The streets just weren't that clean.
That's really bad. I hate that image.
I'm the host of The Gilded Gentleman podcast.
You think you'd survive the Gilded Age?
I would have, but it's... [Carl sighing]
Gloves, a hat and a vial of self-confidence.
Retail therapy. Oh, you have no idea.
This was the thing about buying coke
Like, what is this? This is like twisted.
Well, certainly there were some questionable substances
of something like this actually being sold
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 do your shopping, [pen scratching]
and then you would pile your packages into your carriage
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.
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.
Darling, it's 12 pounds of silk, six cracked ribs
She talks about how tight the corsets were.
The perfect shape for a woman was often this hourglass
But one of the things you have to remember
is what those corsets were made of.
Some of them were made of whale bone
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.
In the Gilded Age, no one told anyone to man up.
rubbed their kids' gums with whiskey.
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.
and someone important invited you to a dinner,
that was a test to see how you managed all the glasses,
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
clean your fingers between courses.
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
It would put you out, sometimes way out.
[Narrator] We are in New York City,
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
to capture the spirit at all of the time.
[Instructor] And transformed in a single generation
Railroads stitched 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.
[Narrator] 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,
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, [pen scratching]
and here we have a very modern look.
[Narrator] You wake in your mansion on Fifth Avenue
on the stretch they call Millionaire's 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, nevermind.
or an Italian palazzo or a Loire Valley castle.
of a supposed Fifth Avenue mansion.
Well, it's reflecting the French style all right,
This is actually representing the great French Chateau
No mansion on Fifth Avenue ever looked like this.
That's really bad. I hate that image.
[Narrator] Ripped from Europe stone by stone
by the most fashionable architects in America.
I think it's a misrepresentation to imply
that mansions were torn down in Europe
were brought from crumbling European chateaus
snapped up by the crate from cash-poor European aristocrats.
of the great Gilded Age barons buying art
People like J.P. Morgan, Jay Gould,
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
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.
[Narrator] You have telephones, central heating,
while the families in the tenements downtown
share a single cold tap among dozens.
[Narrator] 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.
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 said that Caroline Astor did exactly that.
She enjoyed a meal at a French restaurant
[Narrator] The old families, the original Dutch
and they look upon the new industrial fortunes
I'm so surprised to see a Grande Dame
A leather chair would have been found in the library
and usually occupied by one of the gentlemen of the family.
A lady would be sitting in perhaps a Venetian
[pen scratching] not a leather one.
built a fairytale chateau on Fifth Avenue.
So the house that they're talking about right here
was Alva Vanderbilt's Petit Chateau, the Little Chateau,
and it was actually designed by one of the great architects
of the Gilded Age before Stanford White,
After all, she was educated in Paris
the smaller, more intimate chateaus.
Intimate, of course, is a very relative term
[Narrator] And threw a costume ball so spectacular
and so expensive that the old families simply could not bear
that Alva's ballroom looked anything like that.
And in fact, there are some photographs of the interior
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 XV room, and all of it was meant
to reflect a long European heritage.
in that shot is the champagne fountain.
One mansion, and that was the mansion
One poured champagne and one poured cologne.
[Narrator] There were 400 people in America who mattered.
Carolyn Astor decided who they were.
Oh my gosh. Her name was not Carolyn, it was Caroline.
She was born Caroline Webster Schermerhorn.
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.
[Narrator] One woman in a Fifth Avenue mansion
with a ballroom that held exactly 400 guests.
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 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.
[Narrator] 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.
Because it began with a performance at 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.
[Narrator] 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.
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.
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.
P.T. Barnum was one of the great marketers
but he was also looking for the biggest publicity moments
that he could find that helped him and helped his museum.
[Narrator] 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.
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 is in charge
actually developed the bends in the process
of the bridge being built, and he was incapacitated at home,
that was instrumental in finishing the bridge.
Washington gave her instructions, taught her,
She became the first person to cross that bridge
in a carriage once it finally opened to the public.
at the Pearl Street Station in Lower Manhattan.
The massive dynamos roared to light.
is the Great White Way of Broadway.
is because of the white light bulbs
that were now lining the street, the Great White Way.
Not much else here. Next. [tranquil music]
[Narrator] The Newport Cliff Walk wasn't exercise,
Every afternoon, the women of the 400 appeared
and if there was ever a place to see and be seen,
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've been done on Bellevue Avenue
or Ocean Avenue in front of the mansions,
and every afternoon, around 3 or 4 o'clock,
you would've climbed into your carriage,
and that was the great parade up and down,
and that's where you would've shown off your best.
And also, when we look at the gowns
and the dress, these are ball gowns.
They're incredibly elegant, but they weren't day dresses.
This is not what a woman of this social class
and style would've worn in the afternoon.
that would've been living in Newport
would've had these trains [pen scratching]
that would drag in the dirt like that
by the time you'd only walked a couple of feet.
