Of Hallowe’en, Palace Hotels, Prudery, and Nudity
In the 1880s through the 1910s, New York City’s so-called ‘palace hotels’ (not to be confused with The Palace Hotel) were the places to be on October 31 for (adult) Hallowe’en parties and (also adult) fun and games.
These days, late Victorian (Gilded Age) folks are ofttimes caricatured as stuffy prudes or sticks-in-the-mud, sexless drones whose erogenous zones were protected by a multilayered carapace of fabric.
Well, that last part is true—they did like their fabric—but so far as being prudish, sexless, or sticks-in-the-mud, our Gilded Age ancestors were actually a pretty randy lot. True, in many ways sex wasn’t as omnipresent and ‘in your face’ as it is today—frankly I am almost numb to it since the Internet came along—but it was there, if more suggestive and subtle than explicit. Think ‘slow burn romance’ rather than ‘bonfire of the panties.’
But back to the palace hotels. In the late Gilded Age, the original Waldorf, the Hoffman House, the Albemarle, and several other very grand hotels were clustered around New York’s Madison Square—beneath the seemingly topless tower of Sanford White’s original Madison Square Garden. Yet even this soaring structure was surmounted by a thing even more magnificent: namely, Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s enormous gilded statue, ‘Diana of the Tower.’
Who just happened to be buck-naked.
Metropolitan Museum of Art; public domain
(If you think people are less prudish now than then, try to imagine the shitstorm that would ensue if someone proposed popping Saint-Gaudens’s masterwork atop the NFL’s new TaySwift Stadium or whatever passes for an entertainment venue these days. Fortunately, the original statue is now safely on permanent display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
Now, with a 15-foot tall, golden, naked lady gleaming down at you all day long, you can’t blame even the squarest of the Madison Square residents for getting occasional ideas. And in the palace hotels, these ideas burst into full and extravagant blossom. Especially on the final night of October.
Around Hallowe’en time, truly bacchanalian costume balls—the men often wearing masks boasting outsized noses and the ladies with leather harnesses strapped over their gowns—took flight in the grand ballrooms of the palace hotels. Cross-dressing was a thing, too, since those who enjoyed such things could freely indulge while (if queried) passing it off as costume and not kink. Here are a few ladies, circa 1902, enjoying the best of both worlds.
Author's collection
Before the dancing began, though, the Halloweeners got properly lubed up with plenty of champagne and Roman punch, served in the huge barrooms that were a main attraction of the palace hotels. In those saloons, both men and women were surrounded by erotica: sculptures that would bring a blush to Diana of the Tower’s gilded cheek and paintings that left precious little to the imagination. The Hoffman House’s famous bar alone boasted two of the naughtiest: Bouguereau’s ‘Nymphs and Satyr’ (below on right) and Falero’s ‘Witches Going to Their Sabbath.’ (The latter, in particular, was a real crowd-pleaser on Hallowe’en nights, though both were on very public display year-round.)
At midnight—the witching hour!—the panting dancers stopped whirling, the champagne ceased gushing, and the masks came off—literally and figuratively. I’ll leave the next scenes to your roiling Cauldron of Imagination, but let’s be honest, we’re all here today because Victorians did actually slip between the sheets from time to time. The ballrooms may have emptied shortly after midnight, but the partying continued above-stairs. And vigorously.
Artrenewal.org; public domain
(As a personal confession, here we are in the Very Modern and Open-Minded Twenty-First Century, all of us only a few keystrokes away from every variety of sex site imaginable, and get this: I’m a little nervous about posting these Gilded Age artworks. Hmmm. Who’s the prude now? Me? You?)
Anyhow, there they are, in all their naked glory. ‘Diana,’ ‘Nymphs and Satyr,’ ‘Witches,’ and a lot of others just like ‘em were everywhere in the Gilded Age—especially on Hallowe’en, when people could be whoever they wanted to be, if for one wild night every year.
And with that, allow me to wish you all a very Happy Hallowe’en. Ride a friend’s broomstick for all its worth, or take a dip with a few local nymphs. No need to be a prude nowadays—certainly not like those stuffy old Victorians used to be.
