On this day in New York · February 10, 1897
The Ball That Embarrassed the Gilded Age
The Martins spent a fortune on a costume ball meant to help the economy, and instead handed New York proof of exactly how out of touch the rich had gotten.
The facts
- Date
- February 10, 1897
- Venue
- The original Waldorf Hotel, Fifth Avenue at 33rd Street
- Cost
- The Martins spent $369,000 on the ball, roughly $14.8 million today
- Guests
- 1,200 invitations went out; more than half of the invited accepted
On February 10, 1897, Bradley and Cornelia Martin turned the original Waldorf Hotel into a stand-in for the court of Versailles and invited twelve hundred of New York's richest people to dress the part. The country was still grinding through the aftermath of the Panic of 1893, and the Martins argued the ball would push money toward local dressmakers and tailors instead of Paris fashion houses. Guests filed past police guarding the entrance while the hotel's windows were boarded up to keep their jewels out of view from the street. Instead of gratitude, the Martins were condemned from pulpits and pilloried in print, and the city's tax assessors took a much harder look at their fortune soon after.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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You rich people put next to nothing in the collection plate, and yet you'll spend thousands of dollars on Mrs. Bradley Martin's ball
an unnamed clergyman, denouncing the ball from the pulpit, quoted in contemporary press accounts
Source: Wikipedia -
There is a great stir today in fashionable circles and even in public circles. The cause of it all is the Bradley Martin ball, beside which the arbitration treaty, the Cuban question, and the Lexow investigation seem to have become secondary matters of public interest.
the Commercial Advertiser, on the eve of the ball, February 1897
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
The backlash helped close out the era of flaunting Gilded Age wealth in public: the Martins decamped for Britain not long after, and New York's rich grew warier of celebrating money quite so loudly downtown.
Sources
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