A day dress would've been certainly elegant,
but of course the hem would've come up a little bit
so it would've cleared the dirt and the rocks on that path.
[Narrator] Who walked beside you mattered,
Cliff walk was also a public space.
Virtually anybody could walk along here.
The elite were not gonna mix with just anyone.
[Narrator] They called it a cottage,
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,
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
and designed like one of the Petit Trianon at Versailles.
[Narrator] The Breakers was not a home,
a statement written in Italian Renaissance marble
So many of these families wanted to copy
and mirror European royalty and aristocracy.
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.
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
thought this was vulgar and garish taste.
that the Vanderbilts seemed entrenched in a Thermopylae
of bad taste from which no force on Earth can extract them.
[Narrator] Every room was designed to be seen,
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.
where we would like to spend our time.
They thought of it very differently.
The actual living quarters were often fairly small
or the first floors are really stage sets.
They're very calculated spaces intended
to convey certain messages about wealth, status, and power.
[Narrator] Vanderbilts used it for six weeks a year,
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
The fall into the winter was spent here in New York
The spring was spent traveling in Europe,
usually in Paris to buy new dresses from Worth.
And then by late spring, you moved to Newport
and you were there for the entire summer season
until early fall comes back and you're back in town.
That would've been a simple breakfast in bed
Have you ever tried to eat a croissant in bed?
I would think that someone like this,
would be living along Central Park,
and this looks like we're in the middle of town.
Everyone was trying to emulate France and French
but you tended to save that for a dinner party
when you were entertaining 400 of your closest friends.
So this looks like it's trying to be Fifth Avenue,
but if that's St. Patrick's, it's on the wrong angle
and St. Patrick's would've been parallel to Fifth Avenue.
were the main mode of transportation.
that were running wild in the streets too,
[Narrator] Softly, may I present our newest acquisition?
The company that we know as Tiffany & Company
was founded by Charles Lewis Tiffany way downtown.
and also fine jewelry, diamonds, emeralds, rubies.
But in the Gilded Age, at the end of it in 1902,
and his son, Louis Comfort Tiffany,
who's far more famous for his stained glasswork,
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,
which it looks to be the West Side,
would've 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,
and that looks like what they're trying to emulate here.
Those were built a little bit later than what we have here.
How can I not love a shot of a lobster?
But here we are in a fine dining restaurant.
Certainly it was served at Delmonico's,
but not an entire lobster [pen scratching]
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 Newburg,
which is the claw and the tail meat served
in a beautiful sauce of sherry and cream and butter,
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.
This looks like it's very much modeled
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
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.
She said, I'll pay $30,000, which was an awful lot
of money at the time, for my own box.
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
Alva finally got her own box at the opera.
Next. [people talking indistinctly]
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
These were not particularly large buildings,
but they were crammed with multiple families.
[Tenant] Can you hear me over there, Tony?
So the back of these tenement buildings
that were bordered by other buildings.
This was a place where so many different populations
of the immigrants came together throughout the 19th century.
beginning with the Irish in the 1840s,
then the Germans, followed by the Italians,
and then at the end of the century,
So in the backyard of a tenement building,
you'd hear different levels of English,
all combining to become a new America.
[Narrator] Welcome to New York City in the year 1880.
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.
but the foundations are still there.
have just been completed, but look around us,
One of the points that I think is so important
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
When you look at images with muddy, dirty pits
that's pretty close to the way it really was.
was becoming the city we recognize today.
to bring these historical photographs to life.
Here you have the beautiful Grand Hotel,
you have an older, dilapidated building,
part of the older city, which eventually, of course,
We think of Park Avenue as a very elegant address today,
and it was becoming so in the Gilded Age,
that there were originally train tracks there
that were leading from Grand Central Station
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.
the elevated train tracks curve overhead.
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.
[Narrator] Every afternoon, the wealthiest women
in the city circled Central Park's carriage loop.
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
and that great mall with the great trees,
that was where these families went in their carriages
and perhaps whose daughter your son could marry.
let's take another look at those skyscrapers
Very modern skyscrapers, and the height of them,
that's what you would actually see today,
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.
when the Flatiron Building rose at Madison Square Park,
buildings of great height moved right along with them,
[Narrator] Who you rode with, who you nodded to,
who you looked past without blinking,
it was all reported in the society pages
The newspaper and the media was working overtime
who threw what ball, what they wore,
and Caroline Astor's name appeared pretty frequently
[Narrator] When Astor died in 1908,
the system didn't collapse, it shifted.
when you were of society in the Gilded Age
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,
at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
[Narrator] Alva Belmont, Mamie Fish,
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,
She's played brilliantly by the actor Ashlie Atkinson
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.
Well, that's all the AI slop for today. Thanks for watching.
