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Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-ofthe-Century New York. By M. H. Dunlop. (New York: Morrow, 2000. xxiv, 296 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-688-17144-3.) The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896. By Sven Beckett. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xx, 492 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-521-79039-5.)
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.
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."
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...