Gilded Age NYC tour - Art Scenes

NYC

Gilded Age

After the brutal American Civil War (1861-1865) the country went through an economic boom that transformed the ugly dirty industrial New York City into a cultural commercial hub financed by opium and managed by freemasons; who replaced the factories for: corporate beaux art towers, public parks, and cultural institutions that you can still visit today — so get ready to go back to the Robber Barons days and feel like JP Morgan for a day.

Time period: 1860s-1910s

Movie/book: Titanic (1997)/The Guilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

Soundtrack: George Gershwin/Irving Berlin’s music

Fashion: black and white, double breasted jacket and a bowler hat (plus suspenders)

Budget: 120-190$ (40$ for museums 80-150$ for food)

George F. Cram.: Greater New York; Chicago, 1899

This tour would take throughout lower Manhattan: where headquarters for new corporations got built giving us a new type of building: the office tower; and where public spaces and cultural institutions (parks, squares, theaters, libraries, and museums) opened up to improve the living conditions of the old industrial city. The area is characterized by: beaux-arts architecture, hidden parks and office towers that could “scrap the sky” hence Skyscrapers. During the Gilded Age (the golden industrial period which made some rich and a lot miserable) Brooklyn, the Bronx and New Jersey got industrialized, while the dirty Manhattan got corporate/Parisian with banks, department stores and hôtel particulier (city mansions). Book publishers, magazines and “penny papers” made the city the U.S. Media Capital but soon the banks around Wall Street would turned it the U.S. Financial Capital. Banks were not just money safeboxes anymore, after the Civil War (1860-1865) they started investing and printing money; and latter on they would be involved in the creation of monopolies managed by trusts. New rich Robber barons moved to the city to be closer to the banks of Wall Street: J. P. Morgan migrated from London in 1858 and opened his bank (now known as Chase) in 1871; Thomas Edison moved in 1869 and by 1880 opened Edison Electric … Company (and monopolized the film industry); Andrew Carnegie frequented the city to do business on behalf of his Steel Company since 1867, and permanently since 1889; and John D. Rockefeller brought the headquarters of Standard Oil and his family in 1885. They joined the old money merchants families like the Astors and the Roosevelts (who were involved in the fur trade and banking industry), along the new rich railroad tycoons The Vanderbilts. Eventually they wanted to clean their reputation by funding public instituons like: Central Park (1858), the American Museum of Natural History (1869), the Metropolitan Museum (1870), the Carnegie Hall (1891), and the New York Public Library (1911); embracing the Beaux-Art style of Architecture. New York City was experiencing its Belle Epoque and the US the City Beautiful Movement (1880-1920). As corporations grew, so did the size of their offices to manage all the paperwork and cash and. Construction boom started. The Mills building (1882) was the first office tower in the Financial district (made out of masonry with elevators and electric lights) — but soon a competition to reach the sky started. The New York World Building topped the spire of Trinity Church in 1890; then: Park Row (1899) The Singer Building (1908) and the Met Life Tower (1909) got the title of the tallest structure in the city respectively, culminating with “the cathedral of commerce” the Woolworth Building in 1913 at 241 meters high. These towers fallowed a Greek--column design characterized by: a heavy ornamental base, a regular symmetrical body, and an ornamental cornice with maybe a dome or spire on top. But the competition wasn’t done, and after The Wall Street Crash of 1929 art deco giants would invade the sky. The tour suggests visiting 3 public buildings (2 libraries and a train station) in the morning; dinner on a tower, a historical mansion plus a walk around the parks of lower manhattan in the afternoon; and to end the day a walking tour around the financial district with dinner at Delmonico’s.