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

Suburban Mobility



The careers of three Brown Bros. employees illustrate the progression from living in the city to establishing independent suburban households as married family men. John I. Hughes started at the firm in 1889, at the age of 23; Jason A. Neilson began working at the firm in 1892, at the age of 20; and Willet Crosby Roper joined the firm in July 1899, not long after graduating from Harvard. In 1900, Hughes, his wife Emma (whom he had married in 1895), and their four-year-old daughter Alwyn lived at 9 West 106th Street; also part of the household was Hughes’ brother Charles, an artist. Neilson, who had married in 1896, lived with wife Isabelle and their two-year-old son Jason, Jr. with his parents on West 133rd Street; Roper lived with his mother on East 84th Street. All three men saw significant increases in their salary over the 1900s decade: Hughes’ salary doubled from $1,500 to $3,000, Neilson’s grew from $1,500 to $4,000, and Roper’s from $250—the firm’s typical entry-level salary—to $2,500. The three men also enjoyed the bonuses that employees received almost every year, amounting to a full third of their salaries in 1899 and then ranging between five and twenty percent in the years that followed. All told, between 1901 and 1909 Roper received just under $1,800 in bonuses, Hughes just over $3,000 and Neilson almost $3,200.

For all three men, their labor at the urban heart of American capitalism made possible their move to become property-owners participating in and benefiting from the transformation of space on the metropolitan fringe into suburban landscape. None of their families owned the homes they lived in in 1900. Their Brown Bros. salaries and bonuses made possible their move to the suburbs: by 1910, Neilson and Hughes were living in Montclair, New Jersey, while Roper had moved to the nearby town of West Orange. For all three men these moves involved not simply a geographic change but a change in environment, as a comparison of the rowhouse mappings of their 1900 residences and their detached 1910 homes (which they owned with mortgages) makes clear. By 1914, Roper had moved even further from New York—to Closter, New Jersey—and was expressing the hope of becoming an “amateur farmer.”

Contents of this path:

Contents of this tag:

This page references: