Season 4 /Episode 1, “Ring the Bells”

☞ Webster Hall, the site of Oscar and Enid Van Rhijn’s lively wedding afterparty, of which Aunt Agnes would not approve, was a real Gilded Age gathering space, located at 125 East 11th Street in Manhattan’s East Village. It operates to this day as a concert venue. A 2008 report prepared for the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission summarizes Webster Hall’s rich countercultural history.

Architect Charles Rentz Jr. built the venue for Charles Goldstein in 1886. The structure was both a home and a public rental hall and social center, hosting balls, dances, lectures, union rallies and more, often for the Lower East Side’s working-class and immigrant populations. As early as 1888, the hall had gained a reputation as a hotbed of leftist, socialist, anarchist politics and labor organization. Its major clientele of the 1910s and 1920s, the city’s bohemian population, nicknamed it the “Devil’s Playhouse.” The hall would also serve as a hub of New York City’s LGBTQ+ community in the 1920s.

Webster Hall is the site of boisterous dancing by Marian and Larry, as well as the newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Van Rhijn and their friends. Once considered a scandalous departure from group-oriented social dances, the waltz and other partnered dances were rare opportunities for young people in the Gilded Age to be in physical contact with a member of the opposite sex. Among the dances highlighted in this episode is a mazurka, based on triple-meter Polish folk dances. According to “How to Dance,” a dance instruction manual published in 1878, the complexity of the mazurka means it is “not a dance to be learned from a book.”

☞ Peggy’s soon-to-be mother-in-law offers to give her a bridal veil of “Brussels bobbin lace.” Bobbin lace refers to a specific technique of lacemaking, a form of pillow lace, in which the various threads of the lace are attached to wooden spools and carefully woven into intricate patterns, using pins to hold the design in place until the lace piece is finished. Belgian laces were widely sought after from the 16th century onward, and historically utilized very fine linen threads, resulting in a very lightweight and highly detailed final product. This veil would have been considered an exceptionally fine textile.