, but not the enormous ones, the smaller, more intimate chateaus.
Intimate, of course, is a very relative term in the Gilded Age. And threw a costume ball so spectacular and so expensive that the old families simply could not bear to be excluded from it. Now, it's a doubtful that Alva's ballroom looked anything like that. And in fact, there are some photographs of the interior of her house, which you can find. But what's interesting here is we have almost a baronial feeling here. Maybe a little bit of a medieval hall. One of the traits of these Gilded Age mansions often was to have rooms in different styles that didn't match.
You'd have a Tudor room, an Elizabethan room, a Louis the XV room, and all of it was meant to reflect a long European heritage. One of my favorite images in that shot is the champagne fountain. One mansion, and that was the mansion of Leonard Jerome, had two. One poured champagne, and one poured cologne. They did weird crap. Next video. There were 400 people in America who mattered. Caroline Astor decided who they were. Oh my gosh. Her name was not Caroline, it was Caroline. She was born Caroline Webster Schermerhorn. The Schermerhorns were a wealthy Dutch-American trading family.
Her family made their money in importing and selling goods here in New York. In fact, the Schermerhorn building is still there down by the Seaport in Lower Manhattan. One woman in a Fifth Avenue mansion with a ballroom that held exactly 400 guests. Yes, Caroline Astor and her sidekick Ward McAllister decided who they thought were part of proper New York society. And you can see that depicted in the HBO series The Gilded Age fairly accurately. The number 400 actually came from a comment of Ward McAllister's that he thought that they were just about 400 people in good society. He also said that it was about the number that would
fit into Mrs. Astor's ballroom. Whether it was really 400 or not, we'll never know. Mrs. Astor's annual ball was the most powerful event in American social life. Every year in January, Caroline Astor would hold what she called her annual opera ball. Why was it called an opera ball? Because it began with a performance at the opera. So, imagine going to the opera, sitting through several hours, getting in your carriage, and going to Mrs. Astor's where you knew you would be up all night long eating and dancing. Let's move on. Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883.
People were terrified it might collapse. The Brooklyn Bridge and its opening in 1883 was called one of the wonders of the world. To create a suspension bridge this large and this complex was something no one had ever seen. Brooklyn was its own separate city and remained so until the end of the 19th century when all the boroughs consolidated. So, until the Brooklyn Bridge was born, how did you get from Manhattan over to Brooklyn? Well, the Fulton Ferry was your answer and this particular path between Manhattan and Brooklyn is what eventually became the same path that was replicated by the Brooklyn Bridge.
Just a year later, a deadly stampede killed 12 people when a rumor spread that the bridge was falling. To prove its strength once and for all, P.T. Barnum stepped in with a wild idea. Elephants. Oh my gosh, P.T. Barnum. P.T. Barnum was one of the great marketers of the 19th century. He could sell anybody anything. He had a museum downtown, but he was also looking for the biggest publicity moments that he could find that helped him and helped his museum.
Barnum marched 21 elephants, including the legendary Jumbo, across the Brooklyn Bridge. The public's fear disappeared. Replaced by awe. And the Brooklyn Bridge, even today, inspires awe. The same bridge exists and it's still carrying traffic all these years since 1883. One of my favorite stories about the Brooklyn Bridge isn't really about the bridge at all, but it's about the people that created it. Washington Roebling, who was in charge of building the bridge, actually developed the bends in the process of the bridge being built and he was incapacitated at home and it was his wife, Emily, that was instrumental in finishing the bridge. Washington gave
her instructions, taught her, educated her about the process and she interacted with designers, with the actual construction crew and it was through her efforts that the bridge finally was built. She became the first person to cross that bridge in a carriage once it finally opened to the public. Next. September 4th, 1882, Edison flipped the switch at the Pearl Street Station in Lower Manhattan. The massive dynamos roared to life. One of my favorite phrases is the Great White Way of Broadway. Well, the origin of that is because of the white light bulbs that were now lining the street, the Great White Way. Not much else here.
