Bradley-Martin Ball
1897 costume ball held in New York City
The Bradley Martin Ball was a lavish costume ball held at the original Waldorf Hotel in New York City on the night of February 10, 1897. Cornelia Martin, wife of Bradley Martin, organized the ball. In the style of the day, the couple were known as “the Bradley Martins” and Cornelia styled as “Mrs. Bradley Martin” (no hyphen) to distinguish them from other Mr. and Mrs. Martins in polite society, hence the ball became infamous as the Bradley Martin ball.
The Bradley Martins spent $369,000 (approximately $14.8 million in 2026 dollars) to throw the ball, while eight hundred socialites spent about $400,000 imitating kings and queens. In newspapers in New York and across the country, preachers and editorial writers argued over the propriety of a party that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars while the country was in the midst of a depression. In the end, the ball was a social triumph but created negative publicity.
Before the ball
The Martins’ stated intention for throwing the ball was to create an economic stimulus for New York City, which was at the end of the Long Depression which began in 1873 and included the Panic of 1893.
The public source identifies “Bradley-Martin Ball” as 1897 costume ball held in New York City. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bradley-Martin, Ball and costume.
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The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4955079. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1897, 2026, 1873 and 1893.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bradley-Martin Ball” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.