Life at the Dakota Read Online Free

conveniently fit into her ballroom. (When Mrs. Astor’s list was eventually published, it turned out to contain only three hundred and four names.)
    To get into society, it seemed, required more than money and the ability to surround oneself with the luxurious trappings of money. There was a new and important ingredient called taste. Good birth, which was so important a standard in English and European society, could not be purchased by newly rich New Yorkers, but good taste could. In 1870, Charles L. Tiffany had opened his splendid new storeon Union Square, which had quickly become the bellwether of taste. In fact, as the New York Post solemnly advised its readers, Tiffany’s was “a school for taste” for those New Yorkers who needed such an education. Tiffany’s was an immediate success.
    Good taste implied good breeding, which meant good manners, correctness in all things. In a popular play of the era called Fashion, a character with social pretensions named Mrs. Tiffany, a former milliner whose husband has struck oil, declared, “Forget what we have been, it is enough to remember that we are of the upper ten thousand!” But more than forgetting the past was involved; the past had to be covered by a new veneer of polish, and a flurry of books and manuals appeared—how-to books on “etiquette” and “comme il faut” and “proper social usage.” To judge from some of the social “dos” and “don’ts” published in this period, many people needed to be elevated to comme il faut from a fairly primitive state.
    One etiquette writer, for example, scolded, “What an article is a spittoon as an appendage to a handsomely furnished drawing room!” And another advised guests at a dinner party against “shaking with your feet the chair of a neighbor”—an activity whose purpose is hard to imagine. It was also suggested that “ladies should never dine with their gloves on unless their hands are not fit to be seen.” If a lady should make an “unseemly digestive sound” at table or “raise an unmanageable portion to her mouth,” the proper reaction was to “cease all conversation with her and look steadfastly into the opposite part of the room.” While at table, advised one writer, “all allusions to dyspepsia, indigestion, or any other disorders of the stomach are vulgar and disgusting. The word ‘stomach’ should never be uttered at table.” The same writer cautioned that “the fashion of wearing black silk mittens at breakfast is now obsolete.” Decorum while traveling had to be observed, and when traveling alone, ladies should “avoid saying anything to women in showy attire, with painted faces, and white kid gloves … you will derive no pleasure from making acquaintance with females who are evidently coarse and vulgar, even if you know that they are rich.”
    Men of the era were also instructed in the rules of delicacy; one etiquette manual commented that “The rising generation of young elegants in America are particularly requested to observe that, in polished society, it is not quite comme il faut for gentlemen to blow their noses with their fingers, especially when in the street.” Thegentlemen’s habit of chewing tobacco also created problems. “A lady on the second seat of a box at the theatre,” wrote one social critic, “found, when she went home, the back of her pelisse entirely spoilt, by some man behind not having succeeded in trying to spit past her.” And an English visitor had been surprised to see none other than John Jacob Astor remove his chewing tobacco from his mouth and absent-mindedly trace a watery design with it on a windowpane.
    When a French critic reported that it was the custom, in crowded New York omnibuses and elevated trains, for gentlemen who were already seated to let ladies perch on their knees, the New York