The City Electric

The City Electric: New York’s Gilded Age takes visitors inside the mansions, wardrobes, and social rituals of gilded New York, then steps outside into a city where record immigration, Black migration from the South, and a booming industrial economy were remaking New York at the same moment its wealthiest families were building palaces on Fifth Avenue. The exhibition pairs the Museum’s renowned collection of Gilded Age fashion, jewelry, and decorative arts with the story of a city remade by wealth, immigration, migration, and invention.  

New York’s dynamism ran far deeper than its gilded image. A historic wave of immigration reshaped the city’s streets, industries, and culture. Across the East River, Black Brooklynites forged a community of lasting social and political influence. As townhouses rose and tenements teemed, the Brooklyn Bridge linked New York and Brooklyn, pointing the way toward a new urban colossus. The City Electric reveals a metropolis remade by newcomers and bold ideas on its way to becoming the iconic city we know today.

Visitors will encounter artifacts of social competition, furnishings from Fifth Avenue’s mansions, and signature gowns, including the “Electric Light” costume worn by Alice Claypool Vanderbilt. Photographs by Jacob Riis, Alice Austen, and Lewis Hine document the new arrivals who, a few miles downtown, transformed the city’s neighborhoods and labor force. Early films by Thomas Edison and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company capture a city in motion and newly electrified, typified by the Brooklyn Bridge, the era’s most ambitious feat of engineering.  

The exhibition spotlights the society that Black New Yorkers built in Brooklyn, with debutante parties, club receptions, and summers in Newport. It follows one extended family, including pharmacist and Brooklyn Board of Education member Philip A. White and New York Age editor Jerome Bowers Peterson. Visitors will read excerpts of works by the Innocents, a circle of poets that included T. Thomas Fortune and inventor Lewis Latimer, and writing by the founders of the Women’s Loyal Union.

The City Electric is accompanied by a new edition of the sold-out bestseller, Gilded New York: Design, Fashion, and Society (Monacelli), edited by Donald Albrecht and Jeannine Falino. Publishing March 12, 2027, the new edition will include a new essay by Dr. Lilly Tuttle and a foreword by Stephanie Hill Wilchfort.