Stephen Birmingham > Quotes

“A broken heart is better than a whole one where love has never crept in.”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“London had had a subway system since 1863, but New York had not yet gone underground for at least two reasons. For one thing, New York was built on solid rock, and tunneling through the Manhattan schist presented enormous engineering obstacles. For another, during the years when “Boss” Tweed had the city in his grip, Tweed and his “ring” controlled the surface transportation lines and wanted no competition.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“New York horses were driven until they expired, and as many as a hundred horses collapsed daily in the streets. It was often a matter of days before the carcasses could be hauled away, and the odor of decaying horseflesh added its own pungency to the city air. In the 1880’s, meanwhile, New Yorkers were only beginning to get used to the luxury of paved streets in certain areas. Forty-second”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“Still, New York in the 1880’s had become a city of mad, entrepreneurial schemes, many of which didn’t work. Into this mood of hectic speculation and crazy chance-taking, Mr. Clark’s scheme fitted perfectly. It was an era of folly. Building the Dakota”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“They were feisty, fractious, independent, argumentative—bickering shrilly and incessantly with one another. They seemed almost to wear a collective chip on the shoulder.”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“(In the Clark apartment doorknobs and plates and hinges were overlaid with sterling silver.) There were inlaid marble floors, wrought-iron staircases, walls wainscoted in rare marbles and choice hardwoods, bronze lamp fixtures and railings in the elevator lobbies.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“Clark’s building was to be the most opulent and lavish and at the same time tasteful that New York had ever seen, far outdoing any apartment house that then existed anywhere in the world in splendor of detail, size and scale of its apartments, and costliness of its appointments. Its interiors would replicate, and even surpass, the mansions of Goulds, Vanderbilts, Astors and Goelets.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“The park took nearly ten years to build and cost over nine million dollars, a staggering sum in those days. By the end of the Civil War, most of the work on the park had been completed, though the problem of squatters’ shacks—particularly in the park’s northern reaches—would continue for a number of years.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“Brevoorts and Goelets were ironmongers, and the Schermerhorns were ship chandlers.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“New York law required that shipowners guarantee that each immigrant passenger would not, upon arrival, become a candidate for public welfare.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Real Lace: America's Irish Rich

“It was a world, in other words, that gave equal weight to modesty and dignity as to pomp, comfort, and splendor.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“In Bavaria, where attitudes toward Jews were particularly reactionary, the number of Jewish marriages was limited by law in an attempt to keep the number of Jewish families constant. They were surrounded by a heavy network of special taxes, were obliged to pay the humiliating “Jew toll” whenever they traveled beyond the borders of the ghetto, were forced to pay a special fee for the privilege of not serving in the army—though it was an army that would not have accepted them had they tried to volunteer, because they were Jewish. Periodically, Jews were threatened with expulsion from their homes—and often were expelled—unless they paid an added tax for the privilege of remaining.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“Caroline, furthermore, was wan, pale, and dreamily beautiful, an exquisite creature who wept bitterly when she was told that families “of wretched poor” lived south of Canal Street, which was why her coachman would not drive her there.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“Gothic style, and had always admired the old Fletcher house on Seventy-ninth Street and said, “If I ever build a house, I want the architect of that house to design it.” The architect of the Fletcher house was C. P. H. Gilbert and, when he had his property, Felix hired him. It was to be quite a house that Mr. Gilbert designed. The ground floor was to contain a large entrance hall with an adjoining “etching room,” to house Felix’s”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“We weren’t interested in fashion, but we were interested in form. Goodness me, Mother used to worry about whether or not it was good form to pick up an olive with a fork. That’s what’s missing nowadays, if you ask me.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“The Roosevelts, Bayards, Van Cortlandts, and Rhinelanders were in the sugar-refining business.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“The German Jews, in other words, were assimilationists only up to a point, and had prudently not tried to push beyond that point. It might be added, too, that many of the German Jews were blond, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed. In appearance, they did not stand out against the prevailing look”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“Great stress is placed on manners. “Never point,” one San Francisco mother teaches her children, “except at French pastry.” Do’s and don’ts are rampantly important. “We’d never wear diamonds before lunch,” says one woman. “Anyone who’d wear a mink stole in the daytime is automatically out,” says another.”
― Stephen Birmingham, The Right People: The Social Establishment in America

“Semitic”
― Stephen Birmingham, The Grandees: America's Sephardic Elite

“Some East Side Jews were budding Marxists, some were socialists, some were Zionists. Some were Orthodox, some were atheists. The Jews of Warsaw could not see eye to eye with those from Krakow.”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“one of Mr. Boyden’s devices is riding around the Deerfield campus in a horse-drawn buggy. There have been dark hints that other headmasters, to compete, have had to dream up devices or eccentricities or “trademarks” of their own. Seymour St. John at Choate, for instance, has been seen with a pet otter flopping at his heels, and the Reverend Matthew Warren, headmaster of St. Paul’s, was given a red-and-white golf cart by an appreciative alumnus in which to tool around the campus.”
― Stephen Birmingham, The Right People: The Social Establishment in America

“And yet, by 1906, nearly ninety thousand Jews were arriving in New York City every year, most of them from Russia and Poland. (Because the Russians and the Poles seemed indistinguishable, all these immigrants were grouped as “Russians.”) Now the Jewish population of the city stood at close to a million, or roughly twenty-five percent of the total population, and by 1915 there would be nearly a million and a half, or twenty-eight percent. In sheer”
― Stephen Birmingham, "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

“Solomon Loeb, at his wife’s insistence, had come to New York from Cincinnati and, though not on a par with the Seligmans’ operations, his Kuhn, Loeb & Company was becoming an important investment banking house. In Philadelphia the Guggenheims were not doing at all badly. Meyer Guggenheim had”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“The old differentiation between the German “uptown” Jew and the Russian of the “Lower East Side” has become a difference between the “quiet, cultivated Wall Street type” and the “noisy, pushy, Seventh Avenue type”—who do not mix any more easily than oil and water. And out of all this has come the impression that Jews “dominate” both these fields in the city.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“were”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“One can frequently recognize a woman of Real Society by the way she dresses. Real Society women’s clothes have a way of staying in style longer than other people’s because Real Society fashions do not change markedly from year to year. Neither the junior-cut mink coat nor the beaver jacket has gone through many transitions since the introduction of the designs, nor has the cut of the classic camel’s hair topper. The short-sleeved, round-collared McMullen blouse is ageless, and the hemline of the Bermuda short has hardly been known to fluctuate. What is more classic than a double strand of good pearls? The poplin raincoat is as suited to suburban shopping today as it was to the Smith campus in 1953.”
― Stephen Birmingham, The Right People: The Social Establishment in America

“At least three foreign ambassadors—the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Finnish—lived at the Dakota along with the French Minister of Cultural Affairs. There had been the distinguished Schirmers and Steinways.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address

“Over the years the Sephardim in America had gradually modified their religious services to conform more closely to the prevailing Protestant ways. Early in the 1800’s Temple Shearith Israel had introduced English into the service. The cantors, or chazonim, began to assume the dignity, and the dress, of Protestant clergymen and were called “Reverend.” The public auctioning of honors, which began to seem undignified, was discontinued.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“David’s final words to his son were a tearful entreaty to observe the Sabbath and the dietary laws. Fanny’s final gesture was to sew one hundred American dollars into the seat of Joseph’s pants.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York

“James Hazen Hyde gave his $200,000 ball at Sherry’s, at which the ballroom was transformed into a replica of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.”
― Stephen Birmingham, Life at the Dakota: New York's Most Unusual Address