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5 O N E The Education of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer t The first seventeen years of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer ’s life took place in a city being remade and refined by the great fortunes of the Industrial Revolution. She was born into a family of wealthy New York City merchants on 23 February 1851. Her parents, Lydia Alley and George Griswold Jr., were proud descendents of seventeenth-century New England settlers. The family wealth was generated from the China trade; her grandfather and father sent clipper ships around the world and imported tea, silks, and other items from East Asia. At the age of three, Van Rensselaer moved to a splendid residence at 91 Fifth Avenue. The Griswold children had nurses, tutors, and governesses, and according to her brother Frank Gray Griswold, the house had a nursery, two schoolrooms, a gymnasium, and a theater. The nursery was full of curios with which to play, including Chinese porcelains and bronzes. According to the cultural historian Karin Calvert, “traditionally , the [Victorian] indoor play area for children had always been the garret— a fairly large storage space that allowed plenty of room for rough-andtumble play during inclement weather, with little danger that the children would damage anything of value.” The Griswold nursery was an unusually luxurious place for the children’s education, exercise, and amusement.1 Joining the Griswolds on Fifth Avenue were the Belmonts, Goulds, Astors , and Vanderbilts, their mansions beginning to edge uptown toward Central Park. By this time, half of the two hundred most affluent individuals in the city had built homes along this stretch of the avenue. The wealthy y mariana griswold van rensselaer 6 had created a protected and homogeneous environment, separate from the poorer segments of the population. A few blocks east of Washington Square, some of New York City’s wealthiest families lived on La Grange Terrace, a colonnaded row of town houses in Lafayette Place, between East Fourth Street and Astor Place. John Jacob Astor, the richest man in the country, resided at 37 La Grange Terrace until his death in 1848. Van Rensselaer had a playmate whose grandfather lived on Lafayette Place; she knew the house well, for it was the scene of a calamity—her doll was drowned in one of its big bathtubs.2 Van Rensselaer remembered her childhood as idyllic. The growing class and racial antagonisms and New York’s financial panic of 1857 go unmentioned in her recollections. An early memory was of a very different sort: a huge paulownia tree that bloomed in sight of her bedroom window every spring. Year by year the tree’s large aromatic purple blossoms provided proof that summer was coming: “far away on the Connecticut shore, flowers of a less exotic aspect, of a more companionable charm,” waited for her. Young Mariana often spent her summers with relatives who remained in Connecticut , where she drove to church with her family on hot Sunday mornings redolent with the heavy odor of the ailanthus tree.3 The Civil War rocked Van Rensselaer’s privileged world. She recalled James H. Dakin, La Grange Terrace, La Fayette Place, New York City, 1842. (Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 7 The Education of Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer both the glory and the gloom of the war: on Fifth Avenue, she saw fresh recruits going to war and returning pathetically worn. “You who are younger,” she wrote, “do not know how a national disaster makes a city look; you did not see the faces one met on [15 April 1865], the morning Lincoln died; you did not watch his funeral-train pass up the avenue.”4 In 1864 Van Rensselaer’s uncle John N. A. Griswold finished building a house at 76 Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, designed by the most celebrated architect of the day, Richard Morris Hunt. Bellevue Avenue runs north to south through the city and was a showplace for the “cottages” of the wealthy during the late nineteenth century. That summer the family vacationed at the fashionable resort. While the rich idled in Newport, bathing on Bailey’s Beach and parading on Bellevue Avenue, the Atlantic House housed midshipmen from the U.S. The John N. A. Griswold house, north entrance, n.d. (Newport Art Museum and Art Association Archives) mariana griswold van rensselaer 8 Naval Academy. The summer of 1864, in Cold Harbor, Virginia, the Union suffered seven thousand casualties in twenty minutes during...

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