Historian Fact Checks Gilded Age Slop

I hate this video so much.

The streets just weren't that clean.

That's really bad. I hate that image.

I'm the host of The Gilded Gentleman podcast.

Let's fact check some AI slop.

[lively music] [pen scratching]

Let's watch the first video.

[tranquil music]

You think you'd survive the Gilded Age?

Girl, let me show you something.

In the Gilded Age, no one referred

to each other as Girl.

I would have, but it's... [Carl sighing]

Gloves, a hat and a vial of self-confidence.

Retail therapy. Oh, you have no idea.

This was the thing about buying coke

at the department store.

Like, what is this? This is like twisted.

Well, certainly there were some questionable substances

that were sold out there.

I have never seen any evidence

of something like this actually being sold

in a major department store.

So where you shopped in New York in the Gilded Age,

well, that told you a lot about who you were too.

The stretch of Broadway from Union Square

up to Madison Square was called Ladies' Mile.

And that's where some of the most famous retailers

that we've even come to know today were located.

Near Union Square, you had Tiffany & Company.

You also had Lord & Taylor and Brooks Brothers.

Now, this was called the carriage trade,

which means that it catered to ladies in carriages.

You would arrive in your carriage,

you would do your shopping, [pen scratching]

and then you would pile your packages into your carriage

and off they would go back home.

Two streets over on Sixth Avenue,

that was for another class of clientele

because that's where in the early 1870s

they built the elevated rail trains

and some of the early, what we would call today,

big box retailers were these big cast iron palaces.

All the big windows where all the wonderful offerings

were merchandised were up on the second level

because that's where the level of the trains were.

So as you went by on the train,

you could look out the window

and find the next purchase that you wanted to buy.

The idea of a department store was a brand new concept

that you could buy so many things in one place.

And what's even more interesting about that

is women could go shopping by themselves,

and that gave women a sense of agency and power.

They didn't need their husbands

and they didn't need a chaperone.

[button beeping]

Darling, it's 12 pounds of silk, six cracked ribs

and not even a single pocket.

Now, that's interesting here.

She talks about how tight the corsets were.

That's pretty true.

The perfect shape for a woman was often this hourglass

where you were cinched in.

But one of the things you have to remember

is what those corsets were made of.

Some of them were made of whale bone

or other natural fibers that actually gave

and allowed you to have a more comfortable fit.

My nanny feeds the baby beer and tells it to man up.

I don't ask questions.

In the Gilded Age, no one told anyone to man up.

Yeah, they probably, like,

rubbed their kids' gums with whiskey.

I think my mother did that.

Memorized 14 forks and 37 rules.

Still forgot how to chew in front of rich people.

When you went to a dinner party in the Gilded Age,

it was not about having a good time.

If you were new in town

and someone important invited you to a dinner,

that was a test to see how you managed all the glasses,

all the forks.

And if you failed, you would not be admitted into society.

Sometimes people got really stumped.

One of my favorite stories is the finger bowl,

the little crystal bowls with a little bit of citrus

where you would dab your fingers,

clean your fingers between courses.

Some people who didn't know

what they were doing drank them.

They failed.

The doctor removed my appendix in a back room.

He said I was too dramatic the whole time.

The inference here that there was no anesthesia

is not 100% correct.

Things like chloroform were used.

It would put you out, sometimes way out.

I really hate this video.

Next. [tranquil music]

[Narrator] We are in New York City,

the explosive electric heart

of the richest nation on Earth.

America has just clawed its way out of the Civil War.

In 1900, the Civil War had been over for 30 years.

Here we have some clearly computer-generated imagery

that doesn't really begin

to capture the spirit at all of the time.

[Instructor] And transformed in a single generation

into an industrial colossus.

Railroads stitched the continent together.

So here we see what's representing an oil refinery,

and let's remember the great oil fortune,

creator of Standard Oil, was Rockefeller.

[Narrator] And a tiny handful of men,

the so-called robber barons, have seized control of it all,

amassing the largest private fortunes in human history.

One of the things that I'd really question here

is this gentleman, handsome though he is,

looks very, very modern.

