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| Party Over Here! Guests at Hyde's 1905 Ball at Sherry's Restaurant |
At the age of 23, Manhattan socialite and supreme party-er of the Gilded Age, James Hazen Hyde (1876-1859) inherited a fortune. He was given majority control of the extremely profitable Equitable Assurance Society, a company founded by his father, Henry Baldwin Hyde, in 1859.
Hyde was the prototypical dandy of turn-of-the-20th-century New York.
His clothes were made in Paris (a city that he loved and visited
frequently). He was enormously fond of horses and coaches (and
once raced, with Alfred Vanderbilt,--by coach!--from Philadelphia to New York City).
