In spite of his complete lack of experience in designing large spaces that combined commercial and residential uses, Bruce Price was awarded the commission for the mammoth Long Beach resort hotel. Whether the timing was good for such an investment is a question that might have stopped many other men. The early 1880s were an unstable period for the nation’s finances. Washington Lee believed, however, that this was the perfect moment to invest heavily in an ambitious scheme for the leisured classes. He figured that most financiers were erring on the side of caution.
And so he did invest, again and again, desperately trying to save an enterprise that proved a financial disaster almost from its beginning, an endless money pit that severely rearranged the aging man’s finances. As a result, the legacy he bequeathed his family would be a small portion of what it was before the Long Beach behemoth took shape, a fraction of the fortune Bruce Price had anticipated when he’d married the coal lord’s daughter.
The gigantic hotel complex, which the Times anointed as “the new watering place,” officially opened on July 13, 1880. Harper’s Weekly printed a full-page engraving, revealing the Long Beach Hotel as impressively large but fairly mundane in its design, its Queen Anne pretensions and seaside resort simplicity an ill mix. More important than the general, if tepid, praise Bruce’s building received were the management problems that riddled the colossus from the beginning. On April 5, 1881, a new board of directors elected by stockholders of the Long Beach Company chose Lee and Frank Hopkinson Smith to oversee company operations.
That summer, the stockholders bet that the financial flux caused by the July 2 assassination attempt on President Garfield had upset the market only temporarily. But during the ten agonizing weeks it took for the president to die, the financial morass entangling the Long Beach Company kept getting worse. On August 9, A. T. Stewart and Company, the Saks Fifth Avenue of its day, filed suit to reclaim its furnishings, bought on credit. Seemingly undaunted in the face of the continuing foreclosures, the company finagled, within days of the department store’s suit, yet another mortgage for $250,000. On September 21, 1881, when Chester Arthur took the helm as the country’s twenty- first president, Americans became confident of the market again, and investors in the hotel became optimistic. Over the next few years the association publicized celebrity visits, including two trips Oscar Wilde made to the Long Beach Hotel in 1882.
That same year the hotel site was awarded a long- promised railroad stop. Now, surely, the crowds would come rolling in. Society might be agog over J. P. Morgan’s purchase of a 185-foot steamer, the Corsair, the largest yacht in the nation. But even he depended on the trains over the long haul—everyone knew that.
HER SPOUSE’S AMBITION and the life he labored to provide for their family made sense to Josephine Price. She believed Bruce was correct to emphasize his career at the expense of conjugal socializing. The intrepid young matron simply recruited her women friends, including her mother, to accompany her to the theater and the opera. She appreciated her good life: some New Yorkers claimed that “tip-top” living in Manhattan was as fine as that of St. Petersburg and Paris. She also discovered that her New York friends were sometimes demanding in a way that Josie herself was not. They maintained, for instance, that there was no drinkable champagne under $3.00—whereas Josie herself would never pay so much. Her happiness was more likely to come from the tasty $1.50 dinner served on the train to Baltimore. Still, such frugality was her choice; the Price income had progressed nicely.
Nor was there any need to pity Bruce Price for his workload. Missing the theater (or the chance to spend more time with his child) didn’t bother him much; Emily would later explain proudly that he was a man’s man. His social inclinations lay more in debating his colleagues over the staying power of the new impressionist painters or in rehashing, endlessly, the future of tall buildings: How high would they really go? But he couldn’t afford to overindulge in such fraternity, unless the friendship was linked to a job. He worked hard and fast, whether building a church or designing rural getaways for millionaires.
Only an hour or so from the city, the mansions dotting the Hudson Valley’s gentle wilderness stretched from Bear Mountain to Rhinebeck, allowing people like Pierpont Morgan to escape into nature and, unlike the architect, enjoy a more leisurely pace. Between his country and in-town residences, Bruce had built eleven significant structures over the past year. When a census showed that New York City had almost doubled in population since the eve of the Civil War twenty years earlier, he joked that he had probably housed half of that number. By the end of 1880, Bruce Price was satisfied but worn out, in need of a vacation himself.
