When the Astors Owned New York

by Justin Kaplan

  When the Astors Owned New York

  ALSO BY JUSTIN KAPLAN

  Walt Whitman: A Life

  Lincoln Steffens

  Mark Twain and His World Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain

  WITH ANNE BERNAYS

  Back Then

  The Language of Names

  JUSTIN KAPLAN

  When the Astors Owned New York

  BLUE BLOODS

  AND GRAND HOTELS

  IN A GILDED AGE

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Electronic edition: April 2007

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1881-5

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  To Annie, as ever

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  ONE: The House of Astor

  TWO: Town Topics

  THREE: Inventor and Novelist

  FOUR: Palaces for the People

  FIVE: “A New Thing Under the Sun”

  SIX: After the Ball Was Over

  SEVEN: Aladdin

  EIGHT: “Mine! All Mine!”

  NINE: Baron Astor of Hever Castle

  TEN: End of the Line

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SOURCES

  INDEX

  When the Astors Owned New York

  Like English royalty and with comparable pride, the Astors drew on a tiny pool of only a few names to mark and continue their succession. Within the compass of the present narrative, descent in the male line was as follows: John Jacob Astor, the founder, begat William (Backhouse), who begat three sons, John Jacob III, William Jr., and Henry. The eldest of these three sons, John Jacob III, begat another William (Waldorf ), who in turn begat John Jacob V. William Jr., meanwhile, begat John Jacob IV, who begat yet another William (Vincent) and John Jacob VI. John Jacob II, the founder’s other son, was mentally incompetent and had no part in the succession. Henry Astor, his nephew, was virtually expelled from the family after he married a farmer’s daughter.

  Prologue

  WHEN THETitanic went down in the North Atlantic on the night of April 14–15, 1912, she took with her John Jacob Astor IV. He was forty-seven years old and coheir, with his first cousin, William Waldorf Astor, to a historic American fortune. Colonel Astor, as he preferred to be known, had been traveling with his nineteen-year-old bride, the former Madeleine Talmage Force, who was five months pregnant.

  When the ship began her fatal list to port, Astor helped his wife into a cork jacket, led her to a lifeboat, and waved to her from the deck as it was lowered away. “The sea is calm,” he assured her. “You’ll be all right. You’re in good hands. I’ll see you in the morning.” In obedience to the women-and-children-first law of the sea, he remained on deck and, according to some reports, later repaired to the ship’s smoking room for a game of cards. A fellow passenger, J. Bruce Ismay, managing director of the White Star Line, the ship’s owner, had jumped without hesitation into the first available lifeboat and rowed away with other survivors.

  Astor was probably crushed by debris or a falling smokestack as the Titanic, her stern high in the air, sank by the head. A week or so later, a passing steamer, the cable ship Mackay-Bennett, picked up Astor’s body, floating erect in his life belt, with his gold watch and $2,500 in bills still in the pockets of his blue suit, and delivered it, along with about two hundred other corpses packed in ice in rough coffins, to Halifax. The Prince of Wales sent roses to Astor’s funeral at Rhinebeck, New York, in May. The following January a merchantman, traveling along the west coast of Africa, picked up a broken deck chair from the Titanic on which one of the victims, whom subsequent myth has held to have been Astor, a devout Episcopalian, had scratched with a penknife the words “We will meet in heaven.”

  In his earlier years Jack Astor had earned a reputation as a spoiled lordling, deficient in grit and charm; a failed (and abused) husband whose miserable first marriage had ended in a divorce with an admission of adultery on his part. He had also been a public fool on more than one occasion. Although awed by his wealth, reporters who delighted in following his career dubbed him “Jack Ass.” His public rehabilitation had begun during America’s war with Spain in 1898–1899. He lent his 250-foot steel yacht Nourmahal to the navy, donated a battery of howitzers to the army for use in the Philippines, outfitted and drilled his own “Astor” company of artillerymen, and acquired a commission. He saw brief service in the field in Cuba, was invalided out, and returned home hailed as a warrior-patriot. From then on he was Colonel Astor. It was “Colonel Astor,” according to a headline, who “Went Down Waving Farewell to His Bride.” His death capped his rehabilitation.

  Because Astor was the most socially prominent of the Titanic’s first-class passengers, his death became a text for an outpouring of editorials, sermons, poems, and songs. Most of them suggested that wealth, whether earned or unearned, was, as always, a sign of grace, nobility of character, and elevated purpose. One song described Astor as “a millionaire, scholarly and profound” another, as “a handsome prince of wealth…noble, generous, and brave.” “Now when the name of Astor is mentioned,” ran another tribute, “it will be the John Jacob Astor who went down with the Titanic that will first come to mind; not the Astor who made the great fortune, not the Astor who added to its greatness, but John Jacob Astor, the hero.” “Words unkind, ill-considered, were sometimes flung at you, Colonel Astor,” said the publisher and popular sage Elbert Hubbard as he hailed nothing short of an apotheosis of a dead multimillionaire. “We admit your handicap of wealth—pity you for the accident of birth—but we congratulate you that as your mouth was stopped with the brine of the sea, you stopped the mouth of carpers and critics.” (Seven years later Hubbard himself was silenced when a German submarine torpedoed the Lusitania off the Irish coast.)

