A month after his wedding, Ingersoll purchased a block of seven city lots, with an adjoining townhouse at the rear, tucked between two churches on West Twenty-Third Street, half a block east of Fisk and Gould’s Grand Opera House. Like the theater-loving Fisk, Ingersoll saw his Twenty-Third Street purchase as a chance to express his creative vision—a design firm all his own, a temple to beauty even grander than Pottier and Stymus, where European artisans would fashion fabulous new interiors for America in French Renaissance, Pompeian, and Moorish styles. He commissioned the construction of a cast-iron palace and named the building the Excelsior, an apt reference to both the humble wood shavings of his craftsman’s profession and the social and professional transcendence he hoped to experience with the aid of the taxpayers of New York.
It seemed unlikely that Hubert and Pirsson would ever require the services of such a designer. In the autumn of 1870, the architects began work on a home for indigent women far uptown, on Madison Avenue at Eighty-Ninth Street. Its benefactress, Caroline Talman, commissioned a small chapel to accompany the home. When invited to review the plans, Talman expressed enthusiasm for the simple Gothic Revival design with its uplifting arches, modest square tower, and olive-gray sandstone façade perfectly echoing the Arcadian design of nearby Central Park. The arrangement of elements conveyed a sense of serenity—just what she had envisioned for the beleaguered women in the home. The effect was deliberate, the architects told her. One of the great pleasures of their profession lay in framing an interior space to alter or influence its occupants’ mental state—in this case, to soothe their spirits and awaken their minds. During the months that followed, Talman visited the construction site to watch the chapel take shape, and her new friends took the time to show her the ways in which wood, stone, and other natural materials provided a healing moral resonance. Elements could be placed in a space like words were in a poem, they told her—an oval window, a small front garden, a mansard roof, even a Star of David over the door, representing Jesus’s Jewish heritage—sparking visceral associations that had an impact on occupants long after the architects were gone.
For Talman, these visits served as a welcome counterbalance to the Gilded Age excesses pervading the city. The chapel was completed in the summer of 1871, the season when the fraudulent activities of the Tweed ring were finally exposed in the New York Times. With morbid fascination, New Yorkers read daily of woodworkers paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for improvements on buildings constructed of marble and iron; of thousands billed for repair work done on Sundays (when the buildings were closed); of an appropriation of more than $170,000 for chairs, which, at five dollars per chair, would have bought enough chairs to form a line seventeen miles long. In the fall, Tweed was arrested. Shortly after Tweed received a twelve-year prison sentence, Ingersoll was placed on trial; it took the jury only half an hour to convict him, but the partners’ imprisonment did not repay the forty-five million dollars in cash the city had lost, nor did it help with the city’s debt, which had increased from thirty to ninety million dollars over the previous four years. It would take decades to undo this damage. In the meantime, the city couldn’t pay its workers. The streets were gradually buried beneath mountains of uncollected garbage. Pavements went unrepaired. Crime soared, and New Yorkers began to wonder whether their great city would collapse before their eyes.
For the first time since Hubert’s arrival in 1865, the city seemed in the mood for some soul-searching. In a manner virtually unprecedented in that deeply divided era, New Yorkers of all social strata began to come together in lecture halls—mechanics sitting next to bankers, clerks next to manufacturers—to ask how they could have become so dazzled by the city’s influx of riches that they failed to notice the thieves siphoning them off. In rueful hindsight, many now saw that wealth had instilled in the privileged classes a sense of insularity, and the poor had been too preoccupied keeping up with rising prices to give a thought to civic affairs. As a result, all together had allowed the economic and social fabric of their city to be torn to shreds.
As the dimensions of the disaster gradually became clear, a strong feeling of nostalgia welled up in a number of prominent New York literary men, most notably those who had participated in the Brook Farm experiment three decades before. Charles Dana, editor of the New York Sun, repeated Fourier’s warning that a society that pitted each man against his neighbor would breed corruption as a matter of course. George William Curtis, a Harper’s Monthly columnist, recalled the joys of a community where every kind of person, “the ripest scholars, men and women of the most aesthetic culture and accomplishment, young farmers, seamstresses, mechanics, preachers—the industrious, the lazy, the conceited, the sentimental,” had lived together in harmony in those utopian years.
In the pages of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and elsewhere, aging former phalanx members debated the true causes of the communities’ collapse and discussed how a new experiment might succeed. Greeley believed the collectives should have been more selective in admitting new members, weeding out the idle, the greedy, and the ignorant in order to thrive. John Noyes, still leader of the Oneida colony, declared that Fourier himself would have “utterly disowned” every one of the American experiments for being short on members as well as funds. An anonymous contributor to the New York Circular pointed out that it was difficult to attract hard-working individuals to rural phalanxes and recommended that collectives locate themselves in cities instead, with access to tools, ideas, and markets and the opportunity to take their place “at the front of the general march of improvement.”
