The Office Building That Used to Be an Opera House
On the Old Guard, the New Guard, and the Unguarded.
The New York City skyline is a push and pull of old buildings and new, structures that have stood the test of time and towers designed to shock and awe.1 That is as true for the people as the architecture. And as for people as for architecture, there are fights to preserve the way things stand, some of which are righteous and some of which are decidedly not.
The patron saint of strivers and new money was born Alva Erskine Smith on January 17, 1853 in Mobile, Alabama. Just to clarify the fights that we are about to dig into, Alva Smith came from a well-to-do, well-established family: her grandfather was a Jacksonian congressman from Tennessee, they summered in Newport and vacationed in Europe. Now, there’s math I bet you’re doing in your head, wondering how a white family might come to attain such a life of luxury in the antebellum south and the answer is about what you expect: her father, Murray Smith, was a cotton broker.2 The Smiths moved to New York in 1859, though made a discreet exit to Liverpool after Lincoln was assassinated and being a face of the south’s cotton trade was something less than fashionable.3 Alva Smith spent those years attending boarding school outside of Paris.4 The Smiths moved back to Alabama in 1869, but rebuilding their business post-war felt too Reconstruction and not enough Reprostruction5 so the family was New York-bound again and the Smiths daughters could get down to the business of marrying up.
In this, they had both a model and a support in Consuelo Yznaga, Alva Smith’s best friend and an early figure to be called a Bucchaneer.6 A Cuban-American heiress, Consuelo Yznaga married George Montagu, Viscount Mandeville7 and so ended up Duchess of Manchester when he came into his family’s dukedom. Alva’s sister Jennie married Consuelo’s brother Fernando.8 It was Consuelo, moreover, who introduced Alva Smith to William Kissam Vanderbilt, a favorite grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, at a party. They were married at Calvary Church, where Chester A. Arthur had married Ellen Herndon the same year the Smiths first moved to New York and that has a tonally-perplexing sign reminding you to/demanding you enjoy your forgiveness.
Let us pause here to go Dutch for a moment.9 The Vanderbilt family that Alva Smith joined did not yet have the air of breezy elegance of Gloria Vanderbilt or the credibility of Anderson Cooper.10 Cornelius Vanderbilt had been born in New York City’s small, rural neighbor, Staten Island in 1794.11 His father’s family had come to America from the Netherlands in indentured servitude. The geography lined up with the Knickerbocker set,12 like the Van Cortlandts, the Schermerhorns, the Astors, the Schuylers, the Van Rensselaers, and the Roosevelts, who had all come to New Amsterdam as prominent figures or made their fortunes quickly enough to be old money by the time America was still young, which is why so many of those names are familiar to anyone who’s spent time on New York’s streets. It’s worth noting that Caroline “400” Astor was connected to five of those families.13
And so we have Vanderbilt’s Knickerbocker-less father, Cornelius van Derbilt, running a ferry service between Manhattan and Staten Island, which Cornelius “No Space Needed” Vanderbilt dropped out of school to join. At 16, however, he borrowed money to get his own boat.14 Like his fellow New Yorker15 of Dutch extraction, Theodore “President” Roosevelt, he enjoyed bareknuckle boxing for funsies.16 From his sailboat ferry with his very literal fighting spirit, he built a transportation empire. There’s a line of Balzac’s that once translated into English and then translated a little more by Mario Puzo comes out to: “At the base of every great fortune there is a great crime.” Vanderbilt, for example, got angry when he didn’t think he was getting a good enough deal for the use of the railroad tracks he had a monopoly on and so in 1866 effectively blockaded the entire city of New York to teach anyone who wanted to bring in goods by train a lesson, supposedly saying, “we’re going to watch them bleed.” I say this not because Vanderbilt was any worse than any other robber baron17 but because this was all living memory and the Vanderbilts were still outside of high society, despite having all the money.18 And also because it’s always good to remember that pulling yourself up by your bootstraps loses its sentimental appeal when you see how quickly the boot ends up on someone’s neck.19
The newly-minted Alva Vanderbilt was ready to take her place in society but society had its own ideas, and society meant Caroline Astor. The rise of industry in what was fast becoming the Gilded Age and the So Bad We Had To Pass Entirely New Branches of Law To Prevent Them From Happening Again business tactics meant money wasn’t the limiting factor for society it had been, so new austerity measures needed to be enforced. Astor and her second-in-command, Ward McAllister, became the arbiters of aristocratic New York, which meant who was Old Money and truly elite. The list was The 400, which is often attributed to the number of guests Astor’s ballrooms on Fifth Avenue and in Newport could hold but it’s more likely from McAllister’s observation that there were only 400 families of any note in New York.
