Book Review

On February 10, 1897, Bradley and Cornelia Martin hosted a lavish masquerade ball at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Adorned as kings and queens, the guests wore garish costumes, some costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. This social event occupies a central place in two remarkably different new books on late-nineteenth-century New York City.	1
In Gilded City, M. H. Dunlop argues that the ball revealed the marrow of urban life, exposing the decadence and "super consumption" of the era. She focuses on the excesses and oddities of late-nineteenth-century New York City, providing florid descriptions of wild spending sprees and bric-a-brac collections. Gilded City ends with a chapter-long account of the nine-hour effort to euthanize an uncooperative zoo elephant. Relying mainly on New York newspapers, Dunlop avers that the frenetic pace of daily life left city dwellers, particularly the elite, in a frantic search for meaning, which they often derived from owning and displaying "desirable stuff."	2
Dunlop offers a stylized portrait of urban society. "The rich, the aspiring, the nearly poor, men and women, oldsters and infants," she writes, "wore diamonds"; the late nineteenth century was a "Floral Age"; "the New York Herald was fascinated with feet"; and "after 1890, not one foreign traveler had the nerve to claim that he or she had made an easy adjustment to city pace." She notes that Americans, "overwhelmed by life-threatening excesses not of their own choosing," "hiccuped themselves to death" and "sneezed so uncontrollably that they blew an eyeball across the room." Revealing her methodology, Dunlop explains that "nothing better illuminates the world of economic failure and personal catastrophe" during the 1890s than "a small but representative selection of the hundreds of panic headlines that New Yorkers read in the Herald." The next four pages of Gilded City consist of a list of such newspaper headlines.	. . .