SNAPSHOT
Clockwise from left: Mrs. Astor’s portrait by Carolus-Duran; the staircase leading to the ballroom; the mansion designed by Richard Morris Hunt on 65th and Fifth Avenue.
Mrs. astor’s “400” Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, or the Mrs.
Astor, served as high hostess of 19th-century New York, ruling with an emphasis on affluence and influence—and, of course, lineage. She operated as a one-woman admissions committee to the city’s most elite circles, offering acceptance to American aristocracy with her calling card. Mrs. Astor was descended from New York’s original Dutch settlers and became an Astor by marriage—a pedigree that encouraged her to be discriminating. Only 400 people were ever acknowledged by Mrs. Astor as eligible of her company: “Why, there are only about 400 people in fashionable New York society,” preached Ward McAllister, Mrs. Astor’s abettor. “If you go outside that number, you strike 144 QUEST
people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease.” Why “400”? A formidable figure, sure. But, it was also the exact number of guests that Mrs. Astor could host without “vulgar overcrowding” in the ballroom of her brownstone at 350 Fifth Ave. By 1893, she was entertaining in her new mansion, designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt, at 65th and Fifth Avenue—the grandest New York had ever seen. It was Mrs. Astor and her reign that inspired Edith Wharton and the novelists of the Gilded Age. Her sense of exclusiveness was provocative, as she dismissed people from her parties: “Just because I buy my carpets from him, does not mean I have to invite him to walk on them.”—Elizabeth Quinn Brown