If you look back at the images of many of the robber barons

and the late Gilded Age tycoons, they all had facial hair,

mutton chops, long beards, [pen scratching]

and here we have a very modern look.

[Narrator] You wake in your mansion on Fifth Avenue

on the stretch they call Millionaire's Row.

Fifth Avenue, certainly in the area

around St. Patrick's Cathedral going up to Central Park,

was the home to many, many, many famous Gilded Age families.

I'm not even sure that's New York, but anyway, nevermind.

[Narrator] It is not a house.

It is a French Chateau

or an Italian palazzo or a Loire Valley castle.

Oh, that's really bad.

So here we have an example

of a supposed Fifth Avenue mansion.

Well, it's reflecting the French style all right,

but completely wrong.

This is actually representing the great French Chateau

of Chambord in the Loire Valley.

No mansion on Fifth Avenue ever looked like this.

That's really bad. I hate that image.

[Narrator] Ripped from Europe stone by stone

and reassembled in Manhattan

by the most fashionable architects in America.

I think it's a misrepresentation to imply

that mansions were torn down in Europe

and then reassembled over here.

This was new architecture.

Certain interior details,

such as fireplaces and staircases,

were brought from crumbling European chateaus

and palaces and castles,

but all those American palaces

were constructed brand new here.

[Narrator] The walls are hung

with genuine Old Master paintings,

snapped up by the crate from cash-poor European aristocrats.

What they're showing here is one

of the great Gilded Age barons buying art

and collecting art.

That's very true.

People like J.P. Morgan, Jay Gould,

Mrs. Astor, Henry Clay Frick,

all of them assembled extraordinary collections.

When you were building your collection,

it was also important to rely on an art consultant,

someone that you knew you could trust

in buying up old Master Art from Europe.

People like Bernard Berenson, people like Joseph Duveen

who advised Henry Clay Frick,

and even Belle da Costa Greene,

the famous librarian of the Morgan Library.

She assisted J.P. Morgan in creating and collecting some

of the most priceless manuscripts in the world.

[Narrator] You have telephones, central heating,

an elevator, and marble bathrooms

with hot and cold running water,

while the families in the tenements downtown

share a single cold tap among dozens.

That's true. [pen scratching]

That's very true.

[Narrator] Butlers, footmen in powdered wigs

and silk stockings, ladies' maids, valets,

and a French chef lured from a European court.

For a lady of the Gilded Age elite, hiring a French chef

for the kitchen was also a sign of status.

This was a great gig.

If you were a chef in Paris, you could get snapped up

and arrive in New York and have a whole new career.

In fact, it said that Caroline Astor did exactly that.

She enjoyed a meal at a French restaurant

and snapped up the chef.

[Narrator] The old families, the original Dutch

and English New York aristocracy,

guard the gates ferociously,

and they look upon the new industrial fortunes

with open contempt.

I'm so surprised to see a Grande Dame

sitting in a leather chair.

A leather chair would have been found in the library

or in the smoking rooms

and usually occupied by one of the gentlemen of the family.

A lady would be sitting in perhaps a Venetian

or French tapestry chair,

[pen scratching] not a leather one.

That just seems wrong to me.

[Narrator] One legendary heiress,

frozen out by the old guard,

built a fairytale chateau on Fifth Avenue.

So the house that they're talking about right here

was Alva Vanderbilt's Petit Chateau, the Little Chateau,

which was built in 1882,

and it was actually designed by one of the great architects

of the Gilded Age before Stanford White,

Richard Morris Hunt.

Alva loved everything French.

After all, she was educated in Paris

and she wanted to copy her house

after the Chateaus of the Loire,

but not the enormous ones,

the smaller, more intimate chateaus.

Intimate, of course, is a very relative term

in the Gilded Age.

[Narrator] And threw a costume ball so spectacular

and so expensive that the old families simply could not bear

to be excluded from it.

Now, it's doubtful

that Alva's ballroom looked anything like that.

And in fact, there are some photographs of the interior

of her house, which you can find.

But what's interesting here

is we have almost a baronial feeling here,

maybe a little bit of a medieval hall.

One of the traits of these Gilded Age mansions often

was to have rooms in different styles that didn't match.

