A slender boy of ten played in those days in Madison Square Park, hard by his home in East Twentieth Street, just east of Broadway. His name was Theodore Roosevelt.
New York’s richest man was William B. Astor, with a fortune of perhaps fifty million dollars. He was then seventy-six years old, but he walked every day from his home in Lafayette Place—from its windows he could see the Bowery, which had been a real bouwerie in his boyhood—to the little office in Prince Street where he worked all day at the tasks that fell upon the shoulders of the Landlord of New York. He probably never had heard of John D. Rockefeller, a prosperous young oil man in the Middle West.
Cornelius Vanderbilt, only two years younger than Astor, was president of the New York Central Railroad, and was linking together the great railway system that is now known by his name, battling the while against the strategy of Jay Gould and his sinister associates. By far the most imposing figure in financial America, Vanderbilt had everything in the world that he wanted—except Dexter, and that great trotter was in the stable of Robert Bonner, who was not only rich enough to keep Dexter, but could afford to pay Henry Ward Beecher thirty thousand dollars for a novel, “Norwood,” to be printed serially in the Ledger.
Only one other New Yorker of 1868 ranked in wealth with Astor and Vanderbilt—Alexander T. Stewart, whose yearly income was perhaps greater than either’s. He was then worth about thirty million dollars, and he had astonished the business world by building a retail shop on Broadway, between Ninth and Tenth Streets—now half of Wanamaker’s—at a cost of two millions and three-quarters.
In Wall Street the big names were August Belmont, Larry Jerome, Jay Gould, Daniel Drew, and Jim Fisk. Gould and Fisk were doing what they pleased with Erie stock. They and the leaders of Tammany Hall, like Tweed and Peter B. Sweeny and Slippery Dick Connelly, hatched schemes for fortunes as they sat either in the Hoffman House, where Fisk sometimes lived, or at dinner in the house in West Twenty-Third Street, where the only woman at table was Josie Mansfield.
Of the great hotels of that day not more than one or two are left. The Fifth Avenue then took rank not only as the finest hostelry in New York, but perhaps in the world. The Hoffman House was running as a European-plan hotel. It had not yet become a Democratic headquarters, for the Democrats still preferred the New York, on the American plan. The other big “everything included” hotels were the St. Nicholas, where Middle West folk stayed, and the Metropolitan, where the exploiter of mining-stock held forth. Among the smaller and European-plan hotels were the St. James, the St. Denis, the Everett, and the Clarendon, all more or less fashionable, and the Brevoort and the Barcelona, patronized largely by foreigners.
The restaurants were limited in number, for New York had not acquired the restaurant habit as strongly as it has it now. When you have mentioned Delmonico’s, Taylor’s, Curet’s, and the Café de l’Université, you have almost a complete list of the places to which fashion drove in its brougham after the theatre.
The playhouses were plentiful enough, considering the size of the city. None was north of Twenty-Fourth Street. Wallack’s, at Broadway and Thirteenth Street, was considered the best theatre in America. The Grand Opera House, at Eighth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street, was called the handsomest. Surely it was costly enough, for Jim Fisk, who had his own way with Erie finances, paid eight hundred thousand dollars of the railroad stockholders’ gold for it, to buy it from the railroad later with some of its own stock, of problematical value.
THE FIRST NUMBER OF “THE SUN” UNDER DANA