The Brooklyn Bridge, the longest bridge in the world, gave easy access to Manhattan. Completed in 1883, its span of steel cables suspended across the East River competed with the continuous ferries that rushed back and forth on the water. At a penny a ride, six hundred passengers crammed each steamer for the five-minute trip, and seventy-five thousand people commuted on the floating platforms every day. With its leafy streets and numerous churches, Brooklyn, independent until 1898, provided a civilized place for wage earners and Wall Street bankers alike; “a kind of sleeping place for New York,” wrote Charles Dickens.
Although she lived in Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood of elegant Gothic Revival houses with expansive views over the East River, Hetty was seeking neither sophistication nor luxury. “She has a modest room in a comfortable boarding house on Pierrepont Street, and lives in a quiet, unpretentious manner,” said the Brooklyn Eagle. Indeed, few she passed going up and down the steep front steps of her brownstone or walked by on her way to Wall Street knew who she was. Not more than half a dozen people in the neighborhood, and “not one in a hundred who brush by her on the ferry” each day, recognized the famous lady, said the Eagle. “This shrewd operator” and “keen financier” is a “well preserved looking woman, with a rather pleasant face, and dresses very plainly,” the paper reported. At fifty-four, on her morning walk along the cobblestone streets to the ferry, Hetty looked like an ordinary woman doing ordinary chores.
It came as a surprise to Alice Bonta, the owner of the boardinghouse, when a well-known millionaire came to call. Mary Garrett, whose friends included several Quaker women, was a shrewd businesswoman and heiress from Baltimore who had served as her father’s assistant when he was head of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. She had inherited several million dollars from his estate, and, with the proviso that women be allowed to enroll as students, donated some of the money to help create the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Together with the president of the university, Mary Garrett was on a national campaign to raise funds for the medical school. Now she was calling on Hetty Green in Brooklyn.
The following evening the two visitors hosted a dinner in Hetty’s honor. To the surprise of the boardinghouse owner, Hetty emerged from her room dressed in an elegant evening gown and exquisite jewels. Her gift to the university may not have been made public, but when Mrs. Bonta realized that the hardworking lady living in her house was the rich and famous Hetty Green, she made her tenant’s presence known to all.
Hetty and Sylvie spent three months in Hempstead in the summer of 1887; the following year they stayed at the Ocean Hotel in Far Rockaway. When Hetty returned to the city, she faced a long-dreaded situation. Limping across the busy thoroughfare of Ninth Avenue, Ned was struck by a fast-moving cart. Dragged to the ground and pinned down by the boy driver and his St. Bernard dog, Ned suffered further damage to his leg.
Soon after, at the Union Club, where he was celebrating the Fourth of July with his father, he hurried to the window to watch the festivities, twisted his leg, and fell down some stairs. The young man was carried to a room and confined to the club until Edward’s doctor arrived. The distinguished physician Charles McBurney examined the leg and saw the onset of gangrene; he declared he had no choice but to amputate, ending all hopes for a recovery. The operation at Roosevelt Hospital severed Ned’s leg above the knee. But it did not stop Ned from living a life as rich and full as those of his parents: he was as robust and outgoing as his father, as shrewd and astute as his mother, and most important, as self-reliant as they all wished him to be.
Ned’s recuperation took place in Bellows Falls, where he and his father and sister spent several weeks that summer. Happy to be back in the bucolic countryside where she could roam freely and ride her horse, Sylvie invited some friends to the Towns Hotel for a party. Dressed in a gray crepe dress, she entertained some of the young people she had known at school and took a fancy to one of the males in her class. When a friend accused him of being facetious, Sylvie showed surprise. “Never with me,” she replied, indicating that he fancied her too. But the romance never went far and Sylvie soon returned to her mother.
