When the Astors Owned New York

by Justin Kaplan

  During the last twelve years of his life Astor enjoyed semiretirement at his country estate at Hellgate, still mainly farmland, on the banks of the East River, near where the mayor’s official house, Gracie Mansion, now stands. Looking across the estuary turbulence that gave Hellgate its name, he could see the village of Astoria, named in his honor by the citizens of Queens County in the hope, eventually disappointed, that in return for the compliment he would endow a public building there. When not at his country estate, Astor lived and entertained luxuriantly in his brownstone on Broadway. He filled the house with expensive works of art that the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, his paid cultural tutor and daily companion, encouraged him to buy. They included a portrait of Astor by Gilbert Stuart, who was then “all the rage,” according to a contemporary, and counted George Washington and Thomas Jefferson among his distinguished sitters. A silver plaque mounted on the front door of his Broadway house bore the words MR. ASTOR. Sometimes his servants, black, white, and Chinese, could be seen out on the sidewalk tossing him in a blanket to stimulate his circulation.

  The diary of Philip Hone, New York businessman and mayor, gives a memento-mori picture of the eighty-one-year-old Astor at dinner four years before his death, “a painful example of the insufficiency of wealth to prolong the life of man”:

  He would pay all my debts if I could ensure him one year of my health and strength, but nothing else could extort so much from him. His life has been spent in amassing money, and he loves it as much as ever. He sat at the dinner table with his head down upon his breast, saying very little, and in a voice almost unintelligible; the saliva dripping from his mouth, and a servant behind him to guide the victuals which he was eating, and to watch him as an infant is watched. His mind is good, his observation acute, and he seems to know everything that is going on. But the machinery is all broken up, and there are some people, no doubt, who think he has lived long enough.

  When Astor died in 1848, at the age of eighty-four, he was the richest man in the United States. He may have been the young country’s first millionaire, at a time when the word “millionaire” itself was new, before he moved on to far greater wealth. His eventual fortune, an estimated $20 million to $30 million, mainly founded on holdings in Manhattan real estate, was several times greater than that of the nearest contenders in that line, the inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. William, the old man’s heir, had the body put on display in the parlor of his own house on fashionable Lafayette Place, across the street from his father’s. The undertaker installed a glass window in the black silk velvet pall so that citizens who pushed their way in through the crowd of gawkers outside could look upon the face of wealth incarnate.

  Six clergymen; Astor’s servants, with napkins pinned to their sleeves; and perhaps as many as five hundred mourners, Washington Irving among them, followed the body to St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church. Eventually it would be placed in the Astor vault at Trinity Cemetery about seven miles uptown on 155th Street and Broadway. Although entombed like an Egyptian deity, in life the dead man had been nothing less than a “self-invented money-making machine,” James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald said in its obituary. As portrayed by the press, and as indelibly fixed in the public mind, like the Greek poet’s famous hedgehog, John Jacob Astor had known one thing and known it supremely well, and that was “To get all he could, and to keep nearly all he got,” as the popular biographer James Parton wrote two decades later. “The roll-book of his possessions was his Bible. He scanned it fondly, and saw with quiet but deep delight the catalogue of his property lengthening from month to month. The love of accumulation grew with his years until it ruled him like a tyrant.” This predatory, stony-hearted, parsimonious monster of greed, as he was remembered, allegedly enjoyed nothing better than to count his wealth down to the last penny, drive up tenement rack rents, foreclose mortgages, and put widows and orphans out on the street. For his mentally incompetent son, John Jacob II, he provided a house and garden on West Fourteenth Street and an allowance of $5,000 a year to keep him there. But with the exception of the members of his immediate family, Astor was far from openhanded in the terms of his will. His single large benefaction, $400,000 for an Astor Library on Astor Place, represented less than one-fortieth of his fortune. The Herald denounced it as “a poor, mean, and beggarly” figure. Astor left his faithful companion and cultural tutor, Fitz-Greene Halleck, an annuity of $200, so pitiable an amount that William, although only slightly less tightfisted than his father, increased it, out of his own pocket, to $1,500. William was said to be the author of a widely quoted nugget of wisdom on the subject of wealth: “A man who has a million dollars is as well off as if he were rich.”

  ii.

