Hetty (27 page)

Nevertheless, at forty-two, Ned was nothing if not a dutiful son; when Hetty called, he and Mabel packed up and headed to New York. In July of 1910, Ned arrived aboard his private railcar and settled into a deluxe suite at the Waldorf designed especially for him, with living quarters and office. As workmen put the finishing touches on the suite in the stuffy summer heat, Ned stood in his shirtsleeves under an electric fan, talking to reporters. When they asked about his mother, Ned was characteristically kind, the Times reported. The decision to come to New York had been a natural one, he said. “I just dropped everything in Texas when mother wrote for me to come and relieve her of some of her financial cares,” Ned said. “Of course, I can’t look after all of her interests, they are so immense, but I can do my part in looking after some of the details.”

“My mother has improved wonderfully in the past few
months,” Ned added. “After we have had several long talks she will go to Bellows Falls, Vermont, for a well-earned rest. I am very proud of my mother. She is one woman in ten thousand, although she will insist on working despite her years. I am big enough to do her share and mine, too.”

Having Hetty in Vermont would keep Mabel out of his mother’s field of vision. It would also absorb the shock of being back within shouting distance of his mother after so many years of relative autonomy. But as Ned acknowledged in his comment, it was wishful thinking to assume that Hetty would ease into some sort of sunny retirement of rocking in a chair and knitting doilies in Bellows Falls.

Hetty, in fact, continued her daily ferry ride across the Hudson to Wall Street, but gradually, with Ned’s gentle insistence, she began to slow down. In 1911, Ned and Hetty began discussing forming a trust company to handle her affairs. Ned would oversee the trust, which would relieve Hetty of much of the overwhelming burden of keeping tabs on all of her vast and far-flung empire. They called the trust the Westminster Company, after the Vermont county where Bellows Falls lies.

Among Ned’s first acts as managing director of the Westminster Company was to help Hetty shed some of her vast real estate holdings, either through outright sale or by ninety-nine-year lease. In particular, Hetty began unloading her substantial Chicago properties. By now, she owned some ninety separate pieces of property in the city, worth at least $6 million. The lots, scattered around the city, were increasingly difficult for Hetty to keep track of. Most of the lots remained largely undeveloped, because of Hetty’s long-standing policy of keeping the taxes low while allowing the property values to rise. By the early twentieth century, Chicago was on its way to becoming one of the world’s great cities, and was bursting at the seams. Property Hetty held that had been quasi-rural scrubland was now close to the downtown and developers and residents
clamored for the space. Her tactics had endeared her to few people—save for the farmers who tilled her vacant lots—but her policy held true to her financial convictions.

Among the first major sales was the 480-acre tract southwest of the city in Gage Park. Ned negotiated a sale price of nearly a million dollars for the land. Cobe and McKinnon, the buyers, immediately announced plans to develop the area as houses, apartments, and businesses to meet the city’s swelling needs.

Then, Ned found a buyer for an 11-acre lot in the northern lakeside suburb of Winnetka, for $80,000. Over the next several years Hetty, through Ned, disposed of numerous properties through sale or ninety-nine-year lease. Developers, including her Chicago real estate agent, R. F. Lowenstein, snapped up the long-dormant property. In July of 1912 she sold the six apartment buildings on Sibley Street for $140,000.

Among her downtown holdings, worth a total of around $3.5 million, the Howland Block at the southwest corner of Dearborn and Monroe was particularly valuable. The lone structure on the property was a dated, five-story building, but for years, developers had been pursuing Hetty, through her Chicago agents, to sell or lease the land for development. Acquired through foreclosure some thirty years earlier, the lot remained untouched, rising in value to $1,625,000 by 1911, according to the Chicago Board of Review. A developer leased the property from Hetty long-term at $65,000 per year. In short order she sold or leased numbers 183 through 187 Wabash Avenue, valued at $325,000; the plot on Wabash, near Harrison Street, worth around $200,000; the lot with 80 feet of frontage on Michigan Avenue, worth an estimated $1 million; and the houses at 211 and 213 Monroe Street, worth $157,000.

The headquarters of the Westminster Company consisted of three offices on the sixth floor of the Trinity Building at 111 Broadway in Manhattan. Administrators of the estate of millionaire Russell Sage operated in a suite in the same building. Sage, who died in 1906, had been a friend of Hetty’s. Hetty still
put in full days. She occupied a Spartan office furnished with an old roll-top oak desk and three chairs. Often her days consisted of sitting next to enormous piles of coupons for bonds coming due. Patiently, steadfastly she worked her way through mound after mound of coupons, cutting with a pair of large shears. She kept a grindstone nearby for sharpening the shears when they became dulled by the ceaseless tide of her wealth. Ned appeared regularly at the offices, as did Walter Marshall, his personal secretary from Texas, whom he had brought to New York. Keeping track of daily office operations was a small, wiry man named Wilbur Potter, who dutifully and quietly supervised a small staff of clerks.

Hetty still appeared at the offices early in the morning and stayed until evening. Her millions in cash and her willingness to lend made her a sort of one-woman Federal Reserve, whose decisions on interest rates were followed the way investors today await word from Fed chairman Alan Greenspan. “Hetty Green Cuts Rates,” the
Times
reported on January 7, 1911, when she made a loan of $325,000 at 4.5 percent to the Roman Catholic Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue, between East Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Streets. “This is the lowest rate of interest at which a real estate mortgage has been made in this city for many months,” the article stated.