Next. The Newport Cliff Walk wasn't exercise, it was theater. Every afternoon, the women of the 400 appeared on that path in full dress. Now we find ourselves in Newport and if there was ever a place to see and be seen, Newport, Rhode Island was it. Here we find ourselves on the Cliff Walk, which is the windy path that goes behind all of the mansions overlooking the ocean. First of all, this was not a place to see and be seen. That would have been done on Bellevue Avenue or Ocean Avenue in front of the mansions and every afternoon, around 3:00 or 4:00, you would have climbed into your
carriage and that was the great parade up and down. And that's where you would have shown off your best. And also, when we look at the gowns and the dress These are ballgowns. They're incredibly elegant, but they weren't day dresses. This is not what a woman of this social class and style would have worn in the afternoon. That would have been worn at night. No Gilded Age woman that would have been living at Newport would have had these trains that would drag in the dirt like that and would have gotten really filthy by the time you'd only walked a couple of feet. A day dress would have been certainly elegant, but of course, the hem would have come up a little bit, so it would have cleared the
dirt and the rocks on that path. Who walked beside you mattered, who nodded, who looked away. All the women understood this. Cliff Walk was also a public space. Virtually anybody could walk along here. The elite were not going to mix with just anyone. Next. They called it a cottage. 70 rooms, 44,000 square feet. A limestone palace on the cliffs of Newport, Rhode Island. When you go to Newport today, many of these houses Excuse me, many of these cottages that were built during the
Gilded Age are still there that you can visit. What's interesting is that at this point, they were copying European style. The Breakers is entirely Italian Renaissance. Other properties look more like they've been transported from the French chateaus in the Loire Valley. One of the most famous, Marble House, was built by Alva Vanderbilt and designed like one of the Petit Trianon at Versailles. The Breakers was not a home. It was a decoration, a statement written in Italian Renaissance marble and gilded ceilings. So many of these families wanted to copy and mirror European royalty and aristocracy. The Vanderbilts imagined
themselves as the Italian Renaissance Medici family. Who were the Medicis? They were the merchant princes. They made a great deal of money in banking and in trade. The Vanderbilts actually thought they were a modern-day Medici family. In fact, if you visit one of their mansions in Hyde Park, New York, you see the Medici coat of arms in their own drawing room. Not everyone agreed, however. The great writer Edith Wharton thought this was vulgar and garish taste. And in fact, she wrote in a letter that the Vanderbilts seemed entrenched in a Thermopylae of bad taste from which no force on Earth can extract them.
Every room was designed to be seen, not lived in. The great hall alone rose 50 ft. When you look at a Gilded Age mansion, certainly like those of Newport or elsewhere, you have to look at it with very specific eyes. We think of a place to live where we would like to spend our time. They thought of it very differently. The actual living quarters were often fairly small, and they were on upper floors. What we see on the ground floor or the first floors are really stage sets. They're very calculated spaces intended to convey certain messages about wealth, status, and power. Vanderbilts used it for 6 weeks a year. Then they closed it and left. So, when you look at these grand houses, they actually were not intended to live
in all year long. In fact, many wealthy Gilded Age families had rather a nomadic lifestyle. The fall into the winter was spent here in New York in your townhouse. The spring was spent traveling in Europe, usually in Paris to buy new dresses from Worth. And then by late spring you move to Newport and you were there for the entire summer season until early fall comes back and you're back in town. Next. [snorts] Breakfast in the Gilded Age. That would have been a simple breakfast in bed of maybe some toast, some eggs. That croissant?
I don't think so. Have you ever tried to eat a croissant in bed? You know what I mean. I would think that someone like this of the stature in this period would be living along Central Park and this looks like we're in the middle of town. Good morning, sir. Ah, it's those croissants again. Everyone was trying to emulate France and French and things that were elegant, but you tended to save that for a dinner party when you were entertaining 400 of your closest friends. Have a pleasant morning, sir. So, this looks like it's trying to be 5th Avenue, but if that's St. Patrick's, it's on the wrong angle because that's on a cross street and St. Patrick's would have been parallel to 5th Avenue.
And also, let's take a closer look at the conditions of the streets. You have to remember that horses were the main mode of transportation. There were often other animals that were running wild in the streets, too, and they just weren't that clean. Softly, may I present our newest acquisition. The company that we know as Tiffany and Company was founded by Charles Lewis Tiffany way downtown. It evolved, it focused on silver and also fine jewelry, diamonds, emeralds, rubies. But in the Gilded Age, at the end of it in 1902, Charles Lewis Tiffany dies and his son, Louis Comfort Tiffany, who's far more famous for his stained glass work, takes over as design and art director and he changes the focus of Tiffany a little bit. In 1905,
that would probably be not the moment when someone was looking for this kind of necklace. Let's take a closer look at this shot of Central Park. A lot of the buildings surrounding Central Park, particularly on that side, which it looks to be the west side, would have been residential buildings, but they wouldn't have been this tall by the date of this supposed shot here, which is 1905. Two of the most famous, the San Remo and the Beresford, they're still there to this day. And that looks like what they're trying to emulate here. Those were built a little bit later than what we have here. For monsieur.