  IN HIS SEVENTIES, still mourning the death of his wife, Sarah, in 1834, John Jacob Astor had set in motion his last great project. Characteristically bold and ambitious, what he planned was also uncharacteristically self-indulgent and even, surprisingly, a mediocre investment, compared to his other ventures. It was less an act of commerce than one of willful self-commemoration on an impressive scale. Astor determined to put up a hotel without equal anywhere in the world for luxury and architectural grandeur: “A New York palais royal,” Philip Hone wrote, “which will cost him five or six hundred thousand dollars…and will serve, as it was probably intended to, as a monument to its wealthy proprietor.”

  To build his hotel, financed from his own coffers on Prince Street, Astor bought up and demolished the entire block of three-story brick houses that had been the seamark of his ambitions as a young man. Although famously close with a dollar, he was even willing to pay an extortionate $60,000, about three times the market value, to get one of the holdout property owners to move. According to a contemporary newspaper account, when Astor learned the owner was still in residence on the transfer date of May 1, 1832, he instructed his foreman, “Well, never mind. Just start by tearing down the house anyhow. You might begin by taking away the steps.” Not even number 223 Broadway, the house where he and Sarah lived many of their years together, was spared the wreckers’ sledgehammers and pickaxes. For two weeks, as the buildings were pulled down, a stretch of Broadway between City Hall Park and St. Paul’s Chapel, the most opulent and fashionable retail street in the country, became a devastation of dust and rubbish, a barrier to the customary tide of foot and wheeled traffic.

  Astor’s great hotel opened for business on May 31, 1836. After a brief hesitation, during which it was called the Park Hotel, its projector, builder, and owner settled on the majestic and unabashedly declarative name Astor House. Choosing this name gave him an opportunity to offset the failure of Astoria, his fur-trading post on the Pacific coast, as well as the disappearance of “Astor,” in Wisconsin, a township tract of land that instead of perpetuating its owner’s name was swallowed up by the city of Green Bay.

  Two years before he opened his hotel for business, Astor conveyed title to his son William for the token sum of “one Spanish milled dollar.” But apart from this transaction, which was intended to avoid death duties, he held on to an extraordinary degree of personal control over the project, from conception and choice of architect to decisions about management, furnishings, and the number of bathrooms. As Hone and other contemporaries recognized, the new building, although only one of hundreds of Astor properties in Manhattan alone, differed from all the others: it was to be the old man’s self-willed, imposing monument. Astor House was one of his very few ventures that not only did not make him a great deal of money but could even be called, by his exacting standards, a poor investment: carried on his books at $750,000, Astor House paid out only an annual 3 percent or so.

  As model for his venture, Astor had cast a covetous and admiring eye on the Tremont House in Boston, the nation’s first hotel built on grandiose lines for the specific purpose of being a hotel, in every modern sense of the word. For the most part, American hotels of the time had barely evolved from roadside inns and taverns in nondescript
houses. Their patrons, mainly commercial travelers, had few expectations beyond basic food, drink, and shelter and a bed for the night, preferably one not shared with strangers.

  Opened in 1829, Tremont House was a white granite showpiece that gave material expression to Boston’s notion of itself as the Athens of America and its marketplace as well. A child of the new age of iron, steam, and mechanical wonders, the architect, Isaiah Rogers, virtually invented the modern hotel: a functionally complex and self-contained structure (and social organization) that was a sort of human terrarium. A closed world designed from the ground up for the specific purpose of welcoming, housing, maintaining, and feeding guests in advanced comfort, the hotel was no longer just a stop along the way: it was a destination in itself, and for some families a relatively long-term residence that anticipated the later “apartment hotel.” Tremont House was so innovative that for the next fifty years Rogers’s designs, lavishly published in book form in 1830, were the bible of hotel architecture in the United States.

  A massive, classically correct building, the four-story, 170-room Tremont House, the largest and costliest hotel of its time, presented to its guests on their arrival a majestic Doric portico, a rotunda with a stained-glass dome ceiling adapted from frescoes in the Baths of Titus, and reception halls floored with marble mosaic. Also on the ground floor were a pillared dining room seventy-three feet long with space for two hundred diners at a sitting, an open piazza, a reading room stocked with newspapers and magazines, separate drawing rooms for gentlemen and ladies, private parlors, several apartments with their own street entrances, and, Charles Dickens noted, “more galleries, colonnades, piazzas and passages than I can remember, or a reader would believe.”

