 Good afternoon everyone. I think we have a couple folks settling in but we're gonna get started because I know everyone's very anxious and the room is wonderfully full almost. Well everyone welcome to Cooper Hewitt's Smithsonian Design Museum. My name is Kim Robledo-Diga. I am the Director of Learning and Audience Engagement here at Cooper Hewitt's and as you've seen probably from the slide deck that was previous to this slide you are part of a program. This wonderful program is part of our National Design Week so hopefully some of you've been taking advantage of our other programs this past week and we have free admission through Sunday so please do continue to come back. So I'm happy to introduce Keith Talian who is a New York City historian, writer, researcher, and tour guide. His Instagram account at Keith York City seeks to unpack the city's history and help readers better understand and appreciate its development. Many of us have experienced New York City through the history and its history of the built environment through Keith's Instagram account which currently has over 45,000 followers, hopefully another 80 so plus more after today if they aren't following already, and during the uncertain days of the pandemic we could you know roam around New York City and learn about its buildings and peoples through Keith's engaging and informative content so he kept us connected with the city when we're all locked down. Keith and his work have been featured in The New Yorker, The Times of London, and The Daily Beast, Surface Magazine, Condé Nast, Traveller, and El Decor. He has been a guest lecturer at Cooper Hewitt, Atlas Obscura, Parsons, the New School of Design, and Robert A.M. and M. Stern Architects. In 2020 he walked every street in Manhattan and he resides in Harlem. A note that this week is the last week for the Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt Designing a Modern Museum exhibition on the second floor. It closes at the end of this Sunday and the exhibit charts the history of this museum and it's remarkable remarkable women who founded it so please take advantage today because it closes at the end of Sunday if you haven't seen it already. Thank you to Adobe, IBM, Metta, the Hirsch Family Foundation, and his generous supporters including Cooper Hewitt's Board of Trustees for making this program possible. I also like to thank, before I pass it off to Keith, my amazing team that I'm lucky to be a part of. We have two Alexis, Alexa Griffith and Alexa Cummins, Sheamus, Angela, Kirsten, Miguel, Robin, Daniela, and Emily who either hosted you coming in, checked you in, is currently videotaping this or managing the lighting, lots of behind-the-scenes and some will be participating and helping you during the walking tour this afternoon for those who you are attending that. So I am going to stop speaking now and pass you off to the person you're here to see. So welcome Keith. So my word's not going to fall. Let's see what happens. Hi everybody. Thank you so much for coming out to listen to me yammer about history, the way I love to so much today on this beautiful Friday. Today's lecture is going to be a sensibly talking about the neighborhood in which we're all sitting and standing right now, Carnegie Hill. I was talking before my lecture today that I'm going to be struggling today because I'm trying to train myself to say Carnegie, the way that Andrew Carnegie would have said it, which is Carnegie, but something about saying Carnegie Hill doesn't feel right in my mouth. So we'll see how I do with that today. Today's lecture will be split up roughly into four parts. One, infrastructure. Two, the Gilded Age. Three, Yorkville, and four, Carnegie Hill will unpack essentially how the neighborhood where the Carnegie mansion now stands came to be. Part one, infrastructure. As of the early 19th century, New York City was an established port town on the American Eastern seaboard, one of several large and prosperous towns like Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, even New Orleans, all towns that were vying for economic and commercial primacy in the relatively young new nation of the United States. Now at the time, the United States, the original 13 ish colonies were rapidly expanding into what's now what we would now call the Midwest, what we're then called the Northwestern Territories, as well as the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase Territories. Pretty much about the central third of what's now the United States had recently been acquired and was rapidly being divided up into territories and new states. So there was a lot of raw commercial product being produced in these Northwestern colonies and territories, and also a large and growing market for goods produced or imported on the Eastern seaboard to be sold to people moving out there to the west of the Appalachian Mountains. And the issue was that in an era before any sort of rapid transportation, obviously before highways, but even before railroads broke into the American interior, there were really three main ways in which commerce could get in or out of what's now the Midwest. Those are represented by the three lines on the map. Behind me right now, one of those, let's say you lived in Wisconsin, you needed to get lumber to market. You could float that lumber by barge down the Mississippi River out New Orleans through the Gulf of Mexico around the tip of Florida and then finally up to the Eastern seaboard or across the Atlantic to Europe. This process took weeks and was very expensive and completely reliant upon the ability to reserve a space on a barge and to get your product onto it. The second option is represented by the short line in the middle there. This is an overland option, whereas you could put your goods onto a wagon that would then be hauled over rutted dirt roads over the Appalachian Mountains and then down the other side onto the Eastern seaboard to then be brought to port and either sold or sailed over to markets in Europe. Just like the