An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(15)
And she never looked back.
4
New York, New York
If Allene had been searching for a suitable anthill to disappear into, she couldn’t have thought of a better place than Empire City, as New York now proudly nicknamed itself. Four years earlier, Manhattan had combined with its surrounding districts, including Queens and Brooklyn, and the city with 3.5 million inhabitants had become the largest in the world after London. And it was still an unrivaled magnet for immigrants: on some days, the border post on Ellis Island welcomed no fewer than twenty-one thousand newcomers.
Manhattan had grown into a physical symbol of what human ingenuity and energy could achieve. The deployment of steel construction and the “safety hoister”—the elevator—meant that buildings were growing ever taller, with the twenty-two-story Flatiron Building counting as the provisional high point in 1902. The once-so-dark Broadway became a “Great White Way” where the general public feasted its eyes day and night on the giant floodlit shop windows of exclusive department stores and boutiques—this thanks to the invention of a “small ball of sunlight, a true Aladdin’s lamp”: Thomas Edison’s light bulb.
Some writers, such as Edith Wharton and Henry James, emigrated to Europe, disgusted by the raw concrete, harsh light, and vulgarity of industrialized America; other writers and artists were drawn en masse to the most modern and lively and least bourgeois city in the world. In the words of writer Charles Eliot Norton:
This is a wonderful city. There is a special fitness in the first syllable of its name, for it is essential New and seems likely always to remain so. The only old things here are yesterday’s newspapers.
Pedestrians, carriages, horse-drawn carts, donkey carts, and cyclists fought for a place in the streets with automobiles, omnibuses, and the electric streetcars that had been deployed as public transport since 1900. The smell of horse dung mixed with exhaust fumes, and everywhere horns were tooted, bells were rung, and voices were raised, with, above it all, the screaming of the “els”—the elevated trains that ran along the entire length of Manhattan and were intended to reduce the chaos but somehow only managed to add to it.
Allene experienced herself just how dangerous the confrontation between old and new could be on May 14, 1903, when an omnibus so frightened the horses pulling the carriage she was in that they bolted. Both horses and passengers escaped with just shock, but because of these kinds of accidents and the alarming number of traffic fatalities, that year work was begun on an underground train tunnel that would grow into the New York subway network.
There was no city more hospitable and none more capricious than New York, with her “pull-down-and-build-all-over-again spirit,” as poet Walt Whitman succinctly put it. Now that automobiles were rendering horse stables superfluous and it was becoming easier to commute between country house and city, luxurious apartment complexes were becoming increasingly popular.
The big, fancy town houses the nouveaux riches had recently built to withstand all eternity fell prey to wrecking balls, one by one. In most cases, their interiors, bought in Europe along with priceless art objects of great historical value, ended up in the trash heap. In answer to the question of whether they couldn’t be preserved, one demolition contractor summarized the mood in New York in those days with “I don’t deal in secondhand goods.”
In retrospect, Tod had literally gambled himself to death at nearly the same moment that the period his life unintentionally symbolized came to an end. While in the spring of 1903 the newspapers were still full of stories about his gambling mania, a new wave of public indignation was welling. Its new target: the eccentric Chicago industrialist C. K. G. Billings, who had rented out a floor of the Sherry Hotel to stage a dinner for thirty-six costumed guests on horseback. This time, public opinion was too powerful for big money: the dinner went ahead but at a different, strictly confidential location, and the Billings Horseback Dinner went down in history as one of the death throes of the Gilded Age.
The frenzied hedonism and absurd luxury that had given the last decade of the nineteenth century its gaudy overtone simply went out of fashion. Even such a spoiled society doyenne as Alva Belmont was searching for a better way to give her life meaning, joining the suffragette movement. At the same time, the filthy rich had become less filthy and less rich, thanks to the young politician Theodore Roosevelt, who had succeeded as president after McKinley was assassinated in 1901. Roosevelt may have been a Republican, but he was a lot more sensitive to the changing times than his predecessor. He started regulating banks, the food industry, and railway trusts; introduced higher taxes; and for the first time consulted the trade unions, which the government had looked upon with suspicion up to then.
The changing times had an effect on the lives of the Hostetters, too. Both tax authorities and prohibitionists had firmly set their sights on the family’s bitters empire, and in some places, pharmacists who still dared to sell the controversial herb drink as a medicine were prosecuted. In 1905, Hostetter’s Bitters was officially added to the list of alcoholic drinks and taxed as such.
Greta and Teddy Hostetter inherited what was left of Tod Hostetter’s possessions, including the hunting lodge at Raccoon Creek, but they no longer received the annual Niagara Falls’ worth of dollars to which their father had succumbed. As far as Allene was concerned, she seemed not to have inherited anything except her husband’s personal gambling debts and a last name that had been dragged through the mud. Her brother-in-law Herbert, with whom she’d never really gotten along, was in charge of the settlement of Tod’s estate and of his children’s inheritance.