This Day in New York History (The Vanderbilt Fancy-Dress Ball)

March 26, 1883—P. T. Barnum’s troupe was in New York on this Monday night, but that wasn’t the only circus in town. At approximately 11 pm, a mob gawked at the city’s wealthiest families sashaying out of their carriages into the new limestone palace of William K. Vanderbilt and his wife Alva, who were throwing the “fancy-dress” ball to end fancy-dress balls to celebrate the opening of their new home at 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

For nearly a decade, on my way to and from work, I passed by the spot that housed one of the legendary events of the Gilded Age, unaware, like nearly all New York’s midtown workers and tourists, of what had once happened here.

Vanderbilt’s mansion must have been something to see. When I visited the mansion owned by William’s more private brother Frederick up in Hyde Park, N.Y., the tour guide told our group that the wondrous home we were gaping at was nothing compared with William’s.

Now, however, William’s humble little Fifth Avenue abode has gone the real estate version of the way of all flesh, with stores and offices taking up what had once been a monument to gaudy excess. Too bad: the rich in those days were sort of like a contemporary Hollywood starlet after implants: they had paid a lot for what they had gotten, and by golly, they were going to show it!

The preparations for the event—which, at a then-astronomical $250,000, was the most expensive fancy-dress ball given to date in the U.S. —were discussed in hilarious detail in Matthew Josephson’s satirical muckraking history, The Robber Barons. From reading his account, it seems that enough costumers and milliners were employed in the task to fill Napoleon’s army at its zenith.

But the coming affair caused consternation to Caroline Schemerhorn Astor, the grande dame of New York high society, who had never deigned to call on any Vanderbilt—starting with Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the founder of the family fortune in shipping and railroads.

Egged by her friend, the social observer and incurable snob Ward McAllister, Mrs. Astor had become obsessed with “The Four Hundred,” a list of society’s biggest muckety-mucks. By sheer coincidence, they happened to be the people that passed muster with Mrs. A. Conspicuously missing from the list were the Vanderbilts.

Commodore Vanderbilt’s Dutch lineage was not that far removed in length from Mrs. Astor’s. But he gave all the appearance of the worst kind of parvenu with his swearing, his constant tobacco-chewing, and especially the way he kept blithely missing spittoons with the excess from his mouth. (Okay, I might have had a problem with that, too, if I had the kind of antique furniture possessed by Mrs. Astor.)

For years, this exclusion didn’t matter to the Commodore or his son, or their wives. But it did matter to the 30-year-old wife Alabama-born wife of the Commodore’s grandson William.

Alva Vanderbilt was intent on entering high society, and she was went about doing so with the same battering-ram force that those peasants exerted on the Bastille in David O. Selznick’s 1935 version of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Alva hit Mrs. Astor on her greatest point of pride, inviting everyone from The Four Hundred. Everyone, that is, but Mrs. Astor’s daughter Caroline.

That would not do at all. So Mrs. Astor pulled herself together and, at long last, called upon Mrs. Vanderbilt.

The young Astor girl got her invitation, and the Astors and Vanderbilts had created one of the great grand alliances of history. Unlike those involving the U.S., Britain and the U.S.S.R. in World War II or the Kennedy and Cuomo clans more recently, this one remained intact through the years.

But most important was the event at hand: all systems were go were go for the party of the century.

More than a century and a quarter later, it’s amusing to read about citizens in a supposedly egalitarian republic dressing up, without irony, as a Venetian princess, King Louis XVI, or an “Electric Light,” of all things, with white satin trimmed with diamonds, and with a diamond headdress.

Josephson caught the moment in all its unapologetic Gilded Age glory, as “the dancers formed in the gymnasium on the third floor, moved down the grand staircase of Caën stone (fifty feet high), and swept through the great hall (sixty-five by twenty feet) into a drawing-room (forty by twenty feet whose whole wainscoting of carved French walnut had been torn from a French chateau and hauled across the ocean).”

The Vanderbilt’s modest little house-warming party have been faintly echoed through the years in such events as Truman Capote’s costume ball of the 1960s and Malcolm Forbes’ 70th-birthday party in Morocco. But for setting the standard, nothing beat Alva Vanderbilt’s.