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Regilding the Gilded Age in New York

Irina Tarantina, a cigarette girl, at a Shanghai Mermaid event at the Down Town Association; Delmonico’s; Scott Jordan, the man behind the excavation of the basement of Carroll Place, pictured in his apartment in Astoria, Queens.Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times

It was the perfect night for a séance. Manhattan was buried in snow, and an eerie silence hung over the island. To join the occult ritual, a particular fascination of the Gilded Age, I had been told to journey to the remotest fringe of Washington Heights and ascend a staircase into Sylvan Terrace, a cobblestoned lane of wooden houses from the 1880s. An ancient villa called the Morris-Jumel Mansion loomed behind an iron fence in the darkness ahead, looking like a suitable retreat for Bram Stoker.

I was greeted by a mutton-chopped attendant and escorted into an octagonal parlor, where some dozen fellow séance-goers were nervously gathered. He then led us down to the icy basement and instructed us to hold — or in more susceptible cases, clutch — hands around a wooden table. For the next half-hour, we suspended disbelief and communed with the other world through a medium. In the pitch darkness, a malevolent “spirit” hissed, muttered and swept around the group, provoking hysterical shrieks as it brushed against our backs.

I hadn’t actually been teleported back to the Gilded Age — an era of tumultuous social change that ran from roughly the 1870s to the early 1900s — and its fascination for spiritualism and near-beyond; the séance occurred a few weeks ago as a piece of “immersive theater” staged by a group called Death’s Head Productions. Joining the event was no more difficult than taking a ride on the C train. But on an imaginative level, I had taken a step out of time. Afterward, my senses were on high alert. Wandering the empty mansion, its timbers groaning like a living beast, the hairs stood up on my neck. When I fancied I saw something move in a dark corner, I made for the subway.

It’s axiomatic that New York has long been indifferent to its past, knocking down physical remains with cheery abandon — the “pull-down-and-build-over-again spirit,” as Walt Whitman put it over a century and a half ago. There are a handful of famous survivors from the Gilded Age, perhaps the city’s most mythologized historical period, including Gramercy Park, the Frick Collection and Pierpont Morgan Library. But New York has been stripped of much of its rich folklore from the era.

What other cultural mecca would permit the legendary love nest of the playboy architect Stanford White on 24th Street, where he entertained scantily clad chorus girls on a red velvet swing (a habit that led to his eventual murder in Madison Square Garden by a crazed husband), to crumble and collapse? Or allow the notorious Bowery saloon McGurk’s Suicide Hall, so named because prostitutes would kill themselves in despair by downing carbolic acid, to be leveled for a glass condominium? In perhaps the ultimate symbolic insult, Edith Wharton’s childhood home, at 14 West 23rd Street, is now a Starbucks.

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A circa 1892 rendering of the twin-spired Temple Court Building, soon to become the Beekman, a 287-room hotel.Credit...King's Handbook of New York

And yet surprising remnants do linger from the era, along with an even more surprising strain of New Yorkers keeping the era alive. A little digging reveals a thriving subculture of eccentric experts — amateur archaeologists of urban spaces, theater directors recreating bordello-salons, bartenders who specialize in 19th-century cocktails — all celebrating the past in ways that are creative, contemporary and downright fun. (Even television is getting in to the act, as Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey,” has confirmed that his next project will be an American period drama set in Gilded Age Manhattan.)

And so I decided to embark on my own immersive tour of those Gilded Age vestiges, sallying forth from my East Village apartment to seek the company of its obsessive modern admirers. Winter in Manhattan provided an apt period atmosphere, giving its streets a hazy tone and the city’s denizens a tubercular pallor.

My first stop, naturally enough, was a Victorian martial arts class. Old New York could be a dangerous place, and the Bartitsu Club of New York City was founded in 2011 to revive the “gentlemanly art of self-defense,” which had made its way across the Atlantic from its Victorian London birthplace. Bartitsu’s popularity peaked in 1899, but in recent years, after generations of obscurity, its moves were reconstructed by aficionados from Victorian instructional magazines and dog-eared martial arts manuals. Practitioners use canes, umbrellas and even snuff boxes as weapons, combined with jujitsulike moves, to throw their assailants off balance. (Sherlock Holmes employs this martial art in “The Final Problem” before tossing his archenemy, Moriarty, over Reichenbach Falls.)