Hetty never stayed in one place very long. In October 1887 she was discovered by the Chicago Herald, which announced she had been in the city for several weeks, her son at her side. Countering reports that she was thin, angular, and poorly dressed, “she is a big, plump woman,” the paper declared, “and her togs are first class.” She declined to stay in hotels, and instead paid rent to reside with her business agent, who lived on the South Side. She left his house at dawn to ride the streetcar and arrived downtown early in the day. After spending time at her desk one morning, at nine o’clock she left to go down the street and encountered a broker, who assumed that, like the stream of workers filing into their offices, Hetty was on her way to work. Certain of a coup, he told her about a mortgage he could arrange. But Hetty harrumphed. “That was offered to me at seven o’clock this morning,” she snapped, “and I refused it.” With that she shrugged him off and marched away.
Hetty had brought Ned along to train him in real estate investing. The best way to understand what a mortgage was really worth, she believed, was through hands-on experience. She wanted him to know the cost of a building and what it involved, not just from a financial aspect, but in terms of materials and labor. She assigned him work on a warehouse she was building. “I bought a pair of overalls for him, gave him a brush and a keg of white lead, and hired a man to teach him to paint,” she told a friend.
Unfortunately, it was at the time of the anarchists’ riots in Chicago. When one of the laborers saw Ned, he accused him of taking the bread out of the workingman’s mouth; what’s more, he threatened to throw him into Lake Michigan. Hetty was protective of her son, but she also sympathized with the poor and understood their rage. “I reasoned with the man and showed him that Ned was not getting any money for his work; that the job had already been let out by contract, and that the painters would get all there was in it,” she explained. As a result, she said, “he went away satisfied.” And Ned, she said, “got along fine with the anarchists.”
Years later, when the trolley workers went on strike in Brooklyn, Hetty took the side of the workers. “The poor have no chance in this country,” she said. “No wonder Anarchists and Socialists are so numerous. The longer we live, the more discontented we all get, and no wonder, too. Some blame the rich, but all the rich are not to blame.”
Hetty was determined to educate her children on the value of money. Her approach was similar to that of the modern billionaire Alice Walton, the third-wealthiest woman in the world. “One of the great responsibilities that I have is to manage my assets wisely, so that they create value,” says the heiress to the Walmart fortune. “I know the price of lettuce. You need to understand price and value. You buy the best lettuce you can at the best price you can.”
Intent on teaching her children to be clever investors, from time to time Hetty brought them to the Chemical Bank in New York or asked them to join her in meetings elsewhere. Sylvie trudged along, wearing a faded frock and a sad expression. Investing sparked no interest in the girl; if anything, it made her more eager to be with her school friends in Bellows Falls than with the moneymen on Wall Street. For Ned, however, the downtown adventures served as a fantasy peek into the world of finance: “I sometimes thought that it would be nice if mother made me president of the Chemical Bank of New York,” he confessed. But he had only “a vague idea concerning the future.” He dabbled on Broadway, investing in plays, and dabbled with showgirls, playing at night. Hetty took control of things: worried that her son would fall for a pretty young thing who would quickly consume his fortune, she extracted a promise from Ned that he would not marry for twenty years. What’s more, she made him swear he would never speculate on Wall Street.
Even his father was more restrained with his money now. Operating on a far more moderate scale, Edward was seen two or three times a week in the canyons of Wall Street, often
in the company of his wife. On one occasion he sat beside her at the back of the Chemical Bank while she clipped away at her coupons, cutting them off the bond certificates, dropping them into her satchel; she would redeem the pieces of paper for the interest due on the scheduled date. When she finished snipping the bonds, she counted the slips and found that one was missing. They searched the floor, the desks, the bag, until they discovered the coupon, stuck to the bottom of Edward’s boot. With a cry of joy, Hetty grabbed the paper and put it in her satchel, but not before casting a look of mistrust at her husband. Assured that he was innocent, she locked her bag and trotted off, her money and man in tow.
Chapter 13
The Education of Children
From the day their son was born, Hetty had a singular goal: to see Ned become the richest man in America. With railroads propelling the country, she wanted him at the forefront. But she knew he needed an education in how the railroads functioned before he could captain his future along the gilded track.