Mississippi River option, this took many weeks and cost a lot of money and was also rather risky. If the wagon broke down, you could potentially lose whatever goods you had on it. But as difficult as those two options were, the third option was arguably the worst of the three and that's the line that goes up around through the St. Lawrence River in what was then British held Canada. Remember that we're talking the 1820s, we had just barely finished fighting the War of 1812 against the British primarily via Canada. So sending the economic lifeblood of our growing country and economy through the center of a British held territory didn't seem like the most ideal of methods and even then even if it wasn't so bad geopolitically, it took just about as long if not longer to sail your goods up through the St. Lawrence around Gaspe Point and Nova Scotia and then down to the Eastern seaboard or to Europe as it did to send it down the Mississippi or over the Appalachian. So all that's my long winded way of saying that there were no good options to get goods in or out of the territories and states on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and New York State set about to change that. The result of that was the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. What the Erie Canal did was literally cut a waterway across the width of New York State connecting Lake Erie at Buffalo to the Hudson River near Albany. Pretty much overnight when this opened in 1825 it revolutionized not just New York's economy but the entire country's economy. Now goods rather than going down the Mississippi over the Appalachians or over the St. Lawrence and around Nova Scotia goods could just sail via the Great Lakes through Buffalo across the width of New York and then down the Hudson River and out New York Harbor either to markets elsewhere on the Eastern seaboard as I've been saying markets in Europe. Something like 80 to 90% of all goods that used to have to pick their poison so to speak the Mississippi or the Appalachians were now redirected directly through New York Harbor which answers the question that I get a lot when I do walking tours of why is New York so why did New York become so much larger and more important to the nation than any other port town. There were lots of other good ports. There were lots of other cities about the size of New York at the end of the American Revolution. How did New York become so singularly successful and arguably I would argue that you can point directly to the Erie Canal is the reason for that. Now with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 the city's population and economy grew by leaps and bounds. You can see this drawing this drawing was actually made around 1850. This is looking at Lower Manhattan the green patch on the left is Battery Park. If you look closely you'll start to recognize some church steeples like Trinity Church, St. Paul's Chapel. You can even find City Hall on this map. But what the reason I cropped this map down to just this area of looking at Lower Manhattan is I want you to look at the waterfront down at the bottom of the image. Look at how many ships the artist has drawn here. Now obviously there's some artistic license involved here but the point of this was to impress upon viewers just how busy and prosperous the New York City Harbor was in the decades following the opening of the Erie Canal. There are so many ships here you really can't pick one out from the others. This is meant to celebrate New York's economic prosperity but with that prosperity came real urban issues things that we still to a certain extent struggle with today but namely overcrowding and disease. This is a clipping from I think this is the New York Herald it might be the Tribune one of the two before they became the Herald Tribune and then went out of business altogether but this is a list of business announcements from 1822 so just before the Erie Canal opened so this was already an issue before the canal exacerbated it but these are all listings from businesses in New York City announcing that they were moving out mostly to Greenwich Village to escape the seasonal sickness. Most of these just say removed for the present from there I'm looking at one Thomas Dixon and Co on the left side the fourth article down Thomas Dixon and Co have removed for the present from 77 Pine Street so down in what's now the financial district to the corner of Hammond and Greenwich streets and that's what all of these ads were and this is just a snapshot of an entire page filled with ads like this and some of them more specifically if you look two down from the Thomas Dixon ad that I just talked about the Benjamin McCready ad it more explicitly says Benjamin McCready has removed parentheses during the sickness to Brooklyn near Pierpont Distillery fifth house from the military garden in Jirolemans Lane so this the unhealthiness of this rapidly growing city threatened to upend all the economic success that came with the opening of the Erie Canal and so in response to that the same way that New York leaders had opened the Erie Canal to harness that economy that economic success they set about to cure the problem of health in the city by building the Croton water system which was completed first in 1842 what the Croton the original Croton water system was and we still generally rely on the system just a wholly new system of reservoirs and aqueducts today but what it did was dam up the Croton River in West Chester County which is on the left side of the map on the screen and then run the freshwater from the resulting lake via system of like 40 miles of aqueducts down through what's now the Bronx across the Harlem River into what's now Washington Heights Harlem the Upper West Side and finally to a collecting reservoir in the middle of what's now Central Park Central Park wouldn't exist for another decade and a half after this was open but then from that first reservoir the water was piped under Fifth Avenue to a distributing reservoir at what's now the New