You'd have a Tudor room, an Elizabethan room,

a Louis XV room, and all of it was meant

to reflect a long European heritage.

One of my favorite images

in that shot is the champagne fountain.

One mansion, and that was the mansion

of Leonard Jerome, had two.

One poured champagne and one poured cologne.

They did weird crap.

Next video. [tranquil music]

[Narrator] There were 400 people in America who mattered.

Carolyn Astor decided who they were.

Oh my gosh. Her name was not Carolyn, it was Caroline.

She was born Caroline Webster Schermerhorn.

The Schermerhorns

were a wealthy Dutch American trading family.

Her family made their money in importing

and selling goods here in New York.

In fact, the Schermerhorn building is still there

down by the seaport in Lower Manhattan.

[Narrator] One woman in a Fifth Avenue mansion

with a ballroom that held exactly 400 guests.

Yes, Caroline Astor

and her sidekick, Ward McAllister, decided

who they thought were part of proper New York society.

And you can see that depicted in the HBO series,

The Gilded Age, fairly accurately.

The number 400 actually came from a comment

of Ward McAllister's that he thought

that they were just about 400 people in good society.

He also said that it was about the number

that would fit into Mrs. Astor's ballroom.

Whether it was really 400 or not, we'll never know.

[Narrator] Mrs. Astor's annual ball

was the most powerful event in American social life.

Every year in January, Caroline Astor would hold

what she called her Annual Opera Ball.

Why was it called an opera ball?

Because it began with a performance at the opera.

So imagine going to the opera,

sitting through several hours, getting in your carriage

and going to Mrs. Astor's where you knew

you would be up all night long eating and dancing.

Let's move on. [tranquil music]

[Narrator] Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883.

People were terrified it might collapse.

The Brooklyn Bridge and its opening in 1883

was called one of the wonders of the world.

To create a suspension bridge this large

and this complex was something no one had ever seen.

Brooklyn was its own separate city

and remained so until the end of the 19th century

when all the boroughs consolidated.

So until the Brooklyn Bridge was born,

how did you get from Manhattan over to Brooklyn?

Well, the Fulton Ferry was your answer,

and this particular path between Manhattan and Brooklyn

is what eventually became the same path

that was replicated by the Brooklyn Bridge.

[Narrator] Just a year later,

a deadly stampede killed 12 people

when a rumor spread that the bridge was falling.

To prove its strength once and for all,

P.T. Barnum stepped in with a wild idea, elephants.

Oh my gosh, P.T. Barnum.

P.T. Barnum was one of the great marketers

of the 19th century.

He could sell anybody anything.

He had a museum downtown,

but he was also looking for the biggest publicity moments

that he could find that helped him and helped his museum.

[Narrator] Barnum marched 21 elephants,

including the legendary Jumbo, across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The public's fear disappeared, replaced by awe.

And the Brooklyn Bridge, even today, inspires awe.

The same bridge exists

and it's still carrying traffic all these years since 1883.

One of my favorite stories about the Brooklyn Bridge

isn't really about the bridge at all,

but it's about the people that created it.

Washington Roebling, who is in charge

of building the bridge,

actually developed the bends in the process

of the bridge being built, and he was incapacitated at home,

and it was his wife, Emily,

that was instrumental in finishing the bridge.

Washington gave her instructions, taught her,

educated her about the process,

and she interacted with designers,

with the actual construction crew,

and it was through her efforts

that the bridge finally was built.

She became the first person to cross that bridge

in a carriage once it finally opened to the public.

Next. [tranquil music]

[Narrator] September 4th, 1882,

Edison flipped the switch

at the Pearl Street Station in Lower Manhattan.

The massive dynamos roared to light.

One of my favorite phrases

is the Great White Way of Broadway.

Well, the origin of that

is because of the white light bulbs

that were now lining the street, the Great White Way.

Not much else here. Next. [tranquil music]

[Narrator] The Newport Cliff Walk wasn't exercise,

it was theater.

Every afternoon, the women of the 400 appeared

on that path in full dress.

Now we find ourselves in Newport,

and if there was ever a place to see and be seen,

Newport, Rhode Island was it.