For years she had owned shares of the Connecticut River Railroad, and from the time Ned was a boy he had traveled the line linking Bellows Falls with New York. The time had come for him to see its operations from the inside. Limping along the tracks with his new cork leg, he toiled as a section hand and foreman on the Connecticut River Railroad, weeding and clearing the tracks, running a locomotive, eating lunch with the workingmen. A quick student, he learned the ways of the railroad and, after several months, gained an understanding of the process. From there he was sent to Cincinnati, where he worked as a superintendent and then as managing director of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad. Now his mother felt he was ready to take on bigger tasks.
Over six feet tall with a hefty build, Ned Green was an extroverted twenty-two-year-old when Hetty sent him off to the Midwest in 1890. Handing him a satchel filled with valuable papers, she ordered him to deliver them to Frank Chandler, her agent, in Chicago. On the twenty-three-hour train ride out west, Ned fought hard to stay awake all night. He tucked the bag under the mattress in his Pullman berth and did not close his eyes, lest the satchel be lost or stolen.
From the window of his car the next morning, Ned could see the open prairie landscape morph into a maze of stockyards and railroad tracks, could watch the tall poles and telegraph wires give way to smokestacks and factories. When the train pulled into Union Station, the young man grabbed his bag and went directly to the agent’s office. Along State Street, LaSalle, Madison, and Monroe, he saw tall structures rising on “streets long and flat and without end,” as Rudyard Kipling described them at the time; “interminable vistas flanked with nine, ten, and fifteen storied houses, and crowded with men and women.”
The Great Fire had destroyed acres of land and structures, and out of its ashes arose an array of new buildings designed by leading architects such as Charles McKim and Richard Morris Hunt, who re-created the classic Roman style, and Louis Sullivan, father of the skyscraper. New laws prohibited the use of wood, causing builders to put up huge stone or iron structures, mounds of masonry with plate-glass fronts and brass nameplates, which now stretched across entire blocks. Eager young women and impatient young men, fair-haired and wide-eyed, fresh off the farms of Iowa, Kansas, and Oklahoma, dashed from the speeding, clanging streetcars and darted along the sidewalks: off to work, rushing to make a life for themselves.
Weary from the sleepless journey, relieved to have made the trip unscathed, Ned reached the agent’s office and handed over the package. He watched with pride as the man carefully unwrapped the precious parcel. To Ned’s surprise, the agent let out a loud guffaw. “What do you mean, telling me you have bonds here?” he asked, showing Ned the stack. Hetty’s valuable papers were nothing more than a pile of outdated insurance policies. “My mother always dearly loved a joke,” Ned said later with a laugh, “but I’ll say she had a very practical way of testing me out.”
Teasing and practical jokes were a regular part of the Greens’ family life. On one occasion when Ned went to visit Hetty and Sylvie, he arrived with an enormous box. His mother quickly admonished him for his habit of buying things in large quantities. “You don’t need all those dress shirts,” she scolded. Her son protested and proceeded to open the package: the carton was filled with her favorite doughnuts.
Although Hetty often lived at less than distinguished places, she instructed Ned to pay six dollars a day at the Auditorium Hotel. Designed by Louis Sullivan, it was attached to the new Auditorium Theatre, where Grand Opera was performed and the Republican Party had recently held its convention. But the fancy four-hundred-room hotel on Michigan Avenue was too much for Ned. After a short while, he moved to a hotel on Madison that cost half the price. Ned may have wanted to enjoy his money his own way, but as soon as his mother heard, she dashed off a quick reprimand: “I notice that you are not staying at the hotel I suggest,” she wrote. “It’s all right, but I have reduced your daily allowance to $3,” she said, cutting his stipend in half. She warned him to watch his pennies. “You are not to have any more spending money than the amount decided on originally.”