York Public Library that was in a nutshell the city's first comprehensive water system giving the city and its rapidly growing population clean drinking water so that we didn't have annual cycles of cholera typhoid and yellow fever washing through the population and upending the the city's ability to continue growing but what this did was encourage the city to continue growing north this is an image from 1853 the year that New York hosted the United States First World's Fair you can see the Crystal Palace that used to stand where Bryant Park is today in the forefront on the right of the screen to the left of that Crystal Palace which was built by the same architect who did the Crystal Palace in 1851 in London we brought him over so that we could try to copy London as closely as possible but you'll see a raised giant swimming pool that is the distributing reservoir of the Croton system and just beyond that you can see what's now Murray Hill and the theater district Murray Hill on the left the theater district on the right this was pretty much the extent of the city's populated area as of the 1850s when the World's Fair was held in what's now Bryant Park they were actually interestingly reports in the newspapers in 1853 of tourists visiting New York to attend the World's Fair and being unable to get up there because the street cars ended about five blocks south of it so people would come here they'd enter in New York City which was then lower Manhattan ride a street car or a carriage all the way to the edge of town and still have to walk another quarter mile through the dust and and fields to get to the World's Fair but that aside New York was rapidly growing and succeeding and by the time the population grew up into what's now Murray Hill and approached 42nd Street and the Gilded Age was beginning to dawn now I do a Gilded Age walking tour pretty often and I always start long before the Gilded Age actually began historically the Gilded Age is dictated as being somewhere between 1870 and 1910 those are the somewhat hard boundaries of what we consider the Gilded Age but really the reason I did part one on infrastructure is because it was the Erie Canal and the Croton water system that allowed the city to grow and prosper to the point that we can have Gilding on our otherwise Manic City because that is an important distinction here to make is that we had a Gilded Age not a Golden Age where if you compare the two Gilding is a very thin layer of gold over something less valuable beneath that's what we had we had a very small wealthy population over an otherwise teeming and chaotic city now going back this is the map that I had zoomed in on earlier but panned out to show the entire thing and you can see how concentrated New York City's population was on the lower end of Manhattan in fact as an artistic interpretation of the city at the time they have blown up lower Manhattan to make it look even geographically larger than it actually was you can see just across the river in the background the little cluster of buildings that's now roughly Jersey City and then the bare land up the Palisades on the west side and you can just see a little inkling of Governor's Island at the bottom and Brooklyn on the right but the focal point of the image of Manhattan itself I've drawn a line on the map depicting the location of 40th Street and you can see that everything north of 40th Street is just kind of faded out to nothingness because there was really nothing up there if we zoom in on the area north of 40th Street I've left the line and placed at 40th Street here and if you look closely the most if I don't know how clearly you can see this from all the way back in the audience but if you look closely at the map here you can see a little train chugging down the middle right part of the island that is what's now Metro North so that's Park Avenue and then if you look immediately to the left of the train right up against the black line I've drawn on 40th Street you'll see a little castle type building that is the distributing reservoir that I showed a couple slides ago in what's now in what's now Bryant Park where the New York Public Libraries now stand so that should help place you here and but more importantly show you how little thought really was given to drawing the upper part of Manhattan and when I say upper I mean north of 40th Street we're not talking all the way up here where we are 90th and 91st streets that's not even on the map it was so rural that pretty much everything north of about 86th Street just vanishes off into the ether at the top of the map here if you look closely at the map find the train again on the map and look just above it you'll see a little castle building that is the armory in Central Park where the zoo is today and just above that you'll see another swimming pool that is the other Croton reservoir so the the collecting reservoir so that was the water's first stop in Manhattan that was demolished in the 1920s to make the great lawn in Central Park so again just to help place you on the map here so what was going on north of 40th Street that was so unimportant first you have to remember that Central Park wasn't even approved as a concept until the early 1850s and it didn't really begin opening to the public in phases until the early mid-1960s and wasn't completed until the early 1870s so when the Erie Canal was completed we're talking 30 to 40 years before Central Park was even completed so there really was no pull to the north for the city other than a general desire by the city's wealthy population to flee from the increasing density and commercialization of the city as it existed one of the greatest themes that you'll find when you research New York's growth particularly in the 19th century is that wealthy people constantly were pushed and pulled out of the city pushed by the increasing industrialization of the city you didn't want to live next to a factory or a hotel or a brothel but also pulled because the land on which their houses stood in older