Alva Vanderbilt was able to elbow her way into the upper echelon partly through throwing the social event of the season in 1883.20 If the 400 that maybe could fit into Caroline Astor’s ballroom was meant to define and exclude, it had nothing on the New York Academy Opera House.21 The New York Academy was not, as it’s often credited to be, New York or America’s first opera house. That would have been the Italian Opera House, built in 1833 at Leonard and Church in Tribeca,22 though it had only lasted two seasons. In 1843, the Stoppani’s Arcade Building on Chambers between Broadway and Centre was converted into a theater, starting its new life as Palmo’s Opera House. By 1848, however, the building changed hands and as Burton’s Theater, it hosted plays and other poppier entertainment. It changed hands as a theater again before being used as a Federal Court and then being demolished.
The Astor Place Opera House23 was next in 1847, starting promisingly with beautiful design, upholstered seats and a strict dress code. It was as well known for Shakespeare as for opera, however, and more specifically for the Shakespeare riots. The Astor Place Opera House Riots24 happened on May 10, 1849 when two dueling productions of Macbeth led to violence.25 Edwin Forrest, America’s first celebrity actor and so a real hometown hero, had been challenging British star William Macready by following his tour and performing the same shows. The tension were not only born out of cultural growing pains (how was America going to look like England after a revolution and the War of 1812? Did Americans even want it to look like England? Because the upper classes seemed to say “yes, quite” and the working people chaffed having fought two wars about that very thing) but class inequality, with the wealthy lining up behind the Macready26 while signs went up around the city calling to working men and asking if the city would be ruled by Americans or the English, seeing Forrest as their stand-in. A lot of Tammany men and Irish-immigrants lined up with nativists from Five Points27 first with disturbances from the audience of Macready’s production, though Herman Melville was among the audience members who persuaded Macready to finish the show.28 Over the next nights, anti-Macready crowds filled the streets outside the theater. The crowd started with jeers and shouts, then rocks, then some haphazard arson attempts, and then the cops were called in which meant guns and surging crowds and a death count estimated between 22 and 31, with between 48 and 120 injured. The event was called a “dis-Astor” by the press which is very good and I must nod and applaud.29
The Astor Place Opera House struggled to recover its reputation after the riots, since no one wants to get their kid gloves30 bloody. The body blow can’t actually be laid at the door of the Scottish Play: a theater owner named William Niblo put the final nail in the coffin. Niblo came to America from Ireland and made a success with a coffee house that became a kind of club for merchants and married his boss’s widow from his days as a waiter.31 When he sold the Bank Coffee House,32 he used the money to build to a pleasure garden on Broadway and Crosby, which sounds a bit racier than it was.33 It was known as “Sans Souci,”34 “Columbia’s Garden,” but mostly it was “Niblo’s Garden.” It expanded a few times, though that was as much due to fires as popular demand. Niblo’s Garden presented plays, including what’s considered the first book musical, The Black Crook, which doesn’t get a lot of revivals even though one of the songs written for it is called “You Naughty, Naughty Men,”35 as well as circus acts. It also presented opera: Billy Niblo’s disdain for Astor Place Opera House wasn’t the performance onstage, it was the one in the house. Astor Place courted patrician pretensions. So to rub their face in it a little,36 Niblo’s booked the Astor Place Opera House for an animal show, hiding the exact nature under vague language like it being a new species of entertainment. Once the dogs and monkeys started showing up, the Opera House tried to sue Niblo to prevent it but the courts agreed with conventional wisdom: the show must go on. Animal shows were the tackiest of tacky,37 which meant there was no coming back from this. And so the Astor Place Opera House ended not with the bang of a cop’s rifle into a crowd of bystanders but the whimper of a very good dog who probably wanted a little piece of cheese. The space was bought by the Mercantile Library and opera-goers turned their gaze further uptown.
