Gilded Age Resort Happenings of 1900

The scarcity of men which has been felt everywhere was accentuated this past week by the cruise of the New York Yacht Club. Newport was almost deprived of men for two days. Bar Harbor is contenting itself with very young men at the dances and a multitude of luncheons and entertainments where the fair sex is much in the majority. –Late 19th C. Newport, Rhode Island, as depicted in HBO’s “The Gilded Age”

What the secret of this Summer apathy can be, no one has been able to solve. It has been suggested that Newport is so expensive, what with this new craze for bridge, whist and the fees to the servants, and the clubs a man has to join, that the average New Yorker not a multi-million aire shrinks from attempting even a Friday to Monday visit. 

But men who are very wealthy and who live for this sort of thing seem to be as indifferent as those who have a real reason for avoiding Newport and the other very fashionable resorts. There was James J. Van Alen, who only this week, after ten days passed at Newport, deliberately left the place and went to Canada on a fishing trip. It is unmistakably an off season.

The scarcity of men which has been felt everywhere was accentuated this past week by the cruise of the New York Yacht Club. Newport was almost deprived of men for two days. Bar Harbor is contenting itself with very young men at the dances and a multitude of luncheons and entertainments where the fair sex is much in the majority. 

Southampton, of course, has its coterie and tennis and golf have attracted there quite a masculine element. But the greater number of these only remain from Friday to Monday, and the rest of the week schoolboys and juniors are to be depended upon for the small dances which have been given.

There is to be one ball at Bar Harbor and one ball at Southampton. To change an old proverb and twist it to suit the situation, it might be said that one ball does not make a Summer, and even Newport, with three dances in one week. has grown absolutely exhausted at the prospect, and Mrs. Goelet has been asked to postpone her cotillion until the week after Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish’s dance. This seems very odd, when one recalls the past history of Newport with a much smaller population than at present. – NYT’s, “Some Happenings in Good Society”, 1900

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