Quickly, it grew to become clear that the Academy of Music couldn’t accommodate all of the representatives of the 2 components in trendy society who, for one purpose or one other, wished to personal or occupy the containers that have been the seen signal of wealth and social place. Sick of the shutout, a brand new plan emerged that very same 12 months to construct the Metropolitan Opera Home: a much bigger, higher house for this new class of millionaires. Main the cost? The Vanderbilt household, together with William H., William Ok., and Cornelius. (Based on an 1881 report in The New York Instances, of the opera home’s 10,500 shares, the Vanderbilt household owned round 750.) Different now famous-name households—just like the Morgans, Rockefellers, and Roosevelts—joined them.
When the deep pockets of the competitors grew to become clear, the trustees of the Academy of Music made a last-ditch effort to keep away from social oblivion, providing the Vanderbilts, Morgans, and Rockefellers containers. But it surely was too late: In October 1883, the Metropolitan Opera Home opened on thirty ninth Road with a manufacturing of Faust. Its auditorium, with 3,045 seats, was the biggest on this planet. The stage was the third largest, after solely the Imperial Opera Home in St. Petersburg and the New Opera in Paris. On the time, a critic for The Nation bemoaned how such a dimension dwarfed the acoustics. However he additionally made a extra chopping (if not solely unfaithful) comment: “However as the home was constructed avowedly for social functions quite than inventive, it’s ineffective to complain about this.”
Social it actually was. In its opening protection of the Metropolitan Opera Home, the paper famous its pivotal function in New York excessive society: “The Temple of Wealth has been opened. The brand new opera home is what I imply. That concern has been formally devoted to the worship and glorification of cash,” wrote its correspondent. Emblematic of all of it? Alva Vanderbilt herself, who “led the household in gorgeousness.”
She wore a white satin costume so embossed with pearls she appeared lined in them, in addition to diamonds upon diamonds. The Washington Publish surmised the jewels worn by the Vanderbilt girls that night time should have equaled 1 / 4 of one million {dollars}—round $8 million at present.
Inside three years, the Temple of Wealth had received. The Academy of Music, dwarfed by the competitors, closed its opera program and resorted to vaudeville exhibits as an alternative. In 1926, it was demolished to make room for the Con Ed constructing.