Like the flexible spouse she was, Josephine picked up the social slack created by her husband’s relentless work schedule. In January 1881, in spite of frigid weather, she took eight-and-a-half-year-old Emily to Baltimore for a relative’s wedding. Cornelia Barroll, Josie’s niece, was uniting what the New York Times pronounced were two “well known families of Boston and Baltimore.” Though a “blinding snow storm” raged outside, most of the fifteen hundred invitees still managed to attend a “social event . . . of much moment.” Emily and her mother must have beamed with pride, sitting in the front pew of Baltimore’s Christ Church, Bruce Price’s presence embedded in the sanctuary walls. Against the bets that several cynical local residents had placed, he had somehow managed to finish the Chase Street building by the beginning of 1881, in time for his in-laws’ ceremony.
BRUCE PRICE’S ROLE in the Long Beach project served him well. Immediately he moved on, engaged in his peripatetic life, with its gratifying mixture of work and pleasure. Josephine and their daughter traveled abroad late in the winter of 1881 before hunkering down back in New York City so that Emily could finish the year’s classes at Miss Graham’s School for girls, which the nine-year-old now attended. Finally, generously interpreting the school’s spring break, the family of three traveled to Bar Harbor once again for Bruce to build a new house and for his wife and child to play.
Though Josephine and Emily enjoyed a vacation while in Maine, Bruce rarely paused from his work. Still, with his wife’s full support, he managed to return to the city for important social events. Late in March, for instance, when the Titan Club honored Mother Earth, Bruce joined the select set of men gathered at Delmonico’s, at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, since 1825 the favorite restaurant of Manhattan’s social set, to salute the vernal equinox. This was the kind of revelry the architect always seemed to find time for, an otherwise little-seen frivolous side that his daughter adored.
The Titan Club frolic was well matched to Bruce’s current project, a theater at Broadway and Twenty-eighth Street that he’d been constructing throughout the previous year. A well-known capitalist had convinced a company to invest in a new stage for vaudeville and light musical entertainment. Acclaimed by the New York Times as one of the city’s best recent buildings, Bruce’s French Renaissance–style theater was praised widely for its exceptional design. Even the stylish boxes—“like the circle boxes at the new Metropolitan Opera house”—were lauded for deviating from the traditional model in order to obtain better sight lines.
The architect’s daughter was, at ten years old, the perfect age to decide that the theater house her papa was constructing in 1882 was more magic of the type he always seemed to create. Bruce took Emily with him while he worked on the building and later, on special occasions, to an actual performance on the stage he had designed. The young girl watched the stage intently, its glamorous, slightly suspect ladies in luxurious costumes always meeting with tumultuous applause. By now, it was clear to the child that her father, not her mother, was the star in their family. This winter he also found time to help her build an intricate dollhouse, bringing home wood that he ordered cut and smoothed to the dimensions his daughter judged correct. Though he insisted on erecting the staircases himself, he encouraged Emily to create everything else. She took her assignment to heart, not allowing an inch of space to be overlook
ed. “Walls, ceilings and furniture and ornaments—complete!” she would recall with gusto decades later.
WHILE HIS SON-IN-LAW was marching ahead with his life and his career, Washington Lee was still agonizing over the finances of the Long Beach enterprise. Undeniably, he had been a holy fool with his fortune. By 1883, regardless of the refinancing, the various receiverships, and the repeatedly extended credit, the company officers had to concede they couldn’t make a go of it. The sixty-two-year-old Lee died in the spring of 1883, altering his family’s plans for the Monday circled in red months earlier on the city’s best calendars: March 26, the day of the decade’s most eagerly awaited social event, Mrs. Vanderbilt’s ball. Lee’s own pleasures had lain elsewhere, of course; he’d been more excited about the new Brooklyn Bridge, officially opened by President Cleveland just a few days earlier. But Josephine’s father had been devastated by the disastrous miscalculation he’d made with the hotel. When he died, the Long Beach investment company was just marking time until its own inevitably ignominious end.