neighborhoods like let's say a wealthy family lived for generations on Battery Park with the opening of the Erie Canal and the increased commercialization of the city that land where their house stood was now much more valuable as a redevelopment site for a warehouse or a hotel or a brothel and so with that profit in mind families would very quickly sell their houses in the old neighborhood that would be redeveloped and the family would then reestablish themselves in a new neighborhood on the edge of town away from the factory's hotels and brothels this happened again and again about every 20 years about every generation wealthy New Yorkers would decamp the overcrowded city to the edge of town they would then be followed by commerce who wanted their business the business would then be followed by industry which wanted to provide goods to the businesses and then the industry would be followed by tenement and poor immigrant districts to provide laborers to work in those factories and suddenly within 10 or 20 years the people who had moved out to the countryside found themselves surrounded by the same city they had been trying to escape and so with that cyclical action moving north ever northward up the island Manhattan eventually filled up which is how not to give any spoilers but that's eventually how we end up with the area where we're sitting filled up but how specifically Dekarney, Ghee Hill become what it is today so this the image I have open the screen right now is number four West 54th Street it's an interesting house unto itself it was later purchased by John D. Rockefeller and then was demolished for an expansion of MoMA but it was one of the first Brownstone true Brownstone mansions built north of 42nd Street it stood on 54th Street which was in the 1860s still a bit of a hinterland you can see just behind the house there are literal wooden shacks and open fields behind it the streets have been laid out on the left that street you can see running diagonally on the left side of the image is Fifth Avenue this was about as populated as the area between what will become Central Park and the reservoir of 42nd Street was for most of the area during the Civil War this is one of my favorite photos depicting that area so this is around 1871 looking northwest from 55th Street and Madison Avenue the prominent gravel road there is Madison Avenue and you can see there's a church under construction on the right and a cluster of houses in the background most prominently if you look closely at that cluster of houses you'll see one of them with a very high mansor groove is white whereas the rest are all brown that white one is the marble row of Mary Mason Jones who was what's the word I'm looking for she was placed in history by her distant cousin Edith Wharton in the Age of Innocence she's Mrs. Manson Mingott so Mary Mason Jones I just like to point out that house because she built her house at 57th Street where the Louis Vuitton Store is now in 1869 which if you remember 1869 I mean that's this is roughly what the rest of the neighborhood looked like a house here or there but otherwise dirt fields goat farms and dusty gravel roads and Mary Mason Jones had inherited land up in that area in the 1850s or 60s and decided in 1869 rather than to resell the land or lease it out to someone else that she would actually build her own house on that plot of land so in 1869 long before anyone else thought to do so she moved up to 57th Street and as Edith Wharton would later say would sit in her parlor window looking south waiting for society to catch up to her which is also why there's a somewhat apocryphal tie between Mary Mason Jones and her family and the phrase keeping up with the Joneses because people were trying to keep up with her who was ahead of the time but all that is to say that Mary Mason Jones moved up there just as Central Park was beginning to open up it was Central Park was as I said first approved in the 1850s began opening to the public in phases in the 1860s these two maps here depict the land that would become Central Park as it existed originally and then the plan that it would become after being designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux at the bottom and the top map interestingly you can see the reservoir that I pointed out earlier on the map at the center of the park what's now the great lawn and just above that on the map you can see a little smattering of dots those are the buildings of Seneca Village so that's the mostly the black majority community that was evicted to build Central Park as Central Park opened it did make the land north of 42nd Street more attractive to people beyond just Mary Mason Jones and that one brownstone on 54th Street but the question was as wealthy people began to be commercialized out of Murray Hill which was for most of the Gilded Age the premier neighborhood for people it was anchored by Mrs. Aster Carolyn Skirmahorn Aster who lived at 34th Street the question was that inevitably Murray Hill would convert to commercialism and industrialization and where would the wealthy population go next would they push north of 42nd Street into the no man's land between the reservoir and the park or would they leap all the way over that no man's land ahead of Mary Mason Jones to live on this newly established park would this be enough of a draw to make people skip a mile of the city and move all the way north oh I forgot I have this picture in here so this is another picture that I love this is where the Pulitzer Fountain is today in front of the plaza you can see the trees in the background that is Central Park so this is the southwest corner of 59th and 5th looking up into what would become the park so this is what Mary Mason Jones moved into essentially and the question of what would happen to the area north of 42nd Street was mostly answered by the Vanderbilt family the Vanderbilt's made their initial fortune in fairies the Vanderbilt's were an old Dutch family farming and running a small estate on Staten Island