Flappers & Fiction

Elizabeth Bisland examines the harsh realities of tenement life in 1880s New York, where the poor lack basic facilities for bathing and laundry. She describes innovative model tenements built by wealthy philanthropists like Bayard Cutting and Cornelius Vanderbilt, which provide clean apartments, communal baths, and laundry facilities while still turning a profit. The article contrasts these progressive housing experiments with typical tenement conditions, where families pay inflated prices for necessities and lack knowledge of economical cooking and nutrition.

Elizabeth Bisland explores New York’s flourishing flower trade, beginning with Lord Bacon’s observation that Americans build grandly before gardening finely. The city’s cut flower market generates two to three million dollars yearly, supplied by Long Island farms and vendors who gather at dawn markets on Spring Street for potted plants and East Thirty-fourth Street for cut flowers. Leading florists purchase hundreds of dollars worth daily, while elaborate society events like the Vanderbilt ball cost twenty-five thousand dollars in floral decorations alone. The article details the extensive greenhouse operations at New Rochelle, employing forty-five workers and maintaining tropical plant farms in Trinidad and Bermuda to supply orchids and lilies throughout the country.

Deep in the Catskills, far from the vulgar rivalries of Saratoga and Newport, lies a secret experiment in “plain living and high thinking.” This is Onteora, a rustic Arcady where Mark Twain might be found on a porch and the walls of the Bear and Fox Inn are sketched by passing artists. It is a world of log cabins, balsam boughs, and simple blue denim—a charming retreat where the weary literary soul finds rest among the “hills of the sky” and the quiet dignity of the forest.

Behind the heavy doors of the Tenth Street Building and the Sherwood lies a world the public rarely sees – the terra incognita of the New York artist. From William Chase’s cavernous atelier, crowded with faded tapestries and a Peruvian mummy, to the sun-drenched lofts where J.G. Brown poses his street urchins, this tour reveals the intimate chaos of creation. It is a journey through spaces cluttered with armor, dusty velvet, and the smell of turpentine, exploring how a painter’s surroundings inevitably shape the soul of their work.