His will—“I Washington Lee, formerly of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, now of the City of New York”—was probated on May 31, 1883, by New York State. Clearly he had underwritten Bruce Price’s career, and yet Lee appears to have been as admirably even-mannered as his granddaughter herself would turn out to be. He left his estate to be equally divided among all five of his children, after his wife’s interests had been settled. But, he noted genially: in light of the various amounts of money he’d given to one child or another through the years (he tactfully refrained from naming names), he did expect their inheritances to be reduced by any unpaid loans. His wife could mete out the final rewards.
The man was generous by nature, even in death. He may have suffered the mortification of his last investment, but his fine character lasted to his final hour. Like Peter Cooper, who also died that year, having done more to endow New York City than any other single citizen, Washington Lee performed charitably too, albeit on a different scale. Both left New York better off than they’d found it, the self-taught Cooper as a poverty-stricken child and Washington Lee as a mature, cheerful adventurer who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty, smiling all the way.
Right up until her father died, Josephine and her friends had rattled on about the same subject for weeks, Josie admitting to her family that even she was finally bored by the gossip. Spilling over into the homes of the day’s most sensible women, the topic of the Vanderbilt ball, scheduled for March 26, 1883, had usurped center stage in society columns and at neighborhood soirees throughout the winter. Years later Emily recounted having heard the ladies buzz with the latest news on the great event. Gradually the girl had come to realize that her mother’s friends enjoyed the prelude as much as the occasion itself. Monsieur Worth’s latest designs from Paris were at least as important as the guest list.
The ten-year-old, though interested in fashion at an early age, nonetheless grew impatient with the babble’s monotonous rhythms. There was no way, however, to avoid the excited chatter of her class as the stakes escalated during the year’s great melodrama. Its juicy details were rehearsed daily for weeks, the gossip centered upon Alva Vanderbilt’s audacious bid to unseat Caroline Schermerhorn Astor as the potentate of social clout in New York. Mrs. Astor was Old Blood royalty at its most incontestable moment. It was no secret that the Astors looked down on the Vanderbilts, whose riches came from mere trade, and who were now elbowing their way into society with their millions. The Astors had dirtied their hands the right way, trading pelts and selling pianos so long ago that no one remembered their past as merchants. Time—which in the new country moved fast—had made of them gentlefolk. And this new elite had no intention of letting the rabble join their group.
CHAPTER 7
FROM THE SIZE OF HER NEW BALLROOM—SAID TO HOLD ONE THOUSAND guests—to the party favors Alva would furnish—Tiffany bracelets and silver lockets transported on a giant gondola rolled into the room—this dance was in no way an exercise in good taste. The housewarming for the Vanderbilts’ opulent new limestone mansion at what was then 660 Fifth Avenue took the form of a March costume ball that would eclipse the most fabulous events of seasons to come. More important, the blatant confrontation between old and new would ante up the social stakes. This was no gracious dance in the southern style, in spite of Alva Vanderbilt’s Alabama roots; it was an aggressive tango telling “Old Society” New York that the game was over. Now the arrivistes not only belonged in Manhattan, they owned a large part of it.
When she was informed of the upcoming Vanderbilt ball (so the myth’s most popular version goes), the redoubtable Caroline Schermerhorn Astor had immediately doubled up on dance lessons for her marriageable daughter, Carrie. Even the jaded Mrs. Astor couldn’t help getting excited about the Vanderbilt gala: its magnitude promised to be beyond anything even she had sponsored. Perhaps her excitement caused her to be careless. Or, more likely, it never occurred to Mrs. Astor that she would be excluded from the guest list. Whatever the reason, she failed to notice that the Vanderbilts had not invited her family to their ball.
Then she began to hear alarming rumors: Mrs. Vanderbilt was not expecting the Astors’ daughter or her parents to attend. Prodded by her worried daughter, Mrs. Astor sent out a polite if typically haughty query about the missing invitation, mere days before the dance. She was immediately and “reluctantly” informed that the presumably misplaced invitation to the ball was in fact not lost at all: Mrs. Vanderbilt was not so uncouth as to invite someone who had not yet called on her. Mrs. Astor had never dropped her “pasteboard” (or calling card) at 660 Fifth Avenue, so of course Mrs. Vanderbilt couldn’t expect her to attend the party.