October 2nd, 1854 saw the premier of the New York Academy of Music with a production of Norma.38 It was slightly further uptown than the Astor Place Opera House39 on the North-East corner of 14th and Irving Place40 and seated 4,000, which was larger than its predecessors. It was lavishly appointed though in its write-up of the opening, the Times was critical of the architecture.41 The trouble was the boxes: the New York Academy had a large house but only 18 boxes. Seats in the house are fine if you’re there to watch the opera, but if you want to see and be seen, to entertain guests—to show off—you have to be in a box. And showing off was very much the point. While Caroline Astor and Ward McCalister had say over who would be given a box, even that gatekeeping required a box to be available and families who had one weren’t giving theirs up. So the unstoppable force of the new guard met the immoveable object of the old and decided if you can’t join them, beat them.
Those who made their money the new-fashioned way, including three generations of Vanderbilts,42 started planning what would become the Metropolitan Opera House. It would be grander than the Academy with 122 boxes to accommodate those who liked Faust or just feeling fancy. It was opulent and also further north and west than any of the opera houses that had been built in New York, which made attending more convenient for the wealthy who were not only continuing their northerly flight but had settled along Fifth Avenue. Plus, the Lower East Side wasn’t what it used to be: the German immigrants had been one thing but you know who was beginning to arrive in full force? Italians, and Jews from Eastern Europe.43 And even more than that: they were starting to form unions.44 Anyway, it made the move to solidly above 14th Street pretty appealing.
The Met opened in October 1883 at 1411 Broadway, between 39th and 40th. The opening was full of much pomp and circumstance and many critiques of the acoustics.45 It was such a success the New York Academy of Music cancelled its performances by 1886 and had pivoted to vaudeville by 1888. The building was torn down in 1926 to make way for the new ConEd building and a movie theater opened across the street on 14th, named the New York Academy as an homage. Point to Alva Vanderbilt.
This is often pitched as a fight amongst socialites, which isn’t inaccurate but doesn’t really do the thing justice. Because of sexism.46 To view the Met’s emergence as nothing more than an expensively dressed foreshadowing of Mean Girls is to presume the machinations of women must be frivolous. To say Alva Vanderbilt was a disgruntled climber does not account for the work she was doing. Obviously, the fate of nations does not turn on who has a box to the opera but the maneuvering of families takes more than fortunes. Soft power, after all, is still power. It can be wielded and it can be seized.
By 1895, Consuelo Vanderbilt47 was married Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough48 after no small amount of bullying and manipulation on Alva’s part. It was the absolute peak of all their social climbing and it did not go well.49 So what does Alva Vanderbilt do now that she has everything she fought for?50 She divorces William Kissem Vanderbilt. Turns out while she’d been working to make the Vanderbilt name, well… what it is today, oops magoops, he’d been sleeping around pretty brazenly, including apartments in Paris with full households of servants for his mistresses. Things got very cold for Alva in Newport but by the next year she was married to Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont.51 Oliver Belmont was also divorced, having had a bit of a runaway marriage that ended with him literally running away from her and abandoning her in Paris.52 Anyway, he loved yachting, worked in his family bank, and served a term in Congress and they were together until he died in 1908.
