Mapping Mobility: Spatial and Class Change in the Gilded Age Wall Street Workforce

Men's Lives

The Census data also enable us to map male employees’ trajectories across space and show their movement toward New York City’s suburbs in all directions. Of the 44 men found in both samples, only 8 of the men (18%) were in the same home in both years. On Wall Street, the contemporary culture was imbued with the idea that its workforce needed to maximize their exposure to nature for respite from the strenuous pace of the financial district’s daily patterns. Brown Bros. manager W. Gerard Vermilye (who moved from Englewood, New Jersey to Closter, a more distant suburb, over the course of the decade) described for Country Life magazine his delight in enjoying “juicy venison steaks… [barely] related to the kind sold in city markets” on a family camping vacation. A magazine article on “Athletic Wall Street” noted that bankers and brokers hurried to the suburbs on summer afternoons after the work day to “‘get in’ two hours of competitive golf, tennis, polo and swimming” at Montclair in New Jersey, Garrison in Westchester County, or at “various resorts along the Sound.”



Where women's moves were shaped by their existing commitments to parents and other older relatives, many of the Brown Bros. employees who moved to the suburbs between 1900 and 1910 had married and in some cases had children over the course of the decade. For example, Archibald Ogden, who in 1900 was 30, unmarried, and living with his parents in Union, New Jersey, had by 1910 married and moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey. The data thus reinforce my findings from the IPUMS data about the importance of marriage in shaping men’s identities that was then further reinforced by their ability to move to new suburban homes and become avid consumers.

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