Her affable son adjusted quickly to life in Chicago. He dressed nattily and wore his fake leg as gamely as he sported his thin mustache and wire spectacles. He joined the Elks, attended the theater, wooed the actresses, and favored a red-haired girl named Mabel Harlow. He might have run into Sister Carrie at McVicker’s Theatre, or dined with Charles Drouet at the glittering Rector’s, or swilled drinks with their creator, Theodore Dreiser, at Fitzgerald and Moy’s. Self-assured and confident, he chatted easily with actors, businessmen, politicians, and the press. When a reporter from the Herald interviewed him, he boasted about his plans to open a bank.
Relaxing in his office at the Owings Building, a neo-Gothic structure owned by Hetty, he repeated his plans to the New York Times: “Arrangements are practically completed for the new business,” he said, noting it would be a mortgage bank loaning money on securities. “We will loan at a reasonable rate of interest and borrowers may take up their paper at any time. Ours will be a sort of private bank.” Ned assured the writer that he and his mother would have a controlling interest. “We never invest in anything unless we have control of it,” he said.
Some people viewed such banking operations as high finance, but the young man made short shrift of it: “This loaning business is nothing more nor less than a pawnbroker’s shop on a large scale, except that the borrowers have to hock a good piece of real estate instead of a watch. Some men get mad when you call them pawnbrokers,” he said, “but loaning money as I do is nothing more nor less.” Ned also spoke of buying a major newspaper, but despite his big talk, neither the newspaper nor the bank came to fruition. As much as Ned boasted, his mother kept her lips sealed tight. Her remarks were never heard. Ned noted that she was usually nice to him in public, but in private she “gave me hell.”
Hetty knew it was a propitious time to be in Chicago. Not only was the city “the capital of the railroads,” as one French writer observed, it was the bustling center of the West. Innovative and industrial, Chicago introduced steel-framed skyscrapers to the world, established major department stores like Marshall Field’s and Sears Roebuck, and boasted manufacturers like Armour and Company meatpackers, McCormick Reapers, and Pullman Palace sleeping cars. It had twenty-five grain elevators that could hold 25 million bushels of corn. It had Lincoln Park with acres of green and a sand beach lapping Lake Michigan, a lake as large as an ocean. It had grand hotels like the Tremont and the palatial Palmer House, with its barber shop, billiards room, bowling alley, telegraph office, and its own ticker tape. It had banks with weekly clearings of millions of dollars, and the Board of Trade, where men bought and sold commodities—hogs and cattle, wheat and corn—as if they were penny candy. In this dynamic atmosphere, Ned announced he would run his mother’s operations and make Chicago his home. He was right that the city would flourish, but wrong that it would be his home.
Hetty sent Ned to Chicago to sniff out new opportuniti
es and to oversee her mortgages. She charged her son with collecting the payments due, and before he left, she proffered some advice. She counseled him to memorize the amount of principal and interest owed on each mortgage. Whatever someone owed, she warned, don’t take a penny less. And not a penny more. It would only mess up his books. When her son wanted to entertain his associates, his mother cautioned: “After your business is over you may take him to dinner and the theater, or allow him to take you, but wait until the transaction has been closed and the money paid.”
His other responsibility was buying and selling new properties and mortgages. Hetty held him accountable for his every decision but offered her own recommendations before making a deal: “If anyone is fool enough to offer you the full amount, take it. If you are offered less, tell the man you will give him the answer in the morning.” She believed in giving things a second look. “Think the matter over carefully in the evening. If you decide that it will be to our advantage to accept the offer, say so the next day.” Then she repeated one of her favorite maxims: “In business generally, don’t close a bargain until you have reflected on it overnight.”
Not only did Ned purchase mortgages for his mother, he also bought them for his father. E. H. Green became the owner of at least one Chicago mortgage, a $12,000 loan on the First Baptist Church at Thirtieth Street and Indiana Avenue. Whether Hetty had given Ned permission is unknown, but she had a soft spot for Edward, and his name cropped up every so often.
The Richest Woman in America Page 16