Here we find ourselves on the cliff walk,

which is the windy path that goes behind all

of the mansions overlooking the ocean.

First of all, this was not a place to see and be seen.

That would've been done on Bellevue Avenue

or Ocean Avenue in front of the mansions,

and every afternoon, around 3 or 4 o'clock,

you would've climbed into your carriage,

and that was the great parade up and down,

and that's where you would've shown off your best.

And also, when we look at the gowns

and the dress, these are ball gowns.

They're incredibly elegant, but they weren't day dresses.

This is not what a woman of this social class

and style would've worn in the afternoon.

That would've been worn at night.

No Gilded Age woman

that would've been living in Newport

would've had these trains [pen scratching]

that would drag in the dirt like that

and would've gotten really filthy

by the time you'd only walked a couple of feet.

A day dress would've been certainly elegant,

but of course the hem would've come up a little bit

so it would've cleared the dirt and the rocks on that path.

[Narrator] Who walked beside you mattered,

who nodded, who looked away.

All the women understood this.

Cliff walk was also a public space.

Virtually anybody could walk along here.

The elite were not gonna mix with just anyone.

Next. [tranquil music]

[Narrator] They called it a cottage,

70 rooms, 44,000 square feet,

a limestone palace on the cliffs of Newport, Rhode Island.

When you go to Newport today, many of these houses,

excuse me, many of these cottages that were built

during the Gilded Age are still there that you can visit.

What's interesting is that at this point,

they were copying European style.

The Breakers is entirely Italian Renaissance.

Other properties look more like they've been transported

from the French chateaus in the Loire Valley.

One of the most famous marble house

was built by Alva Vanderbilt

and designed like one of the Petit Trianon at Versailles.

[Narrator] The Breakers was not a home,

it was a declaration,

a statement written in Italian Renaissance marble

and gilded ceilings.

So many of these families wanted to copy

and mirror European royalty and aristocracy.

The Vanderbilts imagined themself

as the Italian Renaissance Medici family.

Who were the Medicis? They were the merchant princes.

They made a great deal of money in banking and in trade.

The Vanderbilts actually thought

they were a modern-day Medici family.

In fact, if you visit one of their mansions

in Hyde Park, New York, you see the Medici coat of arms

in their own drawing room.

Not everyone agreed however.

The great writer, Edith Wharton,

thought this was vulgar and garish taste.

And in fact, she wrote in a letter

that the Vanderbilts seemed entrenched in a Thermopylae

of bad taste from which no force on Earth can extract them.

[Narrator] Every room was designed to be seen,

not lived in.

The great hall alone rose 50 feet.

When you look at a Gilded Age mansion,

certainly like those of Newport or elsewhere,

you have to look at it with very specific eyes.

We think of a place to live

where we would like to spend our time.

They thought of it very differently.

The actual living quarters were often fairly small

and they were on upper floors.

What we see on the ground floor

or the first floors are really stage sets.

They're very calculated spaces intended

to convey certain messages about wealth, status, and power.

[Narrator] Vanderbilts used it for six weeks a year,

then they closed it and left.

So when you look at these grand houses,

they actually were not intended to live in all year long.

In fact, many wealthy Gilded Age families

had rather a nomadic lifestyle.

The fall into the winter was spent here in New York

in your townhouse.

The spring was spent traveling in Europe,

usually in Paris to buy new dresses from Worth.

And then by late spring, you moved to Newport

and you were there for the entire summer season

until early fall comes back and you're back in town.

Next. [tranquil music]

[drapes whooshing] [lively music]

Breakfast in the Gilded Age.

That would've been a simple breakfast in bed

of maybe some toast, some eggs.

That croissant? [pen scratching]

I don't think so.

Have you ever tried to eat a croissant in bed?

You know what I mean.

I would think that someone like this,

of this stature and this period,

would be living along Central Park,

and this looks like we're in the middle of town.

Good morning, sir. [lively music]

[tea tinkling]

Uh, it's those croissants again.

Everyone was trying to emulate France and French

and things that were elegant,

but you tended to save that for a dinner party

when you were entertaining 400 of your closest friends.

Have a pleasant morning, sir.

