Gilded Age Escalators, Windows, and Women on the Rise

The Victorian Society New York's 2024 Emerging Scholars winners will shed light on little-known yet influential aspects of Gilded Age culture, activism and architecture. Sophia Kamps, recent graduate of Queen's University in Ontario, will report on surveying 1,200 Gilded Age stained-glass windows at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Diane Dias De Fazio, a grad student at Kent State University, will lecture on how the forgotten circa-1900 inventors of the ubiquitous, oft-unheralded escalator changed the way people experienced and utilized department stores and other public spaces. Deena Ecker, a student at the CUNY Graduate Center, will look at late Victorian streetscapes and culture (popular, consumer and sexual) through the lens of prostitution--how did these maligned women maintain some agency? Amanda Westbrook Brennan, a CUNY Graduate Center student, will analyze Black women activists, writers and clubwomen who elevated communities while defying stereotypes.

Gordon Ross, "The dance of death," Puck, v. 71, no. 1822 (1912 January 31), centerfold. 1912. N.Y.: Published by Keppler & Schwarzmann. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

C.M. Bell, Mrs. A.J. Cooper , 1901. Photograph from a glass plate negative. Library of Congress, C.M. Bell Studio Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.

Otis escalator's debut at Paris World's Fair, 1900