Chelsea is fashionable once more, but it doesn't hold a candle to its 19th century past as the retail center of New York City.
In 1860 the Prince of Wales stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel at 23rd Street, establishing the social credentials of what is now Chelsea in Manhattan. The carriage trade soon found the area to their liking, building brownstone row houses by the hundreds. After the Civil War, emporium after emporium opened in lavish cast-iron front retail buildings with European window dressing to service the elite brownstone clientele.
The mile actually began at 9th Street and Broadway in the Village where A.T. Stewart opened shop. A.T. Stewart moved uptown from its Marble Palace on Chambers Street, quickly followed by B. Altman, Arnold Constable, Lord & Taylor, Tiffany, Brooks Brothers, and Gorham Silver, strung to 23rd Street along Broadway and Sixth Avenue. Stern Brothers was at Sixth Avenue and 23rd, seven stories high and 200 foot wide, while R.H. Macy had been located at Sixth Avenue and 14th Street since 1858. Lord & Taylor's five-story building had steam elevators plushly carpeted and furnished with comfy divans for the ladies to rest a minute.
The first Metropolitan Museum of Art, Steinway Hall, the Academy of Music, as well as various publishing houses and booksellers, sheet music dealers, and fancy restaurants, gave cultural cache to the commercial district. The famous character actor Edwin Booth opened a theater on 23rd Street near Sixth Avenue in 1869. Wallack's at 13th and Broadway showed Restoration comedies.
Famous personages were everywhere: Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Russell, and Lillie Langtry, to name a few. Matthew Brady's photography studio caught the glamour of the age in his portraits of society beauties displayed in his Broadway window. At the studio of stage photographer Napoleon Sarony at Union Square, actors posed in costume for publicity shots. Also in Union Square was Agosto Brentano's bookstand.
Initially, the splendid stores were the preserve of the well-to-do residents of Fifth Avenue, like Emily Post, Horace Greeley, Edith Wharton, the Roosevelts, and Washington Irving. Fashionable women were so much in abundance, the shopping area became known as "Ladies Mile." Horse cars then serviced Sixth Avenue, and crowding the streets were various conveyances, landaus, broughams, and coupes, carrying ladies to shop.
As the district became commercialized, brownstones only two decades old were quickly sold by their owners, who moved farther uptown and east to Gramercy Park and Murray Hill. The basements and parlor floors of the brownstones filled with small businesses, such as stationery shops, dry goods merchants, silversmiths, and candy stores.
In 1878, the elevated train line was run along Sixth Avenue and even more shoppers arrived daily from all over the city. Ladies in bustles and gentlemen with waxed mustaches now clogged the sidewalks. Gradually, the district lost something in its exclusivity, but it made up for it in numbers and in dollars. However, even that did not last forever.
Around the First World War, glamorous and wealthy New York moved farther uptown for their entertainment and shopping, and left the exquisite collection of retail emporia in its wake. Light industrial manufacturing moved in and stayed until the city's economic structure changed in the 1970s and little by little, the grand buildings were emptied.
In the 1990s, as Greenwich Village spread north into Chelsea, once again the neighborhood became a fashionable place to live and modern day retail stores now occupy the huge spaces. Once again, the sidewalks are crowded with shoppers, casually dressed and less elevated in social status, perhaps, but spending lots and lots of money.
The Ladies Mile may not have the glamour and glitz it had in the Gay "˜Nineties, but it has regained its retail identity and is now a New York City Historic District.