When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were no second acts in American lives, he had not accounted for Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont. Consuelo Vanderbilt separated from her husband in 190653 and being in a position where she was able to determine her own steps helped soften what had been a quite abusive relationship. Now a widow, Alva Belmont dedicated herself to suffrage, which meant all the things you might expect – donations, throwing lavish fundraisers54—but she was also a stalwart of the Mink Brigade, the wealthy society women who joined picket lines to stand with working women in solidarity and to forge the connections needed to fight for the vote together. The largest such action was 1909’s Uprising of the 20,000. This was a strike of the newly organized Shirtwaist workers, Local 25 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.55 The women were striking for all the basics: a living wage, a shorter week, and above all, safety concerns. The strike began with a hundred workers and swelled to as many as 30,000, with allies like the Mink Brigade keeping the press interested and the bail money coming.
This is where we meet Rose Schneiderman.56 Rose Schneiderman was a Jewish immigrant from Poland who had left school at 13 to help support her family after the death of her father. She helped organized the cap sewing factory she worked in when she was 18 and was a dedicated union advocate from then on. She’d helped the workers form Local 25 and helped them maintain the strike over eleven winter weeks through the Women’s Trade Union League. The strike made significant gains: a 52-hour work week, collective bargaining and no discrimination for union members, a few guaranteed holidays. There were holdouts, however, including one of the largest shops: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
In 1911, we take the grimmest path back to the Met. On March 25, late in the afternoon on a Saturday, a fire started on the factory floor, probably from a cigarette, and spreading easily through the fabric scraps on the ground. The doors were locked to keep workers in and union organizers out. The Asch Building was new and a skyscraper at 10 stories. The fire department’s ladders were not new and only reached 6 stories. The deaths that followed were brutal and, unlike the industrial deaths that had come before,57 they were quite public. The Asch Building is on Washington Place, just off Washington Square Park, a tony address even when many wealthy New Yorkers were moving north. Passersby, women at tea,58 people enjoying the park watched the Triangle burn and then watched as a dozen workers chose to jump to their death rather than wait for the flames. The fire had lasted less than half an hour and killed 146 people, mostly young women, mostly immigrants. It wasn’t just the deaths that were public, the grief was too: when the firemen were finally able to break down the doors, the charred corpses were laid in the street for identification.
On April 2nd, the WTUL organized a meeting/protest/memorial to find some way forward and it was held at the Metropolitan Opera House. It had gone a bit off the rails as some called for committees and others chaffed at the idea of more bureaucracy in place of action. That was when Rose Schneiderman took the stage built by robber barons and their families and silenced the whole house. I’m going to include her whole speech because I think it’s astounding and this is my newsletter, so who’s going to stop me?
I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.
This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city.59 Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.
We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.
Public officials have only words of warning to us—warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.60
I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.
The resulting regulations reshaped labor in New York state, and then the rest of the country. I just think it matters that even for a moment, a stage so defined by excess and opulence was held by a young woman fighting for the lives of her sisters and neighbors.
The Met stood at 1411 Broadway for another 55 years, when financial strain forced them to sell and Lincoln Center beckoned them to move. There had been some movement to try to landmark the building, but the effort failed and it was torn down in 1967. The World Apparel Center went up in 1970, predominantly filled with fashion offices.61 In 1979, the plaza outside the building62 was dedicated to Golda Meir. She had no tie the building, either as the Met or an office, but the landlord had offered it.
If you were wondering if Alva Belmont’s turn towards a politics of solidarity softened her in the sunset of her years, here is the Belmont Memorial Chapel built by Hunt and Hunt63 at Woodlawn Cemetery:
You can take the girl out of the Gilded Age but you can’t take the Gilded Age out of the girl.