and in the Raritan River Valley across the kill in New Jersey but Cornelius Vanderbilt known to history as the Commodore took his father's fairy business his father would run one boat between Manhattan and Staten Island and other points around New York Harbor but young Cornelius took his father's boat and business and expanded it radically buying more boats hiring more pilots and running more and more fairy lines around New York Harbor Long Island Sound the Hudson River and along the eastern seaboard of the U.S. Now that's not how we tend to think of the Vanderbilt's we think of them as a railroad family and the reason for that is that by the 1860s Cornelius the Commodore recognizing that fairy travel was not the way of the future began to divest himself of his very fortune and reinvest that money in railroad his three chief acquisitions in the 1860s were the New York and Harlem Railroad what's now Metro North on 4th Avenue the New York and Hudson Railroad which is now Amtrak along the Hudson River in Manhattan as well as the New York Central Railroad which runs it's now Amtrak between Albany and Buffalo and points beyond out to Chicago those three railroads combined he then named collectively the New York Central Railroad and with the acquisition of all those lines the consolidation of his whole rail system he built a new Grand Central Depot depicted here at 42nd Street and 4th Avenue or Park Avenue this was meant to establish the primacy of the New York Central Railroad in New York but what it served to do more tangentially was that it established a new center for a new potential center for society on the north side of 42nd Street because immediately with the opening of this train terminal everybody traveling into New York from points beyond like Albany or Boston were now being disgorged on all the way up on 42nd Street in that no man's land that people had been speculating about this terminal the Depot opened in 1871 roughly on the site that the current terminal sits which was completed in 1913 around the Depot though grew very rapidly a collection of hotels to serve those tourists pouring into town which became an attraction in and of themselves to New Yorkers wealthy New Yorkers high society New Yorkers that previously would have gone down to someplace like Madison Square to eat in the restaurant or go to balls at hotels down there now found a new hotel social tourism travel center opening up around 42nd Street now carrying that Vanderbilt family influence forward Cornelius the Commodore died in 1877 and his estate worth somewhere around 150-ish million dollars in 1877 passed whole to his son almost whole to his son William Henry Vanderbilt otherwise known as Billy Billy had eight children and Billy his wife and six of their children immediately took their inheritance and moved north of 42nd Street where they could where they were able to in that no man's land again between the reservoir and the park they were able to get lots of land big enough to build houses commensurate with their new found wealth the Vanderbilt family had otherwise been clustered down around 4th Avenue on the east side of Murray Hill but now flush with all of their patriarch's inheritance money they wanted to build something that said that the Vanderbilt had truly arrived in society and so that open land they 5th Avenue by this point had been cemented as the city's chief wealthy address and the only stretch of 5th Avenue that was still widely available for building but still close enough to the city to partake in all the social comings and goings that were happening in Murray Hill was that no man's land between the reservoir at 42nd Street and Central Park at 59th Street and so Billy and like I said six of his adult children moved into a row of mansions on the west side of 5th Avenue between 51st Street and 58th Street they built seven mansions I did mention that Billy Billy who lived in the frontmost mansion here closest to the camera this is 51st and 5th so where his mansion stood is now Victoria's secret I don't like saying it any more than you like hearing it lost my train oh so he had eight children just to close that out six of the children on this row of mansions and what was known as Vanderbilt Row or if you didn't like the Vanderbilt to Vanderbilt Alley the other two children that didn't move into this row was his third son Frederick who's more famous for building Rough Point in Newport and the Newport mansion at Hyde Park he and his wife moved into Billy's old mansion at 40th and 5th where the Stavros-Niarchos branch at the NYPL is today not the same building it was torn down and replaced by a department store that's now a library it's just it's all very hard to keep up with but that's where he lived and then the youngest son George Washington Vanderbilt the second was too young to have his own house and by the time he came of age didn't want anything to do with Fifth Avenue Society so instead he took his inheritance and moved down to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina and built built more estate down there so that's when we think of the Vanderbilt and Gilded Age mansions and we see pictures like this and we immediately know what time period we're talking about these are the Vanderbilt's we're talking about the son and grandchildren of the Commodore who established the family's fortune this is the largest of all the Vanderbilt mansions this is looking southwest from 59th and 5th this mansion was later replaced by Bergdorf Goodman but this was the house of Billy's eldest son Cornelius Vanderbilt the second really just to show you what became of that No Man's Land stretch so where just 20 years prior Mary Mason Jones was living alone in her marble house you now can see a non an unbroken line of very fine Chateau-esque mansions and church steeples running from 58th street all the way down contiguously into Murray Hill this is where the Gilded Age occurred generally speaking old money families living south of 42nd street in Murray Hill new money families