Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  To New Yorkers’ utter mortification—though the city’s architects refused to admit being bested—the Chicago style aimed at the very heart of the skyscraper: its urban steel-frame construction made the sky the limit. As a result of putting function first, Chicago’s designers had also, fortuitously, created a cleaner look than the present tired Victorian style of Manhattan. Gone was mere decoration with no purpose, an ethos that suddenly seemed dated and decadent. In its place, the Chicago style prophesied the future, an age of commerce and creativity. With innovations by prominent Chicago architects like Louis H. Sullivan and John W. Root, it sometimes looked as though the Midwest was pulling ahead of its eastern rival. Such urban competition energized Bruce Price’s work, which seemed to grow in sophistication from the moment he relocated from Baltimore to Manhattan.

  EMILY’S PARENTS QUICKLY shone in New York, reflecting the patina of the upper-middle class, befriended by social types who approved the blend of Lee millions and Price bloodlines. Josephine was in charge of the home, particularly of arranging for Emily’s care. In an age when large families were still the norm, the couple was occasionally complimented for rearing their only child progressively, the girl sometimes accompanying them to social events instead of staying home with her nanny. Often her presence simply testified to Emily’s success in wheedling her father into taking her along, if only to escape the dreaded German nanny who seemed a jailer to the independent youngster.

  “Emilie, put your shoes straight. . . . Emilie, fold your hands. . . . Emilie, do this. . . . Emilie, do not do that”—Emily felt herself admonished throughout the day, and she didn’t fail to report what she considered the most outlandish criticism to Bruce the minute she spotted him walking down Tenth Street after work. She knew he’d sympathize with her, especially since he was a Francophile and the nanny openly disdained the French. Shrewdly, the girl made sure she reported every critique the woman uttered. Josephine had employed the strict German governess in part because she herself had grown up in Wilkes-Barre under similar supervision and believed it the firm hand her willful daughter needed. Too, she did not trust French women around her husband. He was too charming, and they too artful. The fräulein, whose hands were so icy that Emily avoided her touch, aroused no such fears in Josephine.

  “Bruce Price, playboy” seems an unlikely pairing, whatever a governess’s charms. Even if so inclined, the architect didn’t have time to misbehave. Soon after the family settled into their apartment, Bruce was commissioned to design an upper-class, income-producing, six-floor walk-up rental apartment building, still a rarity at a time when most city residences were owned. With one apartment per floor, rentals went for $1,400 per year in 1878, the equivalent today of $2,600 per month.

  Bruce’s eagerness to participate in urban transformation reflected the momentum of the day, with the citizenry no longer awed by the increased speed of change. Innovations that soon became mundane—stores with electric lights—were modifying the culture’s habits, the new beats absorbed so quickly that they often went unnoted. And once women could shop after the sun set early on winter afternoons—such a trivial change to the men on Wall Street it was hardly worth mentioning—new social routines evolved, from later mealtimes to faster changes in fashions. Even the city government emitted a sense of cautious renewal, marked by a milestone that year when imprisoned Boss Tweed died, no longer able to bribe the Irish workers with citizenship papers in exchange for a vote for Boss.

  Disgusted by the city government at Tammany Hall, still ruled by corrupt leaders who continued to illegally recruit immigrants’ support, Bruce brought home the occasional story about city politics to his daughter and wife. He admired the newcomers. What subsidized their passage, other than their own raw courage? He was pleased that the engineering principles about to bear fruit—indoor plumbing, the Otis elevator, and steel structures—would free him and his colleagues to accommodate the masses, sheltering the citizens at the bottom of the ladder in addition to those living in luxury. He was right: ten years before the century ended, elevated trains, called “els,” would traverse the length of Manhattan and continue on through the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, moving several hundred thousand passengers each day, offering fares affordable even to the lower class, and transforming the landscape.

  But of course his little girl was more interested in goings-on that affected her directly. Two weeks after Boss Tweed’s death, Emily Post would make her first public performance, her society debut, twirling her way across the stage. That was all she could think about these days.

  Her parents had allowed the six-year-old to accept a bit part in a tableau of The Sleeping Beauty. A charity function at New York’s Academy of Music, the event overflowed with patrons, the theater’s limited boxes apportioned according to the buyer’s prestige. Emily’s parents were on the committee of the Mount Vernon Endowment Fund, whose volunteers’ months of preparation were now rewarded by a sold-out house. The audience, decked out in their finest evening dress, created their own bejeweled spectacle, the bijoux casting more illumination than the chandeliers. Local swells drew enough mutually admiring stares that the actors were nearly upstaged. So elite that the founders refused to let in the newly rich, self-made businessmen and their families, the academy members outdid even their usual luxuriant selves this time. (J. P. Morgan and other rising nouveaux riches would found the Metropolitan Opera a few years later in order to have a place where they could attend musical events.)

