New York’s 100-Call New Year

The story as it is told

Ask anyone who remembers it, and the tale starts with the Dutch. The people who founded New York, it goes, kept New Year's Day as a day for visiting, and the custom passed down through the old families who called themselves Knickerbockers, until it belonged to the city more than to any other place in the country.

On the first of January the gentlemen went out. They started in the morning with a list of addresses and a stack of cards, and by evening they had been in a hundred parlors or more. At home, the ladies waited in their best dresses beside tables laid with oysters, cake and hot punch, and when the day was over they counted the cards in the basket to see who had called and who had stayed away.

What we can confirm

Visitors noticed it first because it was so local. The English clergyman Isaac Fidler, who lived in New York in 1832-33, wrote that "on New-year's Day, all gentlemen call on their female friends, to renew or perpetuate their friendship," a custom he was told existed "in no other part of the Union." The rules were simple. Women stayed home, dressed in their best, and received. Men went out with a list of addresses and a stack of calling cards, stayed about five minutes per house, took a bite and a glass, and moved on. Newly married men stayed home with their wives to receive. Etiquette writers of the time said a lady should not ask a caller to take off his coat.

Hosts treated it as the social event of the year. The Merchant's House Museum, whose historian has studied the Tredwell family on East Fourth Street, describes weeks of cleaning and cooking for a buffet meant to feed at least 100 callers: boned turkey, chicken salad, pickled oysters, plum cake, Dutch crullers and punch.

The numbers were real. On January 1, 1840, former mayor Philip Hone wrote in his diary that he "trudged about for nearly five hours" and added, "The extent of the visiting circle in New York has become too great for the operations of one day." In 1844, by the museum's account of the same diary, Hone's daughters told him they had received 169 visits while he was out. A diarist named John Ward recorded on New Year's Day 1866 that he "called at 107 houses," leaving cards at 36 and finding 71 at home. A Long Island Star satire (dated 1845 in the museum's text and 1835 in its source list) has a young man calculate 180 visits at four minutes apiece.

Then it fell apart. As the city grew, the circle grew with it, and drinking became the story. The museum quotes the New York Daily Herald of January 2, 1867, on a 40-man gang called the "Dead Beat Club" that cleared the tables at several mansions before midday. Louisa May Alcott put a drunken New Year's caller into "Rose in Bloom" (1876). Hostesses responded with a quiet signal. The Sun's front page of January 2, 1883, under the headline "New Year's Day Calling," reported that the custom "was falling into disuse among fashionable people" and that in the brownstone districts door knobs and bell pulls "blossomed out" with gaily colored baskets for cards, so callers could drop a card without being received. Black ribbons on some baskets marked houses in mourning. The Sun noted that Mrs. William Astor and Mrs. John Astor were receiving, while Mrs. W. H. Vanderbilt was not. The same report said the "New York custom" had spread through the Northern states, and western papers bear that out: the Helena (Montana) Weekly Herald of January 5, 1888 described Helena's "great calling day."

By 1891, the museum notes, the New York Times was calling the custom "antiquated." New Year's Eve parties and restaurant dinners took its place. The writer Edgar Fawcett mourned it in Lippincott's in 1894, and Edith Wharton later set a novella, "New Year's Day," in its last years among old New York society.

The facts

• Hone diary, Jan 1, 1840: "trudged about for nearly five hours"; "The extent of the visiting circle in New York has become too great for the operations of one day." The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828-1851, ed. Bayard Tuckerman, vol. 2 (Dodd, Mead, 1889), p. 1-2, Internet Archive, archive.org
• Hone, 1844: "my girls tell me they received one hundred and sixty-nine visits. This fine old custom, almost peculiar to New York, does not lose favor." in the scan: The Diary of Philip Hone, vol. 2 (1889), p. 204, entry for 1844 (New Year's Day): "I was out more than five hours, and my girls tell me they received one hundred and sixty-nine visits. This fine old custom, almost peculiar to New York, does not lose favour in the eyes of our citizens" (the scan's spelling is "favour"). archive.org. Also quoted by Merchant's House Museum, merchantshouse.org
• John Ward diary, 1866: "Called at 107 houses, leaving cards at 36 of them, and finding 71 at home." Merchant's House Museum (from Morrell Family Papers, New-York Historical Society)
• New York Daily Herald, Jan 2, 1867: the 40-man "Dead Beat Club." Merchant's House Museum
• Isaac Fidler, Observations... Made During a Residence There in 1832 (1833): the "singular custom, which prevails in New-York, but, I am informed, in no other part of the Union." The American Past: NYC in Focus, nycpast.org
• The Sun (New York), Jan 2, 1883, p. 1, "New Year's Day Calling": custom "falling into disuse among fashionable people"; card baskets on door knobs and bell pulls; black ribbons on baskets; Mrs. William Astor and Mrs. John Astor receiving, Mrs. W. H. Vanderbilt not; "New York custom has spread through the Northern States." LoC, loc.gov
• Helena Weekly Herald, Jan 5, 1888, p. 7: "the great calling day." LoC, loc.gov
• Etiquette: brief calls, no removing coats, refreshments offered as the caller leaves. nycpast.org quoting M. E. W. Sherwood, Manners and Social Usages (1887)

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