spearheaded by the Vanderbilt's living north of 42nd street now moving on to part three what was going on up here while all of that was happening down below 59th street and that was the town of Yorkville Yorkville existed roughly centered on what's now 86th street between second around second third and fourth avenues or park at what would later become Park Avenue people began moving up there starting in the 1830s with the arrival of the New York and Harlem Railroad one of the lines that would eventually be purchased by the Vanderbilt's the New York and Harlem ran down the center of Fourth Avenue and had a station at 86th street in what was then the middle of nowhere but with that station opening some people began to move up to the countryside to establish a little village unto itself around that station and that village was later christened Yorkville now interestingly just as an aside here not to get too off track but York Avenue was actually not named after Yorkville or New York it was named after a World War I soldier whose last name was York I grew up thinking that Yorkville was named after York Avenue but that is not the case maybe you all knew that so it was interesting to me but Yorkville was largely populated by in addition to those original settlers who moved up out of the city to the rural town of Yorkville halfway between New York and Harlem its population boomed in the 1830s not only because of the opening of the train but because workers moved up there to be in close proximity to the Croton Reservoir which was being built in the 1830s the smaller rectangular reservoir in the middle of the map of Central Park here that was the reservoir being built as part of that original water system that I talked about before and mostly German and Irish workers moved up to Yorkville to work on building the reservoir and aqueduct system and then many of them stayed and so that community of laborers who moved out to the countryside coalesced as the town of Yorkville but you'll notice on this map that the population center is far east it's not on Central Park at all and that's because even by the time Yorkville began to grow as a community developers and speculators recognized that Fifth Avenue land on Fifth Avenue was valuable and so the land on Fifth Avenue fronting this new park was held off and put up for sale at a much higher price than land off Fifth Avenue so even if people living in Yorkville had wanted to move on Fifth Avenue the land was generally kept out of fiscal reach of most of the people living there at the time so Fifth Avenue remained a largely undeveloped thoroughfare this far up on the island this is a view looking out over the heart of Yorkville in the 1870s you can see rows and rows of brownstone houses not terribly large and luxurious but these are the kind of houses that the laborers who moved up here the German and Irish immigrants who moved up here to work on the reservoir and then later to work on the elevated trains and the breweries that were attracted to the area these are the types of houses they would have lived in you can see the rows of modern brownstones in the foreground but just behind them to the left you can see little wooden houses many of which are below street grade because as the streets were laid out they had to be raised to be flat and so a lot of those original wooden houses built up here by the first wave of Yorkville residents were then stuck under street level if you can't talk from this image just look beyond the rows of brownstone houses here you'll see an elevated train line that is 3rd Avenue and then behind that in the distance you'll see another train line off in the distance that's 2nd Avenue the 2nd and 3rd Avenue Elves which would remain in place until the 1930s and 40s this image is looking south from the same location so these pictures were taken from the roof of the home of a German brewery owner named George Aret and he had a brownstone mansion at 94th and Park so that's where all these pictures were taken this is looking south again showing rows of brownstones that were being built in the 1870s to house many of the New Yorkers some of them solidly middle class moving up here to live in the countryside if you're familiar at all with the area if you know that there are two wooden houses on 92nd Street east of Park Avenue those are the two wooden houses on the left with the shutters the white houses there that are next to each other those still stand today and then finally this is looking north from that same house this is Park Avenue made of dirt where the train the Fourth Avenue train emerged from the tunnel running under Fourth Avenue which was rebranded Park Avenue to euphemize the fact that trains ran down the middle of it but you can see the large berm on the left side of the image and beyond that is Central Park so this is roughly what what's now Carnegie Hill looked like in the 1870s and 1880s while the Gilded Age and all of its splendor was occurring down in Murray Hill and Vanderbilt Row by the 1890s some people some old money families namely Mrs. Aster Carolyn Scurmerhorn Aster began to creep north of 59th Street but they generally did so one block at a time just about Carolyn specifically moved up to 65th Street where the Temple Emmanuel stands today that's where her house was in 1895-1896 when she completed work on a hotel on the site of her former house 34th Street it's a whole story she had a feud with her nephew and his wife over who got the title of Mrs. Aster and in spite her nephew tore down his inherited house at 33rd Street and 5th and put up a hotel that he called the Waldorf she then not wanting to live next to a 13 story hotel tore down her own house built this and moved up to 65th Street and in place of her house built an even larger hotel to compete with the Waldorf which she called the Astoria so the Waldorf and the Astoria stood there competing with each other until Carolyn died in 1908 her son John Jacob IV died on the Titanic in 1912 and her half of the estate passed to his son