  The Sleeping Beauty, which began at an unusually reasonable eight P.M. as opposed to New York’s typical curtain time of nine or later, was a fairy tale in four acts with a climactic final scene, the five “gorgeous” choreographed pictures changing at intervals. Characteristic of late-nineteenth-century upper-class entertainments, the carefully held (and heavily rehearsed) poses commanded high admission prices and fulsome praise. The thespians onstage this night included so many prominent socialites that it’s unclear who was left to appreciate them. Those applauding, however, were equally illustrious: the New York Times devoted nearly a full page to the event, since even listing the “remarkable” audience members proved daunting.

  Leading the dance, front and center stage, were Bruce and Josephine Price. Josie shimmered in a long, pale pink brocade dress, while Bruce shone in evening clothes embroidered in rich gold and white. Other well-known local men, acquaintances of the couple, had to content themselves with playing beefeaters and court guards and spear-carriers. Satin and silver curls, antique armor and purple velvet: the scene was a welter of precious-metal threads. The lavish sequins dazzled the spectators as the elaborate new onstage lights caused Titania’s costume to sparkle like a star. Among the bevy of young girls serving as stage fillers stood a proudly erect Emily Price, the girl who would say to the end of her life that she had always wanted to become an actress.

  EMILY GREW UP respecting wealth, aware, through the example of her family and friends, of the great good it could serve as well as the comfort it bestowed. By the time that she was seven years old, the girl had heard how Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, a distant cousin through her father’s mother, Marion Bruce, was playing a significant role in urban development. Her funding of the East Side Lodging House for newsboys and bootblacks was no small feat in an age when social services barely existed. According to her approving parents, Emily’s large legacy from Catharine was reduced when the woman donated staggering sums to build an orphanage for boys, designating that no child could be turned away: if a boy couldn’t pay the nightly fee of six cents, the debt was to be charged to his account, to be paid off when he was able.

  The New York Times had written often about Catharine Lorillard Wolfe’s projects to help the poor, and now the paper chronicled the covey of homeless children who carried their “effects” from their old, decrepit domicile to the new lodging house. At six-thirty in the evening, after the boys got off work, all but one were able to transport their entire possessions under their right arm. They were used to such paucity; wha
t they had never experienced was the privacy the new residence gave them. The 175 beds in this upper-echelon orphanage were separated from one another with cloth partitions. As if that wasn’t wonder enough, on their first night home the inhabitants were treated to a dinner of ham sandwiches, coffee, and ice cream, the dessert a special treat from their patron saint.

  Wealth and doing good: both were staples of Emily’s early life. Bruce’s daily routine of handing out money to beggars as he walked to his office secretly made Josie proud. She bragged about her husband being such an easy touch even while she pretended to despair. Accommodation, of husband with wife, of compassion compounded on sound investments: this was the art of the well-oiled and morally ordered existence. This was the model of proper behavior shaping their watchful child.

  Decisions about spending money were, for Emily, a natural part of life. It would have been hard for her parents to keep the subject from her, even if they’d wanted to. In 1879, the new year once again swept in on the frenzy of Wall Street. The price of a seat on the New York Stock Exchange was rising steadily (it would go from $10,000 to $20,000 during the next twelve months), an adjustment that didn’t escape Emily’s cagey entrepreneurial grandfather. Washington Lee had at least partially realized his quixotic dreams by establishing a precious-metals firm, and at the springtime meeting of the Columbia Consolidated Gold and Silver Mining Company’s stockholders, he projected his optimistic earnings for the coming year. Success seemed to come with the prime real estate his office occupied at 33 Wall Street. As with the Internet companies of the 1990s, however, Lee’s speculation quickly proved a brilliant blaze that would sputter to a wan conclusion.

  Luckily, although Washington Lee preferred the glitter of fine metals, he recognized compelling reasons to bet most of his money on the railroads: the decade of Emily’s birth had brought about a revolution in shipping methods. It wasn’t a glamorous subject—and certainly lacked the luster of gold—but now crops could be shipped by rail. He would retain his interest in coal, Emily’s grandfather decided. In the past, getting food to market had sometimes cost more than the goods themselves. This new speed, this new ubiquity of the humble, sturdy rails, changed everything: it changed the way Americans would eat.

  CHAPTER 6

  IN 1880, WHILE THE OTHERWISE STOLID JOSEPHINE MERRILY PLAYED the market, closely following her father’s astute prognostications, the more ethereal Bruce Price pursued a different kind of speculation altogether. He had proven himself this past year by building several additional luxury residences in Bar Harbor. Now he qualified to compete with the more experienced professionals, the cadre of top-rung New York architects bidding against one another for choice projects. That January, however, he suffered his first defeat, though his inclusion in the contest was honor enough. The Long Island Historical Society had solicited drawings from five architects for its new home in Brooklyn. Bruce lost the contest to George Post, but in the process he and the older man quickly became friends. Post, among the era’s most prominent architects, was leading the way with his technologically sophisticated designs, including New York’s first metal-framed structure, the four-story Produce Exchange at 2 Broadway.

  Throughout 1880, the almost militant excitement of the city’s architects reverberated through long-running friendly arguments, their shared long-term vision underwriting their critical inventories of one another’s projects. Exhilarated, Bruce spent long days at his office. Sometimes, when he found himself still working hours after dinner, he would simply spend the night at one of his men’s clubs a mere block or so from his home, refining his designs until two or three A.M. Josie was as happy for her husband to sleep at the club, instead of waking her up with his restless movements.