[lively music] [hooves pounding]

[bell clanging]

So this looks like it's trying to be Fifth Avenue,

but if that's St. Patrick's, it's on the wrong angle

because that's on a cross street

and St. Patrick's would've been parallel to Fifth Avenue.

And also, let's take a closer look

at the condition of the streets.

You have to remember that horses

were the main mode of transportation.

There were often other animals

that were running wild in the streets too,

and they just weren't that clean.

[lively music]

[Narrator] Softly, may I present our newest acquisition?

The company that we know as Tiffany & Company

was founded by Charles Lewis Tiffany way downtown.

It evolved, it focused on silver

and also fine jewelry, diamonds, emeralds, rubies.

But in the Gilded Age, at the end of it in 1902,

Charles Lewis Tiffany dies,

and his son, Louis Comfort Tiffany,

who's far more famous for his stained glasswork,

takes over as design and art director,

and he changes the focus of Tiffany a little bit in 1905.

That would probably be not the moment

when someone was looking for this kind of necklace.

[lively music]

Let's take a closer look at this shot of Central Park.

A lot of the buildings surrounding Central Park,

particularly on that side,

which it looks to be the West Side,

would've been residential buildings,

but they wouldn't have been this tall by the date

of this supposed shot here, which is 1905.

Two of the most famous, the San Remo and the Beresford,

they're still there to this day,

and that looks like what they're trying to emulate here.

Those were built a little bit later than what we have here.

[lively music] For monsieur.

Ah, the lobster.

I'm a boy from Maine.

How can I not love a shot of a lobster?

But here we are in a fine dining restaurant.

Lobster could have been served.

Certainly it was served at Delmonico's,

but not an entire lobster [pen scratching]

that you would have to really get messy

and pull it apart with the picks and the knives.

Certainly not when you're wearing your best clothes.

So what would have been on this table was likely a dish

that was popularized by Delmonico's called Lobster Newburg,

which is the claw and the tail meat served

in a beautiful sauce of sherry and cream and butter,

not a whole entire boiled lobster.

You certainly would have had the oysters.

New Yorkers have been slurping those,

whether you're fancy or not, for decades.

[lively music]

Now, this is a very grand opera house.

We wouldn't have had the same kind

of opera house here in New York.

This looks like it's very much modeled

on a European theater.

The Metropolitan Opera House, when it was built in 1883,

actually had a very small vestibule.

You wouldn't have seen this at all,

but then if we move forward to look at the interior

of the theater, the most important thing here are the boxes

and you see them ringed around.

These were the most expensive.

One of the signs of status in Gilded Age Society

was whether you owned a box at the opera.

The original opera house before the Metropolitan Opera

was the Academy of Music on 14th Street and Irving Place.

Well, that theater only had 18 boxes

and they were all subscribed to the older families.

When Alva Vanderbilt came along,

she wanted a box at the opera too,

but there were none to be had.

She said, I'll pay $30,000, which was an awful lot

of money at the time, for my own box.

That even didn't work.

So she spoke to her husband and the Vanderbilts

and the Morgans and some others got their money together

and built a brand new opera house way uptown on 39th Street

and Broadway with many more boxes.

Alva finally got her own box at the opera.

Next. [people talking indistinctly]

So here we see another side of life in the Gilded Age.

This is the tenement life of the Lower East Side.

Life overflowed onto stairways and hallways

and rooms full of people.

These were not particularly large buildings,

but they were crammed with multiple families.

[Tenant] Can you hear me over there, Tony?

Still owe me for the bread.

So the back of these tenement buildings

were often common areas

that were bordered by other buildings.

This was a place where so many different populations

of the immigrants came together throughout the 19th century.

There were waves of immigration,

beginning with the Irish in the 1840s,

then the Germans, followed by the Italians,

and then at the end of the century,

many of the Eastern Europeans

and Russians all coming together.

So in the backyard of a tenement building,

you'd hear different languages,

you'd hear different accents,

you'd hear different levels of English,

all combining to become a new America.

Oh, let's watch another video.

[tranquil music]

[Narrator] Welcome to New York City in the year 1880.

We will start at Castle Garden.