After climbing a dark stairwell on West 18th Street, I joined a dozen other students (many wearing vests and bowler hats) on the mats, and we equally divided between men and women. “Ladies could learn how to use their parasols for self-defense,” explained Rachel Klingberg, a Pace University web designer who founded the club. “Women were beginning to appear in public alone during the Gilded Age, and some decided to look after themselves.”

Over the next two hours, our instructor, Jesse Barnick, an information-technology specialist during the week, explained the basics of how to knock a cad to the ground. Taking a wooden cane, I began practicing with a bespectacled college student. We dodged one another sedately for a while, until he decided to show Bartitsu’s potential: an effortless move to the knees sent me sprawling face down on the mat.

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Members of the Bartitsu Club of New York City, which specializes in the Victorian art of self-defense, in the club’s West 18th Street studio (Elizabeth Crowens, on floor, with, from left, Emilio Panter, Rachel Klingberg and Brad Gibson).Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times

Luckily, there were no ruffians about on my next mission. The members of the New York Nineteenth Century Society were not hard to spot even in the bustling Grand Central Terminal concourse; each was dressed in full Gilded Age regalia, causing even the most hardened Metro North workers to stop and stare. The women wore confections of bustles, bonnets and veils (one Brooklyn belle, Morgana, introduced herself with a curtsy and a greeting of “charmed, I’m sure”), while the gents sported tailored waistcoats, fob watches and pearl studs, most with mustaches waxed to rapier points.

Our guide, Wendy Felton, who was leading the behind-the-scenes tour, was a little taken aback: “Well, it’s not always that visitors dress so nicely!” And although the walk-through of the Beaux-Arts terminal was fascinating, the society members rather stole the show. Denny Daniel, who runs a “traveling exhibition” of antiques called the Museum of Interesting Things, produced his own array of railway memorabilia, including a phonograph he hand-cranked to play a recording of singing conductors.

The others offered a steady stream of 19th-century lore, which continued as we retired to the Campbell Apartment, a former tycoon’s office decorated in Florentine Renaissance opulence, which now operates as a lavish cocktail lounge in a secreted-away corner of the terminal. As we settled by the ornate stone fireplace, I naturally ordered the Robber Baron, a tangy mix of vodka, muddled mint, lime juice and Midori.

Society members are nothing if not passionate, staying connected through happenings around the city. “I’m very into the Gilded Age,” said Kris Svendsen, a fiber-optic technician by day who had just had his vest hand-sewn by a vintage specialist tailor. “I like the cool clothes, and I like the parties. If you want to dress up in New York, you can do it at least twice a week.”

He rattled off a hectic schedule of steampunk picnics, dinners on vintage trains and burlesque shows. The group also had a taste for sideshow oddities in the style of Coney Island entertainments. Morgana had a video on her iPhone, for example, of a scaled-down Ferris wheel being ridden by taxidermied squirrels. “Isn’t that something?” she mused.

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A cocktail at the Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog.Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times

The most beloved repository of such real-life relics is Obscura Antiques & Oddities on Avenue A, a store that reigns as New York’s very own Cabinet of Curiosities. The shelves were crowded with stuffed, deformed “two-faced kittens,” mummified human heads and harrowing images of medical ailments. “Oh, we’ve got skin diseases!” an attendant boasted, like a carnival barker in suspenders and skull ring, as we pored over postcards of warts and rashes. “2-D, 3-D, whatever you like.”

He suggested I head to Obscura’s new counterpart in Brooklyn, the Morbid Anatomy Museum, where enthusiasts can enjoy taxidermy classes, lectures on post-mortem decay and exhibitions of deathbed portraits. Souvenirs included a wax model of gruesomely spotted lips, labeled “Early Stages of Syphilis” — just the thing to grace a Gilded Age bachelor’s desk, perhaps.

Location scouts for a film set in the Gilded Age would have their work cut out for them: There is no shortage of tragic architectural losses from the era, starting with the eradication of almost all of the Fifth Avenue mansions along the so-called golden mile. Fortunately, since the Landmarks Law was enacted in 1965, there have been a few more heartening tales.

