There’s an interesting “Talk of the Town” item in The New Yorker about a guy named Keith Taillon, who knows a lot about 19th-century New York City, and his disappointment in the new HBO series “The Gilded Age” for its lack of verisimilitude, which we might also call its historical inaccuracies. Central Park, for example, is often shown in the background, down the street that the two main families live on, and it looks a bit like it looks today, if you’re approaching from the east, on Sixty-Something Street, in summer: green trees in the nearish distance. Sometimes the characters walk or ride in the Park, and again, it’s familiarly pleasant and verdant there. According to Taillon, however, in the 1880’s, when the show is set, the trees would have been few, stark, new, and the whole Park would have been pretty bleak.
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The Gilded Age, "The Gilded Age," and…
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There’s an interesting “Talk of the Town” item in The New Yorker about a guy named Keith Taillon, who knows a lot about 19th-century New York City, and his disappointment in the new HBO series “The Gilded Age” for its lack of verisimilitude, which we might also call its historical inaccuracies. Central Park, for example, is often shown in the background, down the street that the two main families live on, and it looks a bit like it looks today, if you’re approaching from the east, on Sixty-Something Street, in summer: green trees in the nearish distance. Sometimes the characters walk or ride in the Park, and again, it’s familiarly pleasant and verdant there. According to Taillon, however, in the 1880’s, when the show is set, the trees would have been few, stark, new, and the whole Park would have been pretty bleak.