As for the overall prognosis for communal life, or “association,” Greeley concluded, “I shall be sorely disappointed if this Nineteenth Century does not witness its very general adoption as a means of reducing the cost and increasing the comfort of the poor man’s living. . . . I am convinced . . . that the Social Reformers are right on many points . . . and I deem Fourier—though in many respects erratic, mistaken, visionary—the most suggestive and practical among them.”
In this strange atmosphere of discouragement and nostalgia, Hubert sensed the potential for profound change. The pendulum seemed poised between two futures—one characterized by greater competition, greed, and waste of human potential, and another more productive, just, and creative reality based on shared concern for the well-being of all. As the political shocks of 1871 slid into the record-breaking recession of 1873—as overspeculation shut down the Stock Exchange, bankrupted businesses, and led to labor riots nationwide—Andrew Carnegie and other disciples of social Darwinism assured the public that these incidents were a necessary effect of the natural laws of the marketplace, that balance would be restored again and America would move forward. But perhaps, Hubert mused, it was time to give the pendulum a little push.
The recession grew so severe in 1876 that construction in New York came to a standstill. Hubert and Pirsson shut down their office for the time being, and Hubert, now forty-six, retreated with his family to their Stamford, Connecticut, country home. It was hardly a sacrifice, now that his two grown sons were launched on their own careers and he could spend time writing plays for Marie, his stage-struck youngest child, to present at home with her friends. But amid the pleasant sociability of country life, the challenge of applying his own experience to the city’s needs teased at his inventor’s mind. Surely, as Greeley had suggested, the tools of association could remedy two of the most critical issues facing New York: the lack of affordable housing, and social isolation. As one anonymous pundit wrote in the New York trade journal Manufacturer and Builder, “Improve the physical conditions under which humanity exists, and humanity may be safely left to improve itself.”
In 1879, as the recession waned, Hubert was ready to present a bold new proposition. In a privately published brochure, he pointed out the ways in which New Yorkers’ need to define their status by how and where they lived put them at a distinct disadvantage. With real estate prices rising, young couples were leaving the city
so they wouldn’t have to start their married lives in cheap tenements or boarding houses. Middle-class families, priced out of private homes, tried to maintain appearances by buying into glamorously named apartment buildings located in expensive districts, unaware that developers, in order to lure them, had overspent on luxurious exteriors and lobbies and stinted on the apartments themselves. Even the wealthy felt compelled to lavish funds on enormous mansions with extensive staff, for appearance’s sake, although they spent much of each year abroad or at their country homes.
It was not necessary to be victimized this way, Hubert wrote. By joining together to form a residential group or club, New Yorkers could buy their own land directly and commission the construction of their own shared building, eliminating the middlemen and redirecting the savings toward larger, higher-quality apartments. Restricting membership to others of their social standing would protect New Yorkers’ reputations even when they chose to live in less expensive neighborhoods. Once in residence, they would save even more money by splitting the expenses of maintenance and fuel, which would allow them to spend less time earning a living and more time with family and in other pursuits.
Hubert structured his plan much like that of a Fourierist community. Just as in a utopian phalanx, his cozily named “Home Club Associations” would be set up as joint-stock corporations whose members would buy shares corresponding in number to the size of the apartments they wished to occupy. Later, if they chose to leave, they could sell the shares to new members and pocket any profits. Although Hubert was careful to disassociate himself from any political motive, insisting that these associations were mere business arrangements among families of “congenial tastes,” he expressed the hope that this type of cooperative ownership might serve as a first step toward bringing New Yorkers together in a new, creative way.
His reassurances were effective. Demonstrating his plan with a prototype cooperative on unfashionable East Eightieth Street that was aimed at the population of underpaid office workers then pouring into the city, Hubert constructed a collection of eight light-filled modern apartments, each one large enough to accommodate a growing family. Equipped with every modern convenience, the apartments far outstripped in quality anything a clerk could ordinarily afford, yet each cost only $4,000, half the going price of other residences.
Hubert’s intention had been to address the “poor man’s” comfort and needs, as Greeley had hoped—but as Fourier had predicted of his own utopian experiments, “merely by working with the poor class, we will attract the middle class, which will want to purchase shares and install itself in the place of the poor families”—and so it happened with this first home club. When less-well-off New Yorkers hesitated, suspicious of a deal that seemed too good to be true, families with more money rushed to invest. Reluctantly, the architect gave in to middle-class demand, but he later wrote of his deep frustration over this failure to solve one of the most crucial problems of the city’s working poor.
To others, however, Hubert’s home-club idea seemed a great success, and his firm was besieged by demands to create more associations. With his partner Pirsson, Hubert drew up lists of subscribers and then began locating and designing buildings to their specifications. For Jared B. Flagg, a wealthy painter and real estate speculator with land on fashionable Fifty-Seventh Street, he created the Rembrandt, a home club for well-to-do artists, with luxurious eleven-room apartments connected to double-height studios—the city’s first duplexes. Next came the Hawthorne, a lodge-like cooperative with wood-beamed ceilings, on West Fifty-Ninth Street facing Central Park, and then the Hubert, the Milano, the Mount Morris, 80 Madison Avenue, and 121 Madison—all equipped with such inventions of Hubert’s as steam-heated bedsteads, machines to grind up kitchen waste, and outdoor sprinklers for the innovative roof gardens, which appealed to the city’s burgeoning professional class.
