The Richest Woman in America (5 page)

R
ich, hemmed thick all around with sail ships and steamships … crowded streets, high growths of iron … the houses of business of the ship-merchants and the money-brokers … the carts hauling goods, the manly race of drivers of horses.… City of hurried and sparkling waters! City of spires and masts! City nested in bays! My city!”

Hetty awoke in the morning to
Walt Whitman’s beloved city, “Mannahatta”: a hustling, bustling whirlwind of carts, wagons, hansom cabs, hackney coaches, and horse-drawn omnibuses clattering and clopping on the cobblestones, a cacophony of sounds ricocheting against the iron and stone buildings crammed together on the lower Manhattan streets. Hammers rang against stones as workers constructed new buildings, and all around, old structures moaned under crumbling blows.

New York was celebrating a financial boom. New institutions were opening on every corner, filling the canyons of Wall Street with retail banks, commercial banks, insurance companies, and brokerage firms. Investors in mining, real estate, and transportation were flush with funds. Eager to spend their new wealth, they were tearing down old buildings as fast as they could and putting up new ones so frequently that
Harper’s Magazine
complained the city was unrecognizable for anyone born forty years before. Walt Whitman called it a “rabid, feverish itching for change.”

Newly rich couples filled extravagant mansions with fabulous furnishings
and installed bathrooms with hot and cold running water on every floor. Those who earned $10,000 a year and wanted a place in society were expected to have a big new house, a country place, a carriage, and a box at the opera, and, of course, to play host to lavish parties and balls.

Welcomed at the boat pier on the Hudson River, Hetty settled herself and her bags in the carriage and rode across town.
The city founders had “the novel plan of numbering the streets,” noted Isabella Bird, an English traveler visiting at the time. The carriage rolled along the cobblestones, past the posh new Brevoort Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street to the older part of town where the streets had names: past the well-paved avenue of Broadway, burgeoning with shops and theaters; past the stately Greek Revival houses of Colonnade Row that were home to Vanderbilts, Astors, and Delanos; past the Society Library on Astor Place where members like Herman Melville borrowed books; past the new Astor Library, free to the public, on Lafayette Place; and on to the Grinnells’ Greek Revival townhouse at the corner of Bond Street and Lafayette.

The city’s swells might be marching uptown to newer neighborhoods, but successful merchants like the Van Cortlandts, the Tredwells (proud descendants of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens), and the Henry Grinnells (his brother Moses had moved uptown) still maintained their homes downtown, just a few blocks away from Grace Church, where the upper crust still worshipped.

No one challenged the status of Henry Grinnell and his wife, Sarah Minturn Grinnell. Henry and his two brothers had left behind their Quaker restrictions and made their mark on the world. Joseph, the oldest, had prospered in New York in merchant shipping before he served in Congress and started Wamsutta Mills.

Their younger brother Moses arrived in the city at the age of fifteen to make his fortune in the family business, completed one term in Congress, presided over the Chamber of Commerce of New York, and served on the commission helping to create Central Park. Not only did he have one of the finest wine cellars in the city, it was said he knew every important and influential person in New York. His wife was the niece of the author Washington Irving.

Henry Grinnell, whose intimate friends included the Whig senators
Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, joined his brother Moses in the family’s prestigious merchant shipping firm, Grinnell and Minturn. Owners of the famous clipper ship
Flying Cloud
, they were the largest shippers and consignors of whale oil, and were business colleagues of Edward Robinson in New Bedford. Henry Grinnell, a passionate student of geography and generous patron of Arctic explorations, distinguished himself as founder and first president of the American Geographical Society. When Hetty arrived, the latest expedition with his sponsorship was under way, one that would commemorate him in a book and immortalize him on maps when the ship’s crew named a piece of Alaska “Grinnell Land.”

With her own mother and aunt unable to help her, and with
social rules allotting her just three years to become affianced, Henry and Sarah Grinnell invited the girl for her debut season in New York. Sarah, from a prominent merchant shipping family and the mother of four, had recently steered her oldest daughter, Sarah Minturn, into a successful marriage celebrated with a wedding at home. Now she offered to take this young cousin under her wing. She and her married daughter would guide the girl through an endless sea of social calls, teas, parties, dances, and balls, and serve as her chaperone as they scouted for appropriate men. With their help, Hetty would sail through the rigid rounds with grace and dignity. But Hetty did not always follow the prevailing winds.