The story, retold with relish in certain quarters even today, surely embellishes the inward turmoil purported to have kept Mrs. Astor tossing in her bed over the next few nights. Smoldering, purple with rage for several days, the defeated queen of society at last angrily acquiesced. Neighbors peeking through their curtains saw a footman in the blue livery of the House of Astor deliver Caroline’s calling card—“Mrs. Astor” was engraved on it even more simply than were most socialites’ names—to the maroon-liveried footman guarding the Vanderbilt gates. The victor purportedly bestowed a wicked smile of thanks upon her servant. That afternoon, the outmaneuvered Mrs. Astor received her invitation to the ball.
Alva Vanderbilt was only thirty-one years old when she took on Old New York, her battle signifying a larger shift in the city’s power structures than partygoers realized. If the Vanderbilts lacked blue blood coursing through their veins, they could never, by any means, be considered bloodless. Raw power, not genes, was what counted. Alva had come to town, and the déclassé Vanderbilts planned to stay. Alva won everything she competed for, elbowing aside the Old Guard, breaking the stranglehold of two generations’ refusal to let her husband’s family into high society.
She helped maneuver her husband, William Kissam Vanderbilt, the Commodore’s grandson, into the right clubs—the Metropolitan, the Knickerbocker, Union, Racquet and Tennis, Turf and Field, and the New York Yacht Club—the club culture allowing him to avoid what had quickly become his miserable home life almost entirely. Hardly missing a beat, Alva would divorce William a few years later and marry one of the Belmonts, soon following that marriage with a prominent role in the women’s suffrage movement. She was a politic and political woman, such qualities setting her apart from her contemporaries, who tended to be one but not the other. The indomitable Alva was even willing to make her personal peace with Ulysses Grant, who could, after all, further her goals, though General Grant’s victory had ruined Alva’s father back home in Alabama. Alva Vanderbilt was the iron magnolia come to take her revenge on the Yankees.
So on the night of Washington Lee’s death, the Vanderbilts were finally seated among the elect. On that fabulous March evening, they spent their way into society, becoming an “old family” overnight and making no secret of how they were doing it. They made Old New York swallo
w the ignominy of it all. The following spring, Mrs. Astor’s colors would be seen fluttering outside the Vanderbilt mansion; the footman was delivering an invitation to Mrs. Astor’s annual Four Hundred ball. Years later, as Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont, Alva would seek to protect Newport from the arrivistes, but for now, she was carrying the torch for the newly arrived. However implausibly, Mrs. Astor herself would become one of Alva’s closest friends and most ardent champions in the age to come.
To most Americans, such a world might as well have been on a different planet. The housewarming at the Vanderbilts’ cost a quarter of a million dollars at a time when $25 a week enabled the men who constructed the extravaganza’s indoor arboretums to support their families comfortably. Such opulence also engineered trickle-down benefits less direct than paychecks for workers: it provided endless fodder for every type of tabloid.
HAVING BURIED WASHINGTON LEE instead of attending the Vanderbilt party, the Price family wanted a change of scenery. They decided to vacation at Newport for a full four months this year, since Bruce needed to be on a local construction site anyway. Emily’s parents had come to realize that in many ways Newport was the most southern of the summer retreats, if only because rich old-timers had used it for generations to escape from the Carolina and Georgia coasts during the unremitting summer humidity.
The mecca for the well-off seemed even more packed than usual this season, the sheer number of socialites attracting press attention. Just a week into the summer season, the beach and cliff thronged “with excursionists,” the Times’ society pages declared, excitedly enumerating the upper-class vacationers. Who was visiting whom seemed the major preoccupation of the day. Henry Clews, Chauncey Depew, Edward Bulwer-Lytton of England, and Emily’s own little family of three were listed as the early arrivals. The Times noted that the Prices were frequent guests at Miss Catharine Lorillard Wolfe’s “palatial villa,” so large that even the neighbors refused to call it a “cottage.” Miss Wolfe had barely finished her new house in time for the season, and now she intended to share it with the Whartons of Philadelphia, the Goelets, the Van Alens, and the Jays, while they were busy laying the grounds for their own bungalows by the sea.
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