It's nearly the end of summer, but we still have time for one more visit to the seashore,

and in particular, one place that was so very popular in the Gilded Age, Coney Island.

Join me and guest Esther Crane for an encore presentation of In the Good All Summertime, where the Guilded Age played.

And as a special announcement, Esther will be joining

me this fall for a brand new episode, Children of the Gilded Age, seen and not heard until now.

But for today, grab your parasol and enjoy a day in the park or at the beach in the gilded age.

There's a time in each year that we always hold dear.

Good old summer time.

With the birds and the freezes and sweet scented breezes good old summer time when your day's work is over then you are in clover and life is one beautiful rhyme no trouble annoying each one is enjoying the good old summer time, in the good old summer time.

This wonderful recording of one of the Gilded Age's most familiar, popular songs songs was made in 1906 by a group known as the

Hyden Quartet, which formed in the mid-1890s, and they were made famous by that new invention,

the phonograph. And that song brings all the feeling of a summer day in the Gilded Age

and a sense of idyllic escape from

life's realities back to us today.

It's common to think of parts of the city of New York during the Gilded Age as long avenues

lined with European-styled mansions, overblown palaces, all accented with the grand new temples to art and culture,

such as the Metropolitan Opera, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library.

Our minds take us to Fifth in Madison Avenues filled with elegantly dressed people

showing off their best and latest Paris fashions.

Well, the truth is, of course, it really wasn't quite like that at all.

There was a tremendous dichotomy between the haves who had too much

and the have-nots who faced great inequality.

...