Early in the morning upper-crust ladies began their routine, a regime repeated around town from Greenwich Village to Gramercy Park. While husbands set off for their offices, stopping first to order the household food at the market in Tompkins Square, the women prepared for their day.

After breakfast in the downstairs family room and a leisurely look at the newspapers, instructions were given to the Irish maids. They were to scrub the floors and ovens in the kitchen; clean the coal ashes from the fireplace grates; trim the wicks and fill all the lamps with oil; polish the furniture and dust the ground-floor front parlor, back room, and study, and do the same for the upstairs bedrooms and sitting rooms; wash and iron the clothes; knead and bake the breads for the family and the cakes and sweets for visitors; prepare and cook dinner by 2 p.m., when the head of the house would join them, and ready
a supper with high tea later on, or if company was expected, prepare the many courses for a formal dinner to be served at six o’clock.

Their directives noted, the ladies clambered upstairs, where the maids had prepared the hot water in the new tin tubs connected to the city’s water supply. As they bathed they could hear the noises in the street below: “Glass put in! Glass put in!” an old man shouted, while a fishmonger blew on a tin horn. A few minutes later a voice might call out, “Pots and pans! Pots and pans! Mend your pots and pans!” and another, “Rags for sale!” “I buy old rags!” All day long men came down the street offering their services: One rang a bell to announce he was the knife grinder, another rang to say that he ground horseradish. One blew his whistle to let everyone know he had pigeons for sale, another shouted that he mended umbrellas. And throughout the day horse hoofs clopped, carts clacked, and drivers shouted at the traffic.

Above the fray, as the women slowly dressed, their maids pulled the laces tight on their corsets, held their hooped underskirts for them to step into, and gently lowered the ruffled dresses over their heads. Downstairs, swaddled in fur-trimmed shawls and fur muffs, with French bonnets and veils firmly tied, the ladies set off in the snapping cold.

Snuggled under their lap robes, they rode in the parade of carriages up Broadway, ducking when they heard the warning bells of the horse-drawn railway cars thundering down the avenue. At Tiffany’s, Brooks Brothers, and Lord & Taylor, they dashed in to inspect the fancy goods and bargain over the prices. When one Englishwoman gasped at the price of a diamond wristlet and asked, “Who would purchase a trinket costing 5,000 pounds?” the salesman shrugged. “I guess some Southerner would buy it for his wife,” he said.

At A. T. Stewart’s marble palace, the city’s most talked-about new shop, they marveled at the huge domed skylight and five-story circular court and joined the crowd of women excited to watch a fashion show. As they fingered soft fabrics from Europe or asked the cost of a flounce of lace, the handsome young salesman, one of dozens in the specialized departments around the store, would inform them that, in contrast to other shops, here the prices were fixed. No one seemed to mind; the cash registers jingled as customers spent more than $15,000 a day. Little did anyone know that one day A. T. Stewart’s would borrow money from Hetty.

Outside, a promenade of ladies in French bonnets and rich silk dresses under their cloaks strolled by, more elegant than those seen in a week in Hyde Park, said an English visitor. Businessmen, more frantic to make money than businessmen anywhere else in the world, rushed past at a dizzying pace, slipping in the slush of mud on the cobblestone streets. Sidestepping men who carried sandwich-board signs on their backs, the crowd tried to avoid the flood of pamphlets and fliers pushed into their hands. In the shop windows, handwritten notices advertised goods, and posters shouted the arrival of new businesses and theatrical performances. Everywhere the noise of carts and horses and angry drivers shattered the air.

If downtown was crowded with shoppers, far uptown at the edge of the city, behind the Croton Reservoir at Fortieth Street and Fifth Avenue, the streets were packed with sightseers. The Crystal Palace, all glass and iron, beckoned visitors to reach its heights, its steam-powered elevator, invented by Mr. Otis, ready to loft them to the top for spectacular views of the city. At night, its mass of lights glowed like lanterns with Oriental elegance. In the daytime, guests gazed at the finest French tapestries and porcelains and English silver and earthenware, along with Italian, Dutch, and German treasures. A pale copy of the Crystal Palace in London, it nonetheless showed Americans the miracles of art, science, and mechanics. The huge display—“a modern wonder,” said Whitman—gave millions of people a glimpse of the future.

