Gilded New York

Gilded New York • © Julie Saad Photography; courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York

If you are museum-hopping this holiday season, be sure to check out the new show at the Museum of the City of New York, "Gilded New York." This compact exhibition focuses on the fashion, grand balls, and over-the-top architecture of the period after the Civil War when wealthy New Yorkers were become richer than ever before.

As it is the inaugural exhibition in the new Tiffany & Co. Foundation Gallery, the jewelry is the star of the show:

Marcus & Co., Necklace, 1900 • Gold, natural pearls, demantoid garnet, enamel • Courtesy of Siegelson, New York

Tiffany & Co., Pendant brooch, ca. 1900 • Platinum, diamond, sapphire • Museum of the City of New York, Bequest of Mrs. V. S. Young, 82.163.1

(For more images, see http://www.mcny.org/content/gilded-new-york).

Also worth exploring are the video monitors outside the gallery, which cycle through images of Gilded-Age parties (some of the clothes and accessories from which are on display), along with an excellent slideshow of the extravagant Fifth Avenue mansions that, in many cases, lasted just one generation.

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Four chapters in our new book Footprints in New York cover the Gilded Age, from Mrs. Astor's grand balls to J. Pierpont Morgan's contributions to the city. The book is out April 15, 2014, but you can pre-order today.

And, of course, Inside the Apple has some wonderful insights on the period as well. With priority shipping from Amazon, you can still get it there in time for Christmas!

The Greatest Grid

We were recently sent a copy of The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011, the companion book to the exhibit of the same name at the Museum of the City of New York.

The book is richly illustrated with images from the show, including a fold-out copy of the original Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which gridded Manhattan into streets and avenues up to 155th Street. Like the exhibition, the book tells the story of New York’s development from the era before the grid, through the city’s explosive growth in the mid-19th century and the development of the Upper East and Upper West Sides, and on to today. The material is at its strongest in the era between 1811 and 1900. The Greatest Grid features many detail maps, including some of the Randel Farm Maps, which remain among the most valuable insights into early 19th-century New York. Created by John Randel, the key surveyor of the Commissioners’ Plan, the farm maps show property lines, topographical features, and other key details at a scale of 100 feet to the inch. Noted Manhattan chronicler I.N. Phelps Stokes called them "the most complete and valuable topographical record of the period that exists."

Also revealing are photographs from later in the century that show just how long it took the city to expand into the grid that Randel had laid out. The photo above is the view looking north from the Dakota apartments, ca. 1890. The only major structure visible is the American Museum of Natural History, which had opened a few years earlier.

The Greatest Grid, skillfully edited by NYU Urban Studies professor Hilary Ballon, is packed with nuggets of information—what spurred the development of a grid plan; why Broadway works against the grid; how the area north of 155th Street faced unique topographical information. Some things are given short shrift—we would have liked more information on the Flatiron Building, for instance, or the development of Times Square—but these are minor quibbles. This is a title well worth owning for anyone who appreciates Manhattan’s past and wants to explore it in greater depth.

(And to plug our own book for a minute—it really does make an excellent companion to Inside the Apple, amplifying and illustrating many of the points we make.)

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