  Some moralists of the Titanic disaster sounded a sour note of social Darwinism. According to them, it had been contrary to the welfare of both the nation and the human race to give over places in the lifeboats
to immigrants and other dregs of humanity traveling in steerage. These places rightfully belonged to men of substance in business, culture, public service, and society. In addition to Astor, among such men who stayed behind to die a hero’s death were Major Archibald Butt, President Taft’s military aide; the eminent English journalist William T. Stead; copper-mining and smelting magnate Benjamin Guggenheim, who reputedly left a fortune estimated at $95 million; Isidor Straus ($50 million), owner of Macy’s, the world’s largest department store; and rare-book collector and Philadelphia Main Line socialite Harry Elkins Widener ($50 million). Astor’s fortune was reported to be about $150 million. (A multiple of sixteen may give a very rough approximation of this amount in present-day dollars: $2.4 billion.)

  A few doom-crying clergymen claimed the sinking of the Titanic spoke for a judgment of God on a society that had lost its way. They had in mind Astor’s divorce, scandalous as well as unholy because it involved an act of adultery; his subsequent marriage, additionally unholy because he was a divorced man and his wife a teenage girl less than half his age; and his earlier years of supposedly unbridled pleasures as playboy, social butterfly, and yachtsman. “Mr. Astor and his crowd of New York and Newport associates,” thundered a prominent Episcopalian clergyman, the Reverend George Chalmers Richmond, “have for years paid not the slightest attention to the laws of church and state which have seemed to contravene their personal pleasures or sensual delights. But you can’t defy God all the time. The day of reckoning comes and comes not in our own way.”

  On April 19, just four days after the sinking, the Commerce Committee of the United States Senate opened its hearings on the disaster. The panel met in the ornate East Room of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on the west side of Fifth Avenue at Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth streets. (This hotel is not to be confused with its namesake opened in 1931, the Waldorf-Astoria on Park Avenue.) Since the 1890s this monumental building, as glittering an exemplar of the luxury hotel as the Titanic of its floating counterpart, had been one of the wonders and obligatory sights of New York City. In the lobbies and corridors of the Waldorf-Astoria the expatriate American novelist Henry James, visiting from England, claimed to have found “something new under the sun,” “a realized ideal,” “one of my few glimpses of perfect human felicity.”

  Although temperamentally opposed and otherwise incompatible, it had been two Astor cousins, John Jacob IV and William Waldorf, who together had built the great hotel. For it to come into being they had enlisted a troop of lawyers and negotiators and managed to put aside their lifelong enmity in a single instance of cooperation and suspension of hostilities. As innkeepers (in a loose sense of the word), the Astors had been motivated by considerations of commerce, profit, and personal glory derived from displaying their social eminence and wealth. But they were also jointly motivated by something less measurable: the hotel imagination—a vision of extravagance, grandeur, amplitude, order, and efficiency—that aimed to satisfy virtually all human needs and in doing so create new ones.

  Since 1899 a British subject and head of the British branch of the House of Astor, William Waldorf oversaw his vast American real estate interests from a sumptuous London office he had built for himself at 2 Temple Place, on Victoria Embankment. As far as is known, he had no comment for the public, or for anyone else, for that matter, when the London papers carried the news of the Titanic sinking and his cousin’s presumed death. Their fathers were brothers, and as boys the two cousins had grown up in adjacent brownstone mansions on the same Fifth Avenue block front now occupied by the Waldorf-Astoria, but they were separated by sixteen years in age and had never been friends. William Waldorf—“Willy”—was purposeful and disciplined; John Jacob IV—“Jack”—was pampered and something of a dabbler. Along with blue-blood pride and enormous wealth they inherited a long-standing personal animosity that had divided their fathers from each other and their mothers as well. Willy’s mother was devoted to the quiet and upright life, the Episcopal Church, and good works; Jack’s had set out to be, and became, the unrivaled party-giver and leader of New York society, possessor, as she insisted, of the exclusive title “Mrs. Astor.”

  William’s silence about his cousin’s death was striking nevertheless, since he was the self-appointed historian, genealogist, and spokesman of an Astor dynasty by his time four generations old. Presumably he spent the day of April 15 in his baronial study at Temple Place tending to business and studying his collections of paintings, antiquities, books, and manuscripts.