New Yorkers took note of the high quality of these beautiful apartments, whose maintenance costs could even be paid with income from jointly owned rental units: Home Club shareholder-owners began receiving offers for their apartments at twice the original price before construction was even completed. Even the wealthy began to express interest, and in 1883, Hubert and Pirsson designed the “Versailles of cooperatives,” the Central Park Apartments. Eight palatial ten-story buildings, arranged in a large square around a landscaped central courtyard, provided wealthy residents with glorious views of Central Park and more space for entertaining than even the grandest private mansions in the city.
All of these cooperatives were huge by 1880s building standards, occupying multiple lots and rising eight to ten stories when few New York City buildings were higher than five. As a result, within just a few years, Hubert’s home clubs began to alter the look of the city’s skyline to a noticeable degree. Politic as Hubert had been in his presentation of the benefits of cooperative living, the buildings’ multiple towers, peaked roofs, enormous bay windows, and outdoor galleries connecting apartments with one another powerfully expressed the potential social advantages of “the enlargement of home—the extension of family union beyond the little man-and-wife circle.” And yet, New Yorkers seemed to be missing the message. Even as association members applauded the economic benefits of cooperative living, they ignored the greater benefits of social interaction.
Perhaps this was due to the fact that the economy had begun to roar ahead again, creating the usual collective amnesia regarding the mistakes and suffering of the past. Benefiting in the recession from lower prices and a desperate work force, the robber barons of the 1870s had consolidated their holdings almost beyond imagining. Carnegie’s network of steel mills was now nearly complete; Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust was on its way to becoming the largest industrial organization on earth; Gould, whose cross-country railways now extended ten thousand miles, had monopolized the telegraph industry and, most recently, set his sights on New York’s new elevated railroad lines. Annual investment returns in the United States had risen to 35 percent and higher, prompting British and European speculators to rush in like “sheep lined up . . . asking to be sheared,” in Gould’s apt phrase, and increasing the number of New York millionaires from four thousand to nearly forty thousand. New construction raced up Fifth Avenue; new palaces arose from St. Patrick’s Cathedral north to Central Park. The evidence was everywhere: the fittest had survived and thrived, the United States now led the way in humanity’s social evolution, and New York was ready to take its place as capital of the new world. Who needed cooperation when competition worked so well?
But a city like this, one whose people looked only outward and never within, was headed for a nervous breakdown. Hubert could sympathize with old Herbert Spencer, longtime promoter of the idea of social Darwinism, who had interrupted a tribute at a Delmonico’s luncheon that year to growl that his wealthy hosts had gotten him and his theory seriously wrong. Contrary to their beliefs, he insisted, he “did not approve of the culture of American capitalism.” It was his opinion that “Americans were endangering their mental and physical health through overwork,” and all in pursuit of the dollar. “Life is not for learning, nor is life for working,” he ranted, “but learning and working are for life.”
His hosts had chuckled indulgently. Of course life was for working—for amassing more treasure, building greater palaces, hosting more fancy balls.
Something had to change. A new set of values had to be established, a new identity created. The city needed to begin its own conversation, to stop parroting the ideas and attitudes of the Old World. But no real, productive exchange of ideas was possible in a city whose people still stubbornly clung to only their own kind. As Charles Fourier had pointed out two generations earlier, only in diversity could a society thrive.
The design for Hubert’s next home club would differ significantly from his earlier cooperatives. No longer would Hubert “earnestly protest against any socialistic union.” Nor would he reassure association members that only those of “congenial tastes” and “simi
lar social and economic positions” need apply. Instead, he would aim for the liveliest and most varied population he could attract.
Hubert and Pirsson’s offices were near Madison Square, now the point of convergence for the city’s theater, arts, and shopping districts, and, in one observer’s words, “socially the most interesting spot in the city.” Drawn to the electric streetlights on Broadway, hundreds of passengers descended nightly from the elevated railway stations to stroll past the elegant façades of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the Hoffman House, and the Albemarle, where, it was often noted, Sarah Bernhardt had stayed for her 1880 New York debut. Stretching from Twenty-Third Street south along Sixth Avenue toward Union Square, a magnificent row of new stone and cast-iron department stores called the Ladies’ Mile provided New Yorkers with manufactured and imported luxuries unheard-of a generation before. The literary establishment met at the Lotos Club at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-First Street, not far from the National Academy of Design, whose striking façade, modeled after the Doge’s Palace in Venice, had attracted an assortment of the academy’s artist-members and students to its private studios. To the north, the cubbyhole offices and upright pianos of Tin Pan Alley churned out popular tunes for the masses, while only a few blocks beyond that to the northwest, the brothels and gambling dens of the Tenderloin satisfied the desires of many New York men.
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 4