Manhattan is still honeycombed with private clubs in antique townhouses, many of which are open to the public during events. My personal favorites are the Down Town Association, an 1887 mansion complete with stuffed wild animals on the top floor, where Teddy Roosevelt would still feel at home; it’s the setting for a regular vintage-dress party called Shanghai Mermaid. A close second is the New York Yacht Club, hidden near Times Square. Thousands of office workers rush past it every day without noticing its three bay windows carved as the sterns of baroque frigates, complete with waves, dolphins and trailing seaweed.

And there are inspiring revivals like the Beekman, an architectural gem from 1883 that is now being renovated as a 287-room hotel, with restaurants by Tom Colicchio and Keith McNally. The architect Randy Gerner took me on a hard-hat tour of this grandiose structure, near City Hall, clambering up dust-covered stairs to behold its soaring nine-story atrium, each level supported by iron brackets modeled as dragons. At the top, we inspected the spectacular pyramid-shaped skylight, which frames the nearby Gothic spine of the Woolworth Building.

For Mr. Gerner, the intricate Gilded Age style is back in fashion. “I think New Yorkers are tired of glass skyscrapers that offer nothing but bland reflections,” he said. “There is a longing for beautiful ornamentation.”

To find less aristocratic sites, I contacted Esther Crain, the author of “New York City in 3D in the Gilded Age.” This unique volume includes stereoscopic photographs from the era and 3-D viewing lenses, offering a fresh way to see the classic images of tenement life — the teeming street markets, the elevated trains rattling along the avenues, the horse manure piled in pyramids.

Ms. Crain suggested we meet in the East Village, which in the Gilded Age was known as Little Germany for its immigrant makeup. We walked past an empty building just off the Bowery that was once a boxing club run by local gangs and paused before a former halfway house for female prisoners on Second Avenue. “There’s something about the East Village,” she said. “The remnants of the Gilded Age have hung on a little bit longer.”

In Tompkins Square Park, we paused at the Temperance Monument, raised in a vain attempt to curtail boozing in the raunchy neighborhood. “There was saloon after saloon around here,” she said, as I silently noted bar after bar.

It was a timely reminder that eating and drinking can offer a vivid entree into the past. The Gilded Age was when New York saw its first fine restaurants, sprawling establishments with menus to match. I started with the upper crust, dining on oysters and steak at the swank Delmonico’s on Beaver Street, then ventured up Madison Avenue to the Palace Hotel, at East 51st Street. Its entrance preserves the 1884 townhouse of Henry Villard, who made the improbable leap from journalist to railroad magnate. Much of the “brownstone palazzo” gleaming with Italian marble is reserved for private events, but mortals can savor the Olympian ambience at Rarities, a by-reservation-only bar, where it still feels like Villard could be cutting million-dollar deals over Cognac and cigars.

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Ava Lee Scott before the “Serenade” performance at Carroll Place.Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times

An ornate portal off the lobby opens into a cocoon of exclusive taste and sepulchral quiet, the walls lined with plush velvet wallpaper of arterial purple and brooding oil paintings behind golden frames. Only 25 guests at any time are permitted to sink into the butter-soft armchairs, which are framed by vitrines displaying aged bourbons. For today’s masters of the universe, the cellar includes genuine Gilded Age wines: a bottle of 1888 Frapin Cognac goes for a mere $10,575, a 1900 Château Margaux red for $22,000.

To palate-cleanse at the other end of the price spectrum, I scurried back downtown. New York was even then a booze-soaked cityscape, with more than 10,000 raunchy, sawdust-floored saloons. A handful of this ilk remains today, complete with worn mahogany bars, pressed tin ceilings, smoke-stained walls and working dumbwaiters: McSorley’s Old Ale House; Fanelli Cafe; the Ear Inn; Pete’s Tavern; the Old Town Bar; and the Paris Cafe, near the South Street Seaport, which reopened last year after damage from Hurricane Sandy, and whose inspiring motto is “1873-Forever.”

But there are also modern updates on the theme, which evoke the period in imaginative new ways.