After they lunched with husbands and children, society ladies were off in their carriages again on the obligatory round of calls. For a quick stop at one house, they held their long skirts and climbed the steep steps to the front door, nodded to the parlor maid who answered, and advancing no farther than the vestibule, dropped an engraved card on the silver tray, then left. But
at the homes of friends or neighbors like the Tredwells, they presented their card and asked to see the lady of the house. A quick glimpse in the hall mirror to check their hair, and they were ushered into the front parlor. While they sat on the new French sofa waiting for their hostess to come down, they took in the furnishings of the room. Their eyes darted from the whale-oil lamps on the marble mantel over the fireplace to the bronze gas chandelier hanging from the high ceiling, to the square piano and the French carpet
woven to look like Roman frescoes. A ten-minute chat with their friend, some good gossip, a critique of the nine-course dinner party they attended the night before, and they were off again in their carriages. A few blocks away they stopped for tea with a dowager, a chance for the young debutante to say a few clever words; a nod from their hostess could only help.

In the evenings, they attended theaters such as Wallack’s on Broadway and chuckled at Lester Wallack, starring in the new English comedy
The Bachelor of Arts
, or they went for a more thought-provoking production at the National Theater, where
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
was playing to packed houses, and every night the audience sobbed over Little Eva’s plight. At the Broadway Tabernacle, Theodore Eisfeld conducted the Philharmonic Society, and at Metropolitan Hall or the Astor Opera House the sopranos sang while audience members pulled out their opera glasses and spied on one another.

The only thing New Yorkers enjoyed more than making money was dancing, and the most important events were the season’s parties, dances, and balls. Hetty’s cousin William, just three years older, might accompany her, but his mother or his sister always chaperoned, while their husbands sometimes stayed home.

As their carriages drew up to the townhouse and the men jumped down, the ladies alighted, climbing up the front stoop and following the rest of the women up the carpeted stairs to their hostess’s bedroom. Adding their coats and capes to the pile on the bed, they removed their heavy boots, slipped on their dainty shoes, and turned their attention to the mirror. All around Hetty, small cliques of women who had grown up, gone to school, or summered together laughed and whispered knowingly as they smoothed their hair and pinched their cheeks to make them pink. A glance at Hetty showed them a tall young woman with blue eyes and peach complexion, dressed in a smart new gown. Handsome, yes. But an outsider, decidedly. Even the most attractive young woman might lose her confidence in their midst.

They smiled at their men, who waited outside the door and escorted them down. In the drawing room, exchanging pleasantries, everyone seemed to know everyone, except for the young girl from out of town. If dancing followed the supper, the ladies were asked for a waltz or a polka, but only the best were invited to do the quadrille.
It could be a long evening for a young woman from New Bedford, but the sparkling Hetty was often asked to dance.

Hostesses sent an endless stream of invitations for dances, costume parties, and masked balls, but without a doubt, the event of the year was given by Mrs. William Schermerhorn. The current rage was for fancy dress balls where costumes ranged from nuns and devils to Ivanhoes and harlequins. The craze was declared “insane and incoherent” by George Templeton Strong, the Wall Street lawyer on everyone’s invitation list.

Mrs. Schermerhorn announced something different: a themed costume ball in the style of Louis XV. Important households fluttered with excitement as the women studied paintings of French palace life, men wondered what to do about their whiskers in the clean-shaven court, and everyone ordered their seamstresses in Paris to stitch up clothes like those worn in the mid-eighteenth century.

The night of the ball, a long line of hansom carriages with liveried coachmen drew up in front of the Schermerhorn mansion on Great Jones Street. Servants dressed in court costumes and white wigs welcomed the six hundred guests, the cream of the city’s fashionable set. Astors, Aspinwalls, Brevoorts, Rhinelanders, and Knickerbockers gushed when they saw the dark, heavy interior transformed into a light and fanciful Versailles. The walls shimmered in their coats of wedding-cake white with gold trim, the crystal chandeliers glittered over graceful rococo furnishings, vases and baskets burst with elaborate flower arrangements, and gilded mirrors reflected the spectacularly costumed guests.