Home Sweet Mansion: A Peek into the Domestic Lives of Gilded Age New Yorkers Tuesday, March 5th 6:30-7:45pm 35 W. 67th Street 2-for-1 Tickets for Partner-level Members! It was good to be a prosperous New Yorker in the late 19th century: beautiful clothing, expensive furnishings, well-kept parlors, and tables laden with food. But someone had to do […]
Tuesday, March 5th 6:30-7:45pm 35 W. 67th Street SOLD OUT It was good to be a prosperous New Yorker in the late 19th century: beautiful clothing, expensive furnishings, well-kept parlors, and tables laden with food. But someone had to do the hard work of actually cooking and cleaning, and it certainly wasn’t the prosperous New Yorker. Esther […]
Historian Daniel Czitrom isn’t particularly shocked by today’s headlines. Vote suppression, police violence, the influence of partisan politics on municipal services: the author of New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal That Launched the Progressive Movement found them all in 1890’s New York City. Prof. Czitrom brings us directly into the fascinating world he found while […]
Everyone starts somewhere-even lauded Starchitects like the trio of McKim, Mead & White. Individually, they were rather undistinguished as young men. How did they ever become the gold standard of American architecture? Architectural historian Prof. Mosette Broderick takes us behind the drafting table for this onetime, special program on the early years of the individuals who became […]
Learn the story of “The Father of the West Side” as only Tom Miller (internationally known for his "Daytonian in Manhattan" blog of fascinating social and architectural histories of NYC) can tell it. Miller rewinds the clock to 1880s Manhattan, when Clark pushed for the creation of Riverside Drive and staunchly protected the Hudson River waterfront for the public. He organized the community for action and lobbied for critical infrastructure and improvements for the UWS. There will be history and politics and tales of UWS shenanigans. Of course there will be fabulous architecture. But most important, there will be an incredible person, the city he envisioned and the very special neighborhood we know today. TICKETS
It was good to be a prosperous New Yorker in the late 19th century: beautiful clothing, expensive furnishings, well-kept parlors, and endless entertaining. But someone had to do the hard work of actually cooking and cleaning, and it certainly wasn’t the prosperous New Yorker. At the Schwab Mansion, for instance, a 75-room home on Riverside […]
Celebrity obsession, con artists, and fake news. Long before Lin-Manuel, the 1890s public already had an insatiable appetite for all things Hamilton. By the era of Alexander Hamilton’s great-grandson, esteemed politician Robert Ray Hamilton, the name still signified political and financial power, privilege, money, and status. That is, until this privileged heir of one of […]
In 1868, a spirit’s guiding hand led two sisters to New York City, to a home on beautiful Washington Square--an address reserved for the elite of the Gilded Age. Behind its doors lived the richest man in America, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt sized up the ladies, Victoria Woodhull and Tennie Claflin, as sophisticated and savvy and, […]
New York’s Fifth Avenue is one of the most remarkable thoroughfares in the world. By the end of the 19th century it had become synonymous with the most fashionable lifestyles and mansions (and all that accompanied them) of the wealthy. Aggressive arrivistes such as Alva Vanderbilt and Marietta Stevens used their "new money" to employ […]