When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age by Justin Kaplan

Author:Justin Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 19th century, Rich & Famous, Biography & Autobiography, Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA), History, United States, State & Local
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2006-06-01T05:03:03+00:00

SIX

After the Ball Was Over

i.

DURING THE WINTER OF 1896–1897 the United States was mired in a period of economic distress and widespread unemployment that had begun with a Wall Street panic in 1893. Financiers, businessmen, and members of the clergy denounced a growing socialist, trade union, and protest movement as a threat to order, decency, and what remained of national prosperity. At a cost of much violence and bloodshed, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to put down a strike at the Pullman Sleeping Car Company that had halted rail traffic in the Midwest and elsewhere. Meanwhile homeless men lined up at soup kitchens in the streets of New York and Chicago. In January 1897 a socially prominent couple, Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Martin, sent out about a thousand invitations to a private costume ball at the Waldorf. The party was to cost its sponsors and guests an estimated total of $500,000, roughly equivalent to $7 million in current purchasing power.

Mrs. Martin, the former Cornelia Sherman, was the only child of Isaac Sherman and his wife. Enjoying comfortable retirement from the leather and fancy wood business, Sherman was generally thought to be worth a respectable $200,000. Cornelia and her husband, Bradley, who came from a rich upstate manufacturing family and had plenty of money of his own, lived with her parents in their house at 20 West Twentieth Street. Relatively inconspicuous young members of New York society, homebound in their tastes and habits, the young Martins raised four children and were not known for giving parties or fancy entertainments.

When Isaac Sherman died in 1881 probate revealed to everyone’s surprise that he had been a very rich man. To his widow he left a comfortable annuity, but to Cornelia he left about $7 million, an amount not in the Astor and Vanderbilt league but sufficient, especially when supplemented by Cornelia’s husband’s fortune, to allow her to have nearly everything she wanted. In time this included ownership of Marie Antoinette’s crown jewels, occupancy of a hunting, shooting, and fishing estate at Balmacaan on Loch Ness, and a reputation for giving spectacular parties. Sudden wealth had the effect on Cornelia of a burr under her saddlecloth. Soon after Isaac’s funeral at All Souls’ Unitarian Church and an obligatory month of mourning she whipped herself up from a demure walk around the New York social track to a full gallop.

She and Bradley bought the house next door to her parents’, took a long European trip, and during their absence abroad had the walls between the houses knocked down and the two converted into a mansion suitable for grand entertainments. They staffed it with an English butler, several liveried footmen, and a corps of other household servants. Cornelia’s regular presence at fashionable events began to be noted in the press. Gorgeously got up as Mary Stuart (and wearing Mary Stuart’s diamond tiara), despite her dumpiness, Cornelia was one of the more admired guests at Alva Vanderbilt’s fancy-dress ball in the winter of 1883.

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