At the time, New York City still consisted only of Manhattan; Brooklyn was a separate city, the 7th most-populous in the US with just over 36,000 inhabitants. The Brooklyn Bridge, and the joining of the other boroughs to Manhattan in the area we now know as New York City, were still nearly a half-century away.
The upper crust of New York society was large, growing, entrenched, and committed to at least an appearance of acquaintance with the finer things in life, among which were considered to be at least a fair command of Latin and at least a slight acquaintance with Greek. The two largest universities in the city were Columbia College and New York University, the upstart democratic institution founded in 1831 and at that time, somewhat the opposite of today, committed to educating promising students from all classes of society. Professor Charles Anthon of Columbia published A Classical Dictionary in 1841. The New York Review, in a tone somewhere between admiration and disparagement, described Professor Anthon's volume as an effort to establish American Classical scholarship at a level "as may not blench in presence of European rivalry."
Besides Columbia and NYU, Princeton was not far away across the Hudson River, and educated many of New York City's upper crust; others attended various other institutions of the Ivy League.
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