Long before Ellis Island ever existed,

Castle Garden was the point of immigration

through a substantial part of the 19th century

until the later part of the 19th century.

Everything transferred to Ellis Island.

Castle Garden continued on

and became a theater, an aquarium,

a venue for public performances,

but the foundations are still there.

[Narrator] The twin spires

of the new St. Patrick's Cathedral

have just been completed, but look around us,

the city is still becoming.

One of the points that I think is so important

to make when we try to imagine

what life was like in Gilded Age New York, for a lot of it,

it was essentially a construction zone.

These buildings didn't all exist at one time

in beautiful blocks with beautiful avenues.

It all had to be built, and the city moved south

and moved north.

When you look at images with muddy, dirty pits

right next to a beautiful mansion,

that's pretty close to the way it really was.

Okay, next video. [tranquil music]

[Narrator] New York in the 1890s

was becoming the city we recognize today.

We've used AI reconstruction

to bring these historical photographs to life.

I particularly like this image.

Let's take a closer look at it.

Here you have the beautiful Grand Hotel,

but right next door,

you have an older, dilapidated building,

part of the older city, which eventually, of course,

is going to be torn down.

We think of Park Avenue as a very elegant address today,

and it was becoming so in the Gilded Age,

but we have to remember

that there were originally train tracks there

that were leading from Grand Central Station

out of the city.

Eventually, they were covered over and beautiful hotels

and residences began to be constructed.

But what you have is brand new construction

with bits of the old city interspersed throughout.

That's what the Gilded Age really looked like.

[Narrator] In 1898,

the elevated train tracks curve overhead.

I particularly like videos

that are created this way using AI,

which means to start with a real photograph of the period

and then using the computer to animate them

so we get a sense of the look and the feel and the movement

and all the smells of the original city.

Next. [tranquil music]

[Narrator] Every afternoon, the wealthiest women

in the city circled Central Park's carriage loop.

And this is true.

Every afternoon, around 4 o'clock,

the wealthy would get in their carriages

and they would go for a drive in Central Park.

One of the carriage turnarounds is still there

in the park today,

and that great mall with the great trees,

that was where these families went in their carriages

and you watched who was going by

and perhaps whose daughter your son could marry.

Since we're in Central Park,

let's take another look at those skyscrapers

that we see in the background.

Very modern skyscrapers, and the height of them,

that's what you would actually see today,

and certainly not the skyline

of the period they're trying to recreate here.

Skyscrapers were actually able to be created thanks

to improvements in structural steel

and also elevators that allowed you to move up

to further heights in the buildings.

One of the most famous was in 1902

when the Flatiron Building rose at Madison Square Park,

but as the city moved north,

buildings of great height moved right along with them,

but these, not right now.

[Narrator] Who you rode with, who you nodded to,

who you looked past without blinking,

it was all reported in the society pages

by the next morning.

The newspaper and the media was working overtime

during the Gilded Age,

who threw what ball, what they wore,

and who exactly was there,

and Caroline Astor's name appeared pretty frequently

in the press.

Next video. [tranquil music]

[Narrator] When Astor died in 1908,

the system didn't collapse, it shifted.

One of the most important things

when you were of society in the Gilded Age

was to have your portrait painted,

and Caroline Astor did exactly that.

She didn't choose John Singer Sargent.

She chose another painter, the famous French Carolus-Duran,

and she went to Paris to have her portrait painted.

This is a very similar image to the original portrait,

which you can see today

at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[Narrator] Alva Belmont, Mamie Fish,

Theresa Oelrichs, three women,

one throne, same machinery.

So Caroline Astor dies in 1908.

Does Gilded Age Society collapse?

It doesn't. It continues on.

There were other women that had worked along Caroline Astor,

but actually took over her role in the end.

One of my favorites was the great Mamie Fish

who came from a very good old New York family,

plenty of money.

She's played brilliantly by the actor Ashlie Atkinson

in the HBO series.

All these women started to break the rules.

You could go to restaurants, you didn't have to wear a hat,

you could expose your neck and shoulders at dinner.

All of these things showed a path

for a new society and a new woman.

Well, that's all the AI slop for today. Thanks for watching.

[lively music]