Vincent the other side of the family the estate passed down to her nephew's son Waldorf and Waldorf and Vincent united the hotel as the Waldorf Astoria and then in the 1920s sold it to a group of businessmen who tore down the hotel to build the Empire State Building that was a tangent I didn't need to go on but I did but this is roughly what lower Central Park Fifth Avenue looked like in the 1890s when Mrs. Aster moved up to 65th Street you can see a steady row of mansions but just north of this north of 72nd Street or so the mansions would have petered out and become just block after block of open dirt fields waiting for someone to buy them there were actually news complaints I was reading about while preparing for this lecture people complaining that all the unsold lots were surrounded by wooden fences that were then covered with billboards making a garish spectacle of every color and crass reference you can imagine now up in Yorkville this is what the area looked like at the same time that previous image was taken so 65th Street 94th Street this is the difference the only mansion you see in this image is that that large house on the left that is the mansion of Jacob Rupert if you're familiar with the Rupert towers over on was that 3rd Avenue 2nd 3rd Avenue those towers were built on the location of his brewery so as a wealthy brewer just like George Arrett from whose house this picture is taken Jacob Rupert built a house up on 5th Avenue but he was as you can see very much alone with his house overlooking his house stood at the southeast corner of 93rd and 5th that's what you're looking at with what's now the Jackie O Reservoir just beyond now everything changed at the end of the 19th century when this area this western relatively undeveloped stretch of Yorkville became Carnegie Hill Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland I believe in 1838 I have the dates on a later slide so we'll see if I'm right or wrong but he was born in Scotland immigrated to the U.S. to specifically Allegheny County, Pennsylvania when he was about 10 years old with his parents there he got into the rail industry and then segued his way into the steel industry as a young man got very wealthy off of this but did not marry until late in life he was very devoted to his mother and she lived until late 1886 and so Andrew Carnegie didn't marry until his mother passed away so he married the woman you see here Louise Whitfield in early 1887 on their marriage Andrew did have her sign of prenuptial agreement which provided her believe it was $20,000 a year in exchange for her not if they ever were to split up she would not get access to any of his fortune so she got $20,000 a year in 1887 which today is about $650,000 a year as an allowance and he also gave her the deed to this house which he purchased for them which stood at 5 West 51st Street where the Women's Republican Club House is today across from Rockefeller Center that's where his house was just behind Billy Vanderbilt's house that you can just see peeking into the camera from the right here with the Corinthian columns surrounding the window so this is where Carnegie and his wife lived after their wedding in 1887 Carnegie by this point in 1887 when he got married he was already 52 years old his wife Louise was 22 years his junior and so having a relatively mature but wildly wealthy and famous man married in 1887 made all the social papers as you can see a clipping of their wedding announcement here on the left that the wedding took place at her mother's house but anyway more importantly the couple didn't have children for a decade into their marriage and when they finally did have a child having an heiress to the Carnegie fortune was also considered newsworthy the daughter Margaret was named after Andrew's mother who had passed away prior to his marriage to Louise Margaret was born in 1897 you can see the article here on the right Mr. Carnegie's expectations talking about the expecting of the first Carnegie child now with the daughter born and with Andrew recognizing that his career and time on earth may be coming to a close in the not too distant future he decided to devote himself more to domestic life and so very secretly he began buying up plots of land far up on northern Fifth Avenue between 90th and 92nd Street he amassed a collection of it was something like 20 buildable lots on Fifth Avenue and the side streets around it he would not publicly admit to buying the land and so you can see from these articles that I pulled on the one on the left is from late 1898 where the real estate pages in the New York Times are speculating that Andrew Carnegie is the buyer of all these lots up at 90th Street but the right article from early 1899 four months after the previous article says aside from the amount involved the purchase of this property by Mr. Carnegie was of special importance in that the limit of the fine residence section of Fifth Avenue was carried about a half a mile further north and the effect of the transaction has been clearly shown in the remarkably active dealing of the last two months in lots between 80th and 90th Streets so essentially the gap of 10 blocks between the established area down around Mrs. Aster's house at 65th Street and this formerly isolated German Brewer District up here north of 86th Street began to be accepted as part of the inevitable northward march of the guilt age society with the arrival of Mr. Carnegie up here in 1898-1899 now in July of 1899 the first etching of his planned house was released to newspapers this is from the New York Times showing the house it was built roughly like this today the major difference is that the left wing the eastern wing of the house wasn't built to a full four stories as shown in this image but what I find interesting is that Carnegie was a very for how rich he was he was a very frugal man and he ordered the architects to design for him a simple but roomy house having a large lawn was important to him you'll notice that the house even today that