The most original (and popular) is the Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog, opened in 2012 by two Belfast boys, Sean Muldoon and Jack McGarry, on Water Street by Manhattan’s southern tip, where thousands of Irish immigrants once landed every day. After getting past the doorman (who might have stepped from a Jacob Riis photograph of Robber’s Roost thugs), I took a stool at the dimly lit second-floor Parlor — and was showered by shards of ice. As the bartender hacked with gusto at a giant cube with a metal pick, she recalled the time when the city’s ice was shipped down from Massachusetts.

Whiskey punch materialized in a crockery teacup — a sort of alcoholic amuse-bouche — and I pored by candlelight over the cocktail menu, which is as thick as a Russian novel, and comes with drawings recounting the career of the Irish ruffian-hero John Morrissey, who brawled his way from rags to riches and died a New York senator in 1878.

The historical research waged by Mr. Muldoon and Mr. McGarry would have ravaged the livers of lesser men. The pair consulted more than 50 cocktail books from the late 19th century and experimented with over 1,000 recipes. Adjustments, they found, were necessary.

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The actors Mark Ryan Anderson and Milagros Simon before a performance of “Serenade,” a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, at Carroll Place.Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times

“The quality of spirits was harsher than today,” Mr. Muldoon explained. “Drinkers favored sweet and creamy cocktails to soften the liquor’s raw taste. We modernize that for the contemporary palate, which favors drier, citrusy, sharper flavors.”

Still, as I knocked back a plate of oysters and a Pistache Fizz (a concoction adapted from the 1895 opus “Modern American Drinks,” based on green-tea-infused gin), I thought I could hear the creaking of ships on the wharves and the clatter of hooves just outside.

The strands of my journey came together one frozen January night, when I went to visit “the wickedest bar in New York,” a title bestowed by an 1890 guidebook called “Vices of a Big City.” This “disgusting” dive, at 157 Bleecker Street in today’s West Village, was called the Slide, and it has gained celebrity status as the first saloon in America to openly admit gay men, in the late 1880s. The ambience was wildly theatrical: Male patrons were often powdered and rouged, flamboyant cross-dressers had names like Princess Toto and Miss Phoebe, and the clientele would be entertained by provocative “singing waiters.” Edith Wharton, one can be sure, never touched a coupe of Champagne at the Slide.

Although the saloon was closed after police raids in 1892, the Village remained a locus of permissive behavior, coming full circle in the 1960s as the epicenter of the gay liberation movement. It flourished for decades as the music club Kenny’s Castaways but closed in 2012. Recently, the future of the fabled site looked bleak, with rumors that it had been gutted and turned into a minimalist trattoria. Just what New York needed.

But when I arrived at No. 157, I was surprised to see it had been renamed Carroll Place, using a 19th-century neighborhood moniker. Inside, the walls were lined with reclaimed wooden planks. The original scratched bar was intact, the rafters were crowded with antique bottles, and a steamy portrait of a Gilded Age chorus girl hung on one wall.

I asked the bartender if I could visit the basement, where the Slide permitted prostitutes of both sexes to ply their trade. “Sure,” she said, unfazed. “The artifacts from the excavations are on display.” Dashing downstairs, I found the walls were indeed adorned with relics, all dug up (according to handwritten signs) from the bar’s privy.

I quickly arranged to meet the man behind the excavation, Scott Jordan, who turned out to be one of the great 19th-century obsessives. He arrived nattily dressed in a bowler hat and suspenders (by now I expected nothing less); every few minutes he carefully wiped the beer froth from his mustache with a linen kerchief.

Mr. Jordan called himself a “digger,” one of a handful of New York amateurs whose passion it is to excavate ancient toilet sites, which provide a wealth of artifacts, since so much was simply tossed inside these open pits before modern plumbing. His involvement in the Slide “digathon” began in July 2013, he said, when he was selling his art at a market next door.

“I recognized the building’s age. I thought: Man, I want to dig here. It would be so cool to find that privy!”

It turned out that one of the new owners, Sergio Riva, shared his passion for the past. (“Sergio said to me, ‘Go in!’ I was thrilled!”) Over two days, he and a half-dozen fellow diggers pulled up 500 pounds of dirt and oyster shells — but also Chinese porcelain, two cast-iron wheels, 40 colored-glass bottles, dinner plates and floor tiles, all now lovingly mounted on the walls.