  Single and double guest rooms upstairs—the $2 daily rate, exorbitant for its time, kept out all but well-to-do private citizens—offered not only comfort, security, and prestige but novel features such as a unique lock and key for each door, an annunciator system connected to the front desk, a bowl, a water pitcher, and free soap. Rogers equipped the Tremont House with indoor plumbing—eight water closets on the ground floor as well as bathrooms with running water—at a time when even the grandest Bulfinch residences on Beacon, Chestnut, and Mount Vernon streets had no indoor plumbing of any sort, relied for their needs on outhouses and chamber pots, and drew their water from sometimes polluted wells in the yard. Some Brahmin neighbors, like the grandparents of historian Samuel Eliot Morison, were grateful to be able to come to Tremont House for a weekly tub bath. By introducing and popularizing convenient bathtubs and indoor toilets, Rogers’s Boston hotel, and the public and private buildings all over the country that followed its example, had a dramatically improving effect on personal hygiene. It was also the American hotel, as time went on, that introduced still other mechanical innovations—central heating, gas lighting, incandescent lighting, telephones, elevators, air-conditioning—that became essential features of domestic life in private houses and apartments.

  Astor had an infallible sense that his city, not Boston, was to be the nation’s social and financial capital, its most cosmopolitan city. New York’s rapidly growing transient population, arriving by stage, rail, and steamer, already supported more than twenty hotels. Until businesses and residences moved uptown, Astor’s Broadway block south of City Hall Park was Manhattan’s prime location, its focus of fashion and publicity, even though, to the dismay of pedestrians and visitors, nomadic pigs rooted for garbage in the gutters while prostitutes, con men, and pickpockets worked the pavements. A few blocks to the east was the Five Points section of the Lower East Side, so desperate and dangerous a slum that Charles Dickens hired two policemen to escort him when he came visiting. During the decade of the 1840s Astor’s stretch of Broadway, a promenade and thoroughfare already crammed with shops, barrooms, galleries, oyster cellars, and ice-cream palaces, added two popular attractions: photographer Mathew B. Brady’s Daguerrian Miniature Gallery and Phineas T. Barnum’s American Museum. In what Henry James recalled as “dusty halls of humbug,” the master showman displayed his collection of freaks, monsters, relics, and curiosities, including a “Feejee Mermaid” and an aged black woman said to have been George Washington’s nurse.

  In the spring of 1832 Astor, nearing seventy, commissioned Rogers to design and build for him a hotel that would overshadow the Tremont House in size, splendor, and mechanical conveniences. He laid the cornerstone on July 4, 1834. Two years and about $400,000 later the noble building he had envisioned as a young man newly arrived in the city opened its doors to an astonished public, which hailed it as a “marvel of the age.” Visitors entered a self-contained, virtually perfected world of luxury and dream fulfillment, evidence of what money could accomplish when joined with vision, energy, mechanical ingenuity, running water, indoor plumbing, and Medician magnificence. “Lord help the poor bears and beavers,” said Colonel Davy Crockett, amazed at the amount of money Astor must have taken out of the fur trade to build such a palace.

  Six stories high, with a Greek Revival granite portico opening onto Broadway, Astor’s hotel employed a staff of over a hundred and contained three hundred guest rooms richly furnished with custom-made sofas, bureaus, tables, and chairs of expensive black walnut. A steam engine in the basement pumped water to the upper floors from artesian wells and from two forty-thousand-gallon rainwater cisterns. Anticipating the boutique-ing and malling of the modern big-city hotel, the ground floor housed eighteen shops and served as a marketplace for clothing, wigs, clocks, hats, jewelry, dry goods, soda water, medicines, books, cutlery, trusses, pianos, and the services of barbers, tailors, dressmakers, and wig makers. Lighted with gas from the hotel’s own plant, the lobby, public rooms, and corridors, carpeted and furnished with satin couches, became a social focus, a public stage for the display of celebrity and fashion. An immense dining room, with its silver and china alone costing about $20,000, served meals at any time of day or night, a departure from the standard boardinghouse and hotel practice of fixed sittings.* A French chef presided over the kitchen, twelve cooks, a staff of sixty waiters precision-drilled like an honor guard, and a wine cellar that stocked sixteen sherries and twenty Madeiras. The hotel’s printing plant, another novel feature, turned out the daily bill of fare. During the 1840s Astor allowed the managers to roof over the open courtyard and convert it into a vast barroom and lunch-counter veranda.