we're sitting in and it has a very nice large garden in the back that was important for him in his old age to have a place where he could go outside and commune with nature he actually had more than a dozen mature trees dug up in Westchester County and Connecticut hauled down to the garden here and planted in place but the press and much of society was surprised and possibly disappointed in the design of the house because they thought it far too plain for a man of Mr. Carnegie's wealth they said it looked like a large brewery keeping up with the the theme of the neighborhood up here but Carnegie wouldn't have had it any other way and so the house was completed in late 1901 early 1902 the finishing touches were being put onto it but even by then newspapers had begun to refer to this area this rise of land where the house was built it had previously been known as Prospect Hill but newspapers quickly after they found that Carnegie was the buyer of the land up here they began to refer to it as the Highlands and it didn't take long after the house was completed for developers to rebrand it as Carnegie Hill in honor of the biggest attraction up here at the time this article is from 1812 or April 12, 1903 barely a year after the house was completed and you can see a view looking north with the Carnegie House and the distance here but showing the types of houses being erected on the blocks just south of it and this district talking about the phenomenal growth of the Carnegie Hill section as more and more mansions were put up on Fifth Avenue and the surrounding blocks now this I found interesting this is in the same newspaper the same day but shows two different ads one shows the Carnegie Hill Hotel which still stands today as the I think it's called the Whales it's an apartment building on 92nd and Madison this is the first institution as far as I can tell to take the name Carnegie Hill it was built as the Carnegie Hill Hotel but I included also an ad for two houses on 89th Street on the left because if you look closely just below the address you'll see that it says in their designing construction they compare favorably with the finest houses on Carnegie Heights so they were still debating what to even call the area but it definitely had the name Carnegie in it now 10 by 1913 10 years later the area had pretty much filled up as one of the city's greatest mansion districts so you can see this article from the New York Sun declaring new and finer Fifth Avenue on Carnegie Hill and displaying anchored by the Carnegie mansion at the center of the page all the fine mansions going up around the mansion ostensibly because and only because Carnegie had moved this far north so today a hundred and 20 years later we sit inside the house that made this neighborhood what it's now known as so thank you all and thank you Mr. Carnegie yep yes I just wanted to recommend Downey Grand Central Station in Vanderbilt Hall for the next week or two is the Regional Plans Association yes really wonderful display of a hundred years of four regional plans and for New York City including the future and it builds so much on this wonderful talk of yours that I stumbled on I recommend yes yeah I saw the ads for it I haven't made my way over there yet embarrassingly but I do highly recommend that as well talks about the growth of the city and plans for growth of the city and that's at in Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central Terminal right now so I know it's all over the map literally and figuratively in this speech so I understand their questions does anybody have any questions for me yes so after Carnegie dying his wife stayed here no it was taken what was it NYU or was it Columbia Columbia thank you Columbia used it until I believe 1973 when it was taken over by Cooper Hewitt which had previously been in the Cooper Union down in Astor Place any other questions those white small white wooden homes that are still existing on 92nd Street are they inhabited or are they inhabited yep they're still inhabited at least one of them has been expanded a bit you can if you walk by you'll see they've added some extra floors to it but otherwise it looks very much like it would have looked in 1865, 1870 which is fantastic that wooden houses have not only survived all the caprice of aesthetic choices over the over the previous century and a half but also that they haven't burned down like so much of New York did any other questions yes although in the back as the Astors and Jones and that's a good question and everybody has kind of their own story mixed into that generally speaking a lot of old landowning families had been given land by either the Dutch West India company or by the English crown over time one of the most notable examples of land speculation if that's what you want to call it was John Jacob Astor himself he came over to the U.S. in the late 18th century as to work in the fur trade but reinvested the same way that Cornelius Vanderbilt later did by reinvesting his ferry money into railroads John Jacob Astor reinvested all the money he made in the fur trade by buying up cheap land up the length of Manhattan Island recognizing very astutely that the city could only grow in one direction as it grew so he and people of his ilk would often buy up old farms and estates and sit on them knowing that the city would inevitably catch up and make the land much more valuable and so over time either Astor or his heirs as the city caught up would drive roads through their land and then divide the land up into buildable lots and sell them off one by one making a massive profit off of what had been a cheap investment 20, 30 years prior so not just John Jacob Astor I use him as one example but generally speaking it was either old families that inherited their land long before the city was anything more than little port town or land speculators who gulped the land up later as they recognized which way the city was growing any other questions cool I answered everything thank you so much for coming