I was struck by this advertisement on my way to the Belmont Chapel because I wonder what kind of takers they’ll get: it’s a self-selecting audience for those who will spend a million and a half dollars of housing they’ll have limited enjoyment of and the nature of the hyper wealthy has shifted.64 The definition of legacy has slid sideways: a beautiful or functional space that bears your name might be money that could be spent injecting teenage blood into their bits and pieces65 or throwing cars at the moon and they might think mortality is for the poor.66 Perhaps it’s analogous to the anti-vaxxers who dismiss the dangers of the diseases we have beaten back because they have no memory of the devastation they wreaked. We’re a century out from the storming of the Winter Palace, two centuries gone from The Terror: who is scared enough to try to donate their way into the good graces of any mobs-to-be.67 It’s an extreme privilege that becomes a sword aimed outward as well as in: after all, if we can use money to build a wall between ourselves and our mistakes, we cannot grow from them. We cannot become more than our worst moments, and we can never rise to become greater than we are. And that’s a dark thought, even in a newsletter that stops to visit the charred corpses of young working women and just invoked the Terror. The history of 1411 Broadway and Alva Belmont should remind us there are more ways to be better than we may see at any given moment, and even the most shallow fights can create something important if one has the vision for it.
And water towers. It’s old building-new building-water tower.
So, he didn’t hold the whip in his hand but there’s no fortune without the ongoing crimes of slavery.
It had been hit-or-miss before then as New York was both a hub of abolitionist activism and also a haven for Confederate sympathizers but we’ll talk about the Copperheads and the Draft Riots another day.
As one does.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯, amirite?
“Bucchaneer” referred to the American heiresses/social climbers who married into aristocratic families and whose wealth propped up the posh who were unable to sustain themselves. I am not aware of any special term deemed necessary for the Englishmen and their families grasping for cash and happy to sell their sons and their titles though, just on a mathematical level, it would seem to take two to tango. Edith Wharton would name her final, not-quite-finished novel on young American women going through the London season “Buchaneers.”
Fun fact: none of his multiple names are characters in Rebecca but they sound vaguely like they could be.
For a while, anyway. They got divorced and both remarried, he to a famed beauty and her to a Rough Rider/Yeah, Those Tiffanys Tiffany-cousin, William George Tiffany.
Because of New Amsterdam? And the Vanderbilts? Heyoooo.
Don’t be fooled by the fact theres a “van” in the name; it just means they have roots going back to De Bilt in Utrecht and that’s just so Old World classy to American ears, the writers of The Sound of Music added it to the Trapp Family.
Pre-Consolidation, baby! It’s not a borough, so it’s not New York City!
They didn’t actually have that term yet: it comes from Washington Irving’s 1809 History of New York, which was put forward as being written by Diedrich Knickerbocker. What can I say? The Mayflower didn’t get down this far south.
Seems more than necessary, but that was kind of her thing.
It was small enough that he was given the nickname Commodore ironically.
Spoiler. Vanderbilt doesn’t stay in Staten Island, though he would be buried there.
I don’t totally see the appeal, but I live in a society where therapy exists, you know?
Does that sound like faint praise?
No really: like all of it.
It’s also an interesting companion piece to the Draft Riots, with New Yorkers doing to the city what the Confederate army couldn’t dream of. It’s like the shooting yourself in the foot version of the “can god make a rock so heavy even god cannot lift it” paradox.
A housewarming party so lavish and over the top if you’re looking at a party dress in a museum that isn’t dedicated to fashion, it’s probably from this or Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball.
This is where I need to apologize as I know this is the plot of the most recent season of The Gilded Age but I’m behind. I do encourage you to read this whole thing in Christine Baranski’s voice. I actually prefer that for all my writing, including work emails and questions to my dog’s vet. Also, relatedly, full disclosure: my knowledge of opera is mostly limited to the rock, space, and -etta variety. I do, however, stand by my ability to process and synthesize petty grudges and that’s what really matters.
Since we’re chatting, we’re all the same page that Tribeca stands for Triangle Below Canal, yes? If not, that’s a fun one for you.