  Just as the architect had been searching for another—grander—project, he’d heard from Hop Smith about a perfect, plausible opportunity to make real money: Bruce could invest his time and reputation, Washington Lee his cash. Together, they would all become rich off Long Beach, New York, a town on a barrier island off the South Shore of Long Island. Hop Smith, the graceful amateur economist whose enthusiastic calculations and excellent track record could suspend anyone’s disbelief, practically guaranteed the outcome.

  A BORN WINNER, Francis Hopkinson Smith sometimes literally turned what he touched into gold. Bruce Price had always, good-naturedly, laughed about Smith’s positioning himself as an outsider to society. New York artists of a certain ilk were encouraged to hang out at the swank Century Club, even if they weren’t members, since their presence lent a raffish air to the otherwise august men’s facility. In reality, the “bohemians” who were allowed into the establishment inevitably came from wealth and well-connected families, and Hop was a prime example: he had memberships himself in all the major clubs.

  But none of that mattered to Emily Price, who doted on Uncle Frank, as she called him. He always managed to make his enviable adventures even more exciting in the telling. Years later, her favorite memories would include sitting on his lap as a child, awed by his tall tales—usually, if improbably, true. Once, when he dreamily described the barge trip taken up the Hudson by “the Club,” his group of artist friends, Emily gaped, causing him to joke about her swallowing a fly. The born raconteur allowed her to feel part of the ride, traveling the Erie Canal from Troy into Lake Champlain. Next to her father, the girl admired Uncle Frank more than anyone else in her life.

  Hop had developed an engineering firm that would stay in business for the next three decades, and he and Bruce often sent each other business throughout their careers. This current chance for everyone involved to reap rewards for a development project in Long Beach was just another example of the uncanny acumen Hop showed in combining commercial with artistic investments. The recently formed Tile Club was yet another example.

  A group of illustrious men (twelve, with a few members wandering in and out over the decade) met periodically, ostensibly to promote the Arts and Crafts movement, then catching on in the States. Inspired by British artist and activist William Morris’s decorative genius, the movement had reached America on the back of the new post–Civil War fortunes. The 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, with its almost neurotic emphasis on England, the mother country, had paved the way. New York’s Hudson River school had had its time in the sun, and the Tile Club was determined to help art reinvent everything from painting to textiles.

  More than most such organizations, the Tile Club ingeniously blended pleasure with business—and not only the business of making art. Painter William Laffan, a writer for the New York Sun as well as a passenger agent for the Long Island Rail Road, served as the unofficial leader of the club. Counted variously as members during the club’s ten-year duration were Beaux Arts sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens; painter Winslow Homer; teacher, proponent of impressionism, and artist William Merritt Chase; and architect Stanford White, who eventually decorated the room on East Tenth Street where the club met. Even Mark Twain was briefly involved in what quickly became more of a social than a professional club. John Singer Sargent requested permission to join before he’d even consider moving to New York.

  The Tilers actually stuck to their professional agenda for about one year, from around 1877 into 1878, but the club quickly devolved into a social organization, professionally affiliated in name only. Over the next ten years, a member would occasionally publish an article in Scribner’s or Harper’s Weekly, keeping interest in the Tilers’ future alive by teasing the audience about what actually went on at their mysterious meetings. The Club functioned like a grown-up boys’ fraternity.

  Art had always been secondary to the agenda of the Tile Club, whatever its official mandate. And if camaraderie came first, doing business followed right behind. It was this primary business agenda that interested Hop’s friends Bruce Price and Washington Lee. Club president Laffan had invested early in the Long Beach Development project, and he made it clear to Hop that the Tile Club would help commercialize Long Beach, making it, as well as the rest of L
ong Island, famous through the Tilers’ travel, painting, and antics.

  In keeping with its primary schema, one of the earliest products of the Tile Club was a commercial brochure for the Long Island Rail Road, the LIRR, called The New Long Island: A Handbook of Summer Travel. Using the Tilers’ own visual record of their summer hike, the promotional package made for a slick product. During a couple of leisurely paced weeks, the Tilers had hiked the hundred miles from Long Beach to Montauk, at the tip of Long Island itself, racking up adventures to share with those less adventuresome and fortunate. Future residents would have it easier: the brochure promised a year’s worth of free railroad passes for newcomers who bought real estate on Long Beach.

  ALWAYS CONFIDENT THAT he would come out on top, Washington Lee viewed the business proposition, brokered by Hop Smith (who rarely bet wrong), as a savory opportunity. During the early decades of their rapid development, most railroads were tiny, owned by private stockholders who basically controlled the routes. Washington Lee was a railroad man, his specialty coal, along with equity in the occasional railroad company itself. Of course, he knew how to negotiate contracts with the Long Island Rail Road to transport thousands of customers to the beach development. And this investment would grant his son-in-law the chance to build a major project. The enterprise, inbred with shared artistic and financial interests, fit Lee’s ambitions and generous personality. Everybody would win.