  Having planned this hotel to surpass all others in America and Europe, Astor kept his hand on its running. He leased the Astor House—at $16,000 for the first year (he had asked for more) rising to $20,500 after the third—to Simeon and Frederick Boyden, members of the same family group that had made a success of running Boston’s Tremont House. He allowed the Boydens to talk him into building seventeen bathing rooms instead of the original ten, but he made the Boydens pay for them as well as for any other improvement or deviation from the original plans. Nothing could be added or changed, not a penny spent, without his approval. When the Boydens’ management lease expired, Astor replaced them with one of their clerks, Charles A. Stetson, who had passed the test of a decisive personal interview with him. Announcing that he considered himself “a hotel-keeper, not a tavern-keeper,” Stetson went on to explain, to Astor’s satisfaction, that a “hotel-keeper” was “a gentleman who stands on a level with his guests.” Defining his job in this way, Stetson may have inaugurated the tradition of manager and leaseholder (“proprietor”) as surrogate seigneur, in-house Cerberus, and first among equals.

  By the time Astor died in 1848 his astonishing hotel was securely established as the best of its kind anywhere. The parents of Henry James had taken up residence there the winter following their marriage in 1840, and they often returned. Henry’s brother William, the future philosopher and psychologist, was born in the Astor House, and, according to family legend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a guest under the same roof, came up from the lobby to greet the infant in his cradle. “The great and appointed modern hotel of New York,” as Henry recalled the Astor House, “th
e only one of such pretensions, continued to project its massive image, that of a vast square block of granite, with vast warm interiors, across some of the late and more sensitive stages of my infancy.”

  During its almost eighty-year career—a long one, given the fevered pace of demolition, change, and “renewal” on Manhattan Island—Astor’s palace, its lobby and sidewalk outside habitually crowded with onlookers, housed the great and famous of the day: Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Henry Clay, and Stephen Douglas; Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray; the French tragic actress Rachel; former president of the Confederate States Jefferson Davis, recently released from a federal prison; Louis Kossuth, Hungarian revolutionary hero, and Grand Duke Alexis of Russia; Horace Greeley and Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, onetime Whig candidate for president, his enormous bulk gorgeously uniformed; Jenny Lind, Barnum’s “Swedish Nightingale,” who sang to a rapt audience at Castle Garden; and the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, the first British royalty to visit New York. These and others of their kind arrived at Astor House and were welcomed like deities descending to earth. Dozens of papers published on nearby Newspaper Row regularly reported hotel arrivals: James Gordon Bennett told his New York Herald staff, “Anyone who can pay two dollars a day for a room must be important.” Astor House was to be the mecca and transmission center for a growing cult of celebrity.

  Statesman and orator Daniel Webster had been guest of honor at the hotel’s opening and always stayed there when he was in town. “If I were shut out of the Astor House,” he once said, “I would never again go to New York.” He was the towering presence at a marathon Whig Party dinner there in 1837. It began at 7:30 and did not reach its high point until 2 a.m. It was then that Webster rose to his feet and spoke for two hours “in a vein of unwearied and unwearying eloquence,” Philip Hone wrote in his diary. No one else on the globe, Hone went on, “could thus have fixed their attention at such an unseasonable hour…. I verily believe not a person left the room while he was speaking.” Whenever the great man took up residence, and also on his birthday for ten years after his death in 1852, the Astor House flew “the Webster Flag”—a large white banner inscribed with the words “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” Denied his party’s presidential nomination in 1852, Webster stood for the last time in the doorway of his suite and announced, his indignation and Ciceronian cadences never failing him although his health had, “My public life is ended. I go to Marshfield to sleep with my fathers, carrying with me the consciousness of duty done. When perilous times come to you, as come they will, you will mourn in bitterness of spirit your craven conduct and your base ingratitude. Gentlemen, I bid you a good-night.”