Ah, the lobster. I'm a boy from Maine. How can I not love a shot of a lobster? But here we are in a fine dining restaurant. Lobster could have been served, certainly it was served at Delmonico's, but not an entire lobster that you would have to really get messy and pull it apart with the picks and the knives. Certainly not when you're wearing your best clothes. So what would have been on this table was likely a dish that was popularized by Delmonico's called lobster Newberg, which is the claw and the tail meat served in a beautiful sauce of sherry and cream and butter. Not a whole entire boiled lobster. You certainly would have had the oysters. New Yorkers have been slurping those, whether you're fancy or
not, for decades. Now this is a very grand opera house. We wouldn't have had the same kind of opera house here in New York. This looks like it's very much modeled on a European theater. The Metropolitan Opera House, when it was built in 1883, actually had a very small vestibule. You wouldn't have seen this at all. But then, if we move forward to look at the interior of the theater, the most important thing here are the boxes, and you see them ringed around. These were the most expensive, one of the signs of status in Gilded Age society was whether you owned a box at the opera. The original opera house before the Metropolitan Opera was the Academy of Music on 14th Street and Irving Place. Well, that theater only
had 18 boxes and they were all subscribed to the older families. When Alva Vanderbilt came along, she wanted a box at the opera, too, but there were none to be had. She said, "I'll pay $30,000, which was an awful lot of money at the time, for my own box." That even didn't work. So, she spoke to her husband and the Vanderbilts and the Morgans and some others got their money together and built a brand new opera house way uptown on 39th Street and Broadway with many more boxes. Alva finally got her own box at the opera. Next. So, here we see another side of life in the Gilded Age. This is the tenement life of the Lower East Side. Life overflowed onto stairways and hallways and rooms full of people. These were not
particularly large buildings, but they were crammed with multiple families. You hear me over there, Tony? You still owe me for the bread. So, the back of these tenement buildings were often common areas that were bordered by other buildings. This was a place where so many different populations of the immigrants came together throughout the 19th century. There were waves of immigration beginning with the Irish in the 1840s and then Germans followed by the Italians and then at the end of the century, many of the Eastern Europeans and Russians all coming together. So, in the backyard of a tenement building, you'd hear different languages, you'd hear different accents, you'd hear different levels of English all combining to become a new America. Oh,
let's watch another video. Welcome to New York City in the year 1880. We will start at Castle Garden. Long before Ellis Island ever existed, Castle Garden was the point of immigration through a substantial part of the 19th century until the later part of the 19th century, everything transferred to Ellis Island. Castle Garden continued on and became a theater, an aquarium, a venue for public performances, but the foundations are still there. The twin spires of the new St. Patrick's Cathedral have just been completed, but look around us. The city is still becoming.
One of the points that I think is so important to make when we try to imagine what life was like in Gilded Age New York. For a lot of it, it was essentially a construction zone. These buildings didn't all exist at one time in beautiful blocks with beautiful avenues. It all had to be built and the city moved south and moved north. When you look at images with muddy, dirty pits right next to a beautiful mansion, that's pretty close to the way it really was. Okay, next video. New York in the 1890s was becoming the city we recognize today. We've used AI reconstruction to bring these historical photographs to life.
I particularly like this image. Let's take a closer look at it. Here you have the beautiful Grand Hotel, but right next door you have an older, dilapidated building, part of the older city, which eventually of course is going to be torn down. We think of Park Avenue as a very elegant address today and it was becoming so in the Gilded Age, but we have to remember that there were originally train tracks there that were leading from Grand Central Station out of the city. Eventually, they were covered over and beautiful hotels and residences began to be constructed, but what you have is brand new construction with bits of the old city interspersed throughout. That's what the Gilded Age really looked like. In 1898, the elevated train tracks curved
overhead. I particularly like videos that are created this way using AI, which means to start with a real photograph of the period, and then using the computer to animate them so we get a sense of the look and the feel and the movement and all the smells of the original city. Next, Every afternoon, the wealthiest women in the city circled Central Park's carriage loop. And this is true. Every afternoon, around 4:00, the wealthy would get in their carriages and they would go for a drive in Central Park. One of the carriage turnarounds is still there in the park today. And that great mall with the great trees, that was where these families went in their carriages and you watched who is going by and perhaps
whose daughter your son could marry. Since we're in Central Park, let's take another look at those skyscrapers that we see in the background. Very modern skyscrapers and the height of them, that's what you would actually see today. And certainly not the skyline of the period they're trying to recreate here. Skyscrapers were actually able to be created thanks to improvements in structural steel and also elevators that allowed you to move up to further heights in the buildings. One of the most famous was in 1902 when the Flatiron Building rose at Madison Square Park. But as the city moved north, buildings of great height moved right along with them. But these, not right now. Who you rode with,
who you nodded to, who you looked past without blinking, it was all reported in the society pages by the next morning. The newspaper and the media was working overtime during the Gilded Age. Who threw what ball, what they wore, and who exactly was there. And Caroline Astor's name appeared pretty frequently in the press. Next video. When Astor died in 1908, the system didn't collapse. It shifted. One of the most important things when you were of society in the Gilded Age was to have your portrait painted. And Caroline Astor did exactly that. She didn't choose John Singer Sargent, she chose another painter, the famous French
Carolus Duran, and she went to Paris to have her portrait painted. This is a very similar image to the original portrait, which you can see today at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Alva Belmont, Mamie Fish, Theresa Ulricks. Three women, one throne, same machinery. So, Caroline Astor dies in 1908. Does Gilded Age society collapse? It doesn't. It continues on. There were other women that had worked along Caroline Astor, but actually took over her role in the end. One of my favorites was the great Mamie Fish, who came from a very good old New York family, plenty of money.
She's played brilliantly by the actor Ashley Atkinson in the HBO series. All these women started to break the rules. You could go to restaurants. You didn't have to wear a hat. You could expose your neck and shoulders at dinner. All of these things showed a path for a new society and a new woman. Well, that's all the AI slop for today. Thanks for watching.
