Non-Fiction, Historical
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
The year was 1873, and the gilded age was roaring into life. New york seemed to be growing by the minute. New and ever more splendid buildings rising in the center, with ramshackle housing filled by the tide of immigrants spreading outwards. One tenement in Mulberry Street, home to 80 people, half of whom were Children saturated with filth and vermin strewn with garbage, was typical here raged, typhus diphtheria and smallpox. Only nine years earlier. Smallpox alone had killed more than 800 New Yorkers in a display of the untrammelled wealth now pouring into the city Gorgeously dressed women. They're huge hats wreathed with flowers and feathers kept in place by jeweled happens stroll down 5th Avenue in the first of the Easter parades after attending a service in one of the city's fashionable churches before returning to the houses past which they sauntered. Great palaces of marble, stone and brick, domed crenellated with balconies, spires, canopies were springing up all around, some so huge that they took up a whole block, as did the largest new york townhouse ever built, That of Cornelius Vanderbilt II on the corner of 5th Avenue and 57th Street, As the green shoots of spring appeared. So did the inhabitants of these 5th Avenue palaces between four and five in the afternoon, women put on their smartest dresses and drove in carriages along Fifth Avenue, sometimes stopping for a walk in Central Park on the first saturday in May the coaching club held its annual parade coaches lined up at the meeting place. The Brunswick Hotel, diagonally opposite Delmonico's until given the starting signal by the President of the club. Women in their best dresses and most beautiful hats, men in their coaching club livery of check suits with black coats, tan aprons, and red and white buttonholes. Even the horses wore bouquets attached to their throat straps. In the winter there was slaying and everyone would drive in horse drawn sleighs in Central Park, mrs Cornelius vanderbilt slay a dark red with dark red liveries for coachman and footmen, dark red plumes and red and gilt tassels. The air was full of noise from the clashing of horses, shoes on the cobbles to ship sirens, the postman's whistle and the explosive noise of one of the countless loose fitting iron manhole covers as a carriage wheel passed over it, although rubbish disposal had become a problem, and manure dried to a powder blue into open windows, and the faces of passersby, the rich who could afford to transport it, got rid of the manure in their stables by donating it to the city's parks and gardens. There was nothing like the sooty pollution of London. Gone were the days just over a decade earlier, when Central Park was full of irish squatters, goats, pigs, and dogs with them, and piles of rubbish, everything from tin cans to old hoop skirts, who had come to America after the potato famine had struck Ireland with no hope at home dying in the fields, the villages and the mountains millions of irish had emigrated to America, with a good few speaking only irish. Many of them were women, young and unmarried, for whom domestic labor was a way out of penury, as well as providing room and board. They were a prime source of servants for the rich of America, whose countrymen and women in general scorned the idea of working as a servant to someone to whom their constitution declared them equal. Now the poor had been pushed out of sight, and the rich were busy spending their new wealth. That year, saw a banquet so extravagant that it made even new Yorkers gasp. Its cost was estimated at $3,000. A guest. The host Edward luck Meyer was a rich importer exporter who had decided to blow a rebate. He had received from the government on a single evening Down the center of the table in a 30 ft lake, surrounded by violet bordered brooks, grassy glades and lush plants glided four swans around it, a mesh of gold wire from the city's most illustrious Jeweler Tiffany stretched to the ceiling to prevent their escape. Inside over the lake hung golden cages holding songbirds. The only sour note was caused by the swans borrowed from Prospect Park, which spent most of the evening either fighting or mating