Named for the Place not any particular society matron.
Or the Shakespeare Riots.
Just having typed that, I’m surprised it doesn’t get thrown into the show being bad luck, but nativism and classism had a lot more to do with the violence than McB, and he already gets a bum rap.
Macready, I feel I should say, was half-Irish –his father was born and raised in Dublin and was an actor himself, so this would have been out there—but he’s always described as English and the standard-bearer for the all that that entails. I can’t really say how Macready saw himself.
Not natural allies but sometimes the great power of the British is uniting people against them.
Melville lived much of his life working office jobs to stay afloat but his mother had been a Gansevoort.
As Mrs. Scarlet said in Clue, making jokes is my defense mechanism.
The ones required by the dress code that made everyone outside the upperiest crust feel warned away.
Or she married him to be the face of her operations: many contemporaries, including Niblo himself, credit Martha Niblo as the brains of the business, or at the very least the sense of style.
It had been in an old bank. However far back you go, there will always be an older New York to look back on as the real city.
Though unaccompanied women were turned away.
Or “Free of Care,” which is a reasonable expectation for a pleasure garden.
Bring it back and give the people what they want, you cowards!
A lot.
I question their judgement but I also like dogs more than most operas I’ve seen so I’m not the audience for this one.
Everything I know about Norma I know from a handful of lines in The Young Victoria. Sorry. I know way more about Norma Rae, does that help?
Read: further from the crowds that that stood against the Astor Place Opera House.
Named after Washing Irving by Samuel Ruggles, the developer behind Gramercy Park.
The review had a distinct Person at a Q and A Who Has More of a Comment Than a Question Really vibe so take it with a grain of salt.
And also James Roosevelt, who was Theodore “Great Heart” Roosevelt’s brother and so uncle to the then-future president but gung-ho for the Met from the start. I guess you can’t judge a book by its cover if its cover is old-timey Dutch pantaloons.
Gasp!
<shrieking, crying, vomiting, swooning.>
Followed by the acknowledgement that no one was coming for the acoustics anyway.
I mean, you probably knew it was going to be that or capitalism.
Named after Alva’s best friend and former sister-in-law who introduced her to William Vanderbilt.
For Jane Austen fans, this made her mistress of Blenheim Palace.
Spencer-Churchill apparently told Consuelo on their wedding night that he had only married her for her money which couldn’t have been a total surprise but is still extremely rude.
And a yacht!
You may remember the name Belmont from that time his brother August Belmont laid out the cash to build the subway. August Belmont had also been quite high up in the Academy but that was yesterday’s battle and already won.
Yeeeow.
Turns out him saying he only married her for her money was one of the high points. They would eventually divorce and attain an annulment, with help from Alva Belmont.
To be fair, she had a good track record with lavish parties.
ILGWU, if you like initials.
I won’t get into her full story today, if for no other reason than she is not a footnote in the tales of Alva Belmont. She is, if I can paraphrase Chief Miles O’Brien, more than a hero: she was a union woman.
And many that would come after.
Including future Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins.
It wasn’t. There had been a fire with multiple casualties the week before in Newark.
This will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the arguments on the “civility” of protests with skepticism or who knows Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn” well.
Rose Schneiderman’s people ended up with a stronger claim on the neighborhood than the Belmonts or the Morgans.
The 1961 Zoning Resolution applies, after all.
The sons of Richard Morris Hunt.
For the worse, to be clear!
Answering the question no one asked: what if a vampire had a Jocasta complex?
Proving once and for all that F. Scott Fitzergerald was correct: the rich *are* different from you and I because I would never disregard the wisdom of Olympia Dukakis in Moonstruck: no matter what you do, you’re gonna die, just like everyone else.
I want to be very clear I am not endorsing murder. I am only observing that sometimes fear keeps us honest and our knowledge of our mortality makes us human.
Thank you
The whole speech was a great call. And the lack of Phantom jokes shows incredible restraint.