Even more thrilling was news that the theatrical spirit of the Slide refuses to die. In a startling example of history’s resilience in New York, Mr. Jordan told me that the wine bar is hosting creative tributes to Edgar Allan Poe, who lived around the corner in the West Village for two years in the 1840s, created by alumni of “Sleep No More,the wildly successful pioneer of immersive theater staged in a warehouse in Chelsea.

And so, on the night of Jan. 19 — Poe’s birthday, as it happened — I found myself being handed a Tarot card (gratifyingly, the Emperor), then descending the stone steps that once led to the Slide’s basement brothel. The performance unfolded like an opium dream, evoking the louche artistic entertainments in upscale Gilded Age bordellos. Two priestesses in Grecian robes purified my hands before leading me to a sumptuous salon in the rafters, where I sank into a velvet armchair and was plied with red wine and Italian delicacies. A powdered M.C. in funeral garb asked us to light candles and silently confess our most secret wish, then recited Poe’s 1833 poem “Serenade.”

Seven Muses in slinky night robes sang solos — channeling Cleopatra, Endymion and Medusa — to haunting live strains of violin and cello. In between songs, the actresses drifted around the room, chatting in 19th-century character with the diners. It was hard to tell the performers from the observers: The women in the audience were dripping with vintage jewelry, and the men with creative facial hair that evoked the topiary of an English garden. A local artist beside me crafted jewelry from raven claws. An example was dangling from his own piratical beard.

After the show, I spoke with Ava Lee Scott, its writer-director, about the appeal of this fluid and interactive 19th-century performance style. “It comes down to a longing for human contact,” she said. “Today, everything is dehumanized by technology. We miss the intimacy of the Gilded Age — a handwritten letter, flowers at the door, giving a lock of hair, looking into someone’s eyes, feeling a human touch. There is a void today, and people want connections. We want storytelling and poetry in our lives.”

As I strolled through Washington Square Park, which was enveloped in a wintry silence, there was hardly a sign to betray that this was not 1890. I was carrying a wax candle that one of the performers had given me to burn the following noon to “purify my spirit.” I would have to run modern errands — dealing with health care, paying my phone bill — but the ritual would make a welcome break. A touch of Gilded Age mystery is addictive.

TONY PERROTTET, a contributing writer for Smithsonian magazine, is the author, most recently, of “The Sinner’s Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe.”

How to Relive the Past

The New York Nineteenth Century Society has a Facebook page that alerts the curious to meetings, tours, lectures, tea swaps, Victorian séances and workshops on life in the 1800s.

Monthly training classes in the Victorian art of self-defense are offered by the Bartitsu Club of New York City in a studio on West 18th Street.

The immersive theater piece “Serenade,” a creative tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, occurs every Monday at Carroll Place.

Fans of period dress regularly visit the Museum of Interesting Things, which holds gatherings in a SoHo loft about once a month, and the extravagantly theatrical Shanghai Mermaid, whose regular parties with historical themes are held in the Down Town Association’s 1887 clubhouse.

Finally, a good way to admire the stuffed polar bear and period ambience of the Explorers Club on the Upper East Side is to attend the public lecture series held on Monday nights.

Where to Stay

New York has several hotels surviving from the early 1900s, including the Jane Hotel, in the West Village by the Hudson River, built for seamen and where survivors of the Titanic were put up (rooms from $69).

The grandiose Peninsula New York hotel, which started life as the Gotham (rooms from $695), sits in Midtown across Fifth Avenue from the equally historic St. Regis (rooms from $626).

The Inn at Irving Place is in an atmospheric double brownstone by Gramercy Park, with period décor and quiet Victorian tea salon (rooms from $275).

But the most grandiose Gilded Age survivor lies 90 minutes from Manhattan near New Paltz: The lakeside Mohonk Mountain House (rooms from $300) maintains its period ambience while updating its modern luxuries, including a spa, and offers regular tours and lectures relating to the Gilded Age.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section TR, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Regilding the Gilded Age. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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