  ONE

  The House of Astor

  i.

  AT SEVENTEEN John Jacob Astor, founder of an American dynasty, left the German village of Waldorf, where he was born in 1763, and came to New York by way of London. Son of a village butcher, he could barely read and write. Toward the end of his life, attended by a butler and household staff who served him on silver dishes, he ate peas with his knife, spoke with a heavy German accent, and was not averse to using a guest’s sleeve as his napkin. A visitor from England was appalled to see him remove his chaw of tobacco from his mouth and trace patterns on the window with it. When he first landed in America, for a while young Astor worked for a Quaker named Bowne who bought undressed pelts; scraped, cleaned, and cured them; and then sold them as furs. After two years Astor started his own fur business and traded for furs with the Indians, sometimes paying for their pelts in cut or adulterated rum. He married, and with his wife, Sarah Todd, lived above his shop on Water Street, close by the East River docks. Still a relatively poor man, Astor admired a row of newly erected buildings on Broadway, far to the west of his shabby street. According to Washington Irving, later one of Astor’s close friends, these residences were “the talk and boast of the city” because of “the superior style of their architecture.” In the time-honored rhetoric of American strive-and-succeed stories, Astor told the author many years later that he had vowed “to build one day or other, a greater house than any of these, and in this very street.”

  After fifteen years in business for himself Astor was worth about a quarter of a million dollars and moved his family and fur business to a three-story brick building in the row he admired. By then Astor and his network of agents virtually monopolized the trade, but he lived pretty much the way he and Sarah had at Water Street, frugally and without show. He watched every penny, conducted business in a malodorous shop and warehouse on the ground floor, and employed his son William to beat and air the furs to dispel moths. Astor’s reach soon became global. He set in motion a trading scheme designed to rack up enormous profits at each junction in its triangular traffic. His fleet of merchantmen were to load their hulls with furs from Astoria, the trading post he established in 1811 at the mouth of the Columbia River; bring them to Shanghai; exchange them there for tea, spices, silks, musical instruments, and fans; transship the goods to Liverpool; trade them there for British manufactures; and sell these in the New York market. Astor believed that his plan to create a commercial empire based in the Pacific Northwest might have made him the richest man that ever lived had it not been frustrated by blundering subordinates, Indian treachery, the War of 1812, bad weather, and just plain bad luck. “Was there ever an undertaking of more merit, of more hazard and more enterprising,” he is supposed to have written soon after the collapse of his Pacific Fur Company, “attended with a greater variety of misfortune?” But he accepted defeat with what Washington Irving, who became the appointed historian of the Astoria enterprise, called “his usual serenity of countenance.” “What would you have me do?” Astor asked. “Would you have me stay at home and weep for what I cannot help?”

  Astor turned his energies away from the fur trade to acquiring land in Wisconsin, Missouri, and, especially, in Manhattan. He held on with a death grip to what he acquired, eventually about five hundred properties in the city, and watched its value increase at an almost geometric rate. His motto was “Buy and hold.” If he had his life to live over again, he often said, and knowing what he now knew, he would have bought up e
very foot of land on Manhattan Island. The population of Manhattan jumped from about twenty-five thousand in 1780, when Astor arrived there, to about five hundred thousand in 1848, the year he died. Meanwhile and accordingly, the residential and commercial areas of Manhattan had become denser and expanded at a pace that dazzled old settlers. The New York of Astor’s youth, Washington Irving wrote in 1847, “was a mere corner of the present huge city.” In 1828 Broadway, the city’s spinal thoroughfare, ended at Tenth Street, according to the grid plan for the city streets. Forty years later Broadway extended northward to 155th Street and beyond that into the Bronx. Only the three rivers that enclosed Manhattan could limit its horizontal growth. Even though he never did buy up every foot of Manhattan, Astor owned and bequeathed so much property there, prime real estate as well as entire slum districts, that William, his son and heir and a comparably relentless accumulator, came to be known as the landlord of New York. William guarded the family treasure as if he were the red dragon of the Apocalypse.

  John Jacob and his son managed their affairs from an office building on Prince Street where each day they supposedly toted up dollars by the tens of thousands. Burglarproof, fireproof, and apparently earthquakeproof as well, the Astor business headquarters had massive masonry walls, an iron roof, doors of iron, iron-grated windows, and heavy iron braces thrown from wall to wall. John Jacob eventually began to live on a scale that more nearly matched his wealth. Standing on the snow-covered Broadway pavement on a January day, the young Walt Whitman watched the great man being readied for an outing. “Swathed in rich furs, with a great ermine cap on his head,” Astor was “led and assisted, almost carried, down the steps of his high front stoop…and then lifted and tuck’d in a gorgeous sleigh, envelop’d in other furs…. The sleigh was drawn by as fine a team of horses as I ever saw.”