In fact, Hetty often lent money to more than thirty churches at rates well below the going market. These churches benefited from the low rates, but Hetty would not give them a free ride. Several years earlier, in 1903, the Fifth Presbyterian Church of Chicago defaulted on a $12,000 loan. The pastor made the mistake of trying to shame Hetty into forgiving the loan. He arranged for pastors at other Chicago churches to denounce Hetty from their pulpits as a ruthless financier, and wrote to Hetty threatening that she would not get into Heaven if she foreclosed. Hetty wrote back: “As long as you’re in a threatening mood, you had better climb up on your cornerstone and pray for my soul because I am going to foreclose.” A number of
pastors leapt to Hetty’s defense. The Reverend M. P Boynton, of Lexington Avenue Baptist Church in Chicago, told reporters, “To expect the holder of a church mortgage to cancel it upon the grounds of Christianity, after the money has been lent in good faith, is nothing less than a hold-up.” The
New York Times
agreed on its editorial page of February 29, 1903: “If churches … see fit to borrow money in the regular way from persons who make a business of lending it, there is no imaginable reason why they should not pay their debts.” Within a year the site of the Fifth Presbyterian was being occupied by the Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church.

Lending money to churches at a low rate of interest is not the same thing as an outright gift, of course. If she did give portions of her vast wealth away, she did so anonymously. “One way is to give money and make a big show. That is not my way of doing,” she told her friend, C. W. deLyon Nicholls, in a
Business America
magazine profile in May 1913. “I am of the Quaker belief, and although the Quakers are about all dead, I still follow their example. An ordinary gift to be bragged about is not a gift in the eyes of the Lord.”

There was another reason, of course, for keeping any acts of generosity a secret—if word got out, she would be besieged by requests for more. She was not alone in this fear. A
New York Times
article on anonymous philanthropy in November 1913 stated: “Often the donors are controlled not by modesty but by a desire for self-protection against the thousands of letters that follow widely heralded public giving. The same article identified Hetty as the likely anonymous donor of $5,000 for relief efforts for victims of major floods in Dayton, Ohio, the previous spring. “In this connection the question has been raised if Mrs. Hetty Green is not accustomed to give generously in secret.”

Breaking her own rule of talking about one’s gifts, Hetty told Nicholls: “I have done one deed of which I am proud. I have helped a school for boys to the extent of between three or four
hundred thousand dollars.” Hetty told Nicholls the unnamed school was in New York State, and that she had bought the land during the panic of 1907, at a steep discount. “The buildings were put up at a time when the poor urgently needed employment.”

When confronted with reports of charitable acts, she was quick to deny them. In 1904, rumors surfaced that Hetty had given $500,000 to the Nurses’ Home in New York City, and another $50,000 for a nurses’ settlement home. When reporters arrived at the Chemical National Bank seeking comment, she sent a terse written reply out to them: “It’s a chimera; it’s absurd; there is not a scintilla of truth in it; it’s all a dream.” When Annie Leary announced plans to build an art school on Fifth Avenue, opposite Central Park, newspapers reported that Hetty would donate $500,000 to pay for the site. Neither Hetty nor Annie ever confirmed the reports.

In 1911, Nicholls organized a contest among society ladies to trim Easter hats to be given to poor girls. The women gathered at the Madison Avenue home of a wealthy woman named Mrs. George Kemp, a friend of Hetty’s. Hetty was not only a sponsor, she helped judge the entries. Among her favorites was a wide-brimmed hat with a spray of flowers and a large green bow—a color that the contest participants christened as “Hetty green.”

In the annals of philanthropy, a hat-trimming contest is a minor event, to be sure. But Hetty’s participation made it news. Just as everything she did made news. By now, she was so familiar to Americans that she was becoming a popular icon. She seemed to be everywhere. Her name cropped up in popular songs, one of them, written in 1905 by Sidney S. Toler, titled “If I Were As Rich As Hetty Green”
(Each day I’d give the poor a thousand dollars / A diamond ring to every little queen
—/ O
you bet your life that
I
would go to the limit / If I were just as rich as Hetty Green).
Another song, “At the Million Dollar Tango Ball,” written in 1914 by
James White, included the lines:
Given by the millionaires at Wall Street Hall / John
D.
Rockefeller sold the tickets by the score / Andrew Carnegie was taking tickets at the door / Hetty Green was Dancing Mistress of the floor / Vanderbilt was playing every rag encore.

In 1912, a trotter named Hetty Green finished sixth in a field of seven at the Detroit’s Grand Circuit horse races. That same year, a wealthy slumlord in New York, Mrs. Pasquale Spinelli, was murdered. She had been known as “the Hetty Green of Little Italy.” At the Thirty-ninth Street Theater in Manhattan in 1914, in a play called Too
Many Cooks
, a character named Albert Bennett told his fiancée that he loved her and not another character named Minnie, with these words: “If Minnie was as beautiful as Lillian Russell and as rich as Hetty Green … I’d laugh in her face.” A few months later, the
New York Sun
reported (erroneously, as it turned out) that Hetty planned to buy the Chicago Cubs.

To the public, Hetty was ageless and timeless—people could not remember a time when Hetty could not be seen bustling along the streets of lower Manhattan. It seemed as if she might live forever. And she was determined to give that impression, working long days and weekends, ever minding her fortune. But she was beginning to contemplate her death, and in a quiet way to make preparations. In 1911, she made up her will, a straightforward document passing everything along to her children. A year later, she made another arrangement. One Saturday in July of 1912, Hetty spent the morning, as was her custom, in the offices of the Westminster Company. She worked until a man, the Reverend Augustine Elmendorf, arrived at the building. Ned was there, too. The three of them got into Ned’s chauffeur-driven car, and Ned ordered the driver to take them across the river to Jersey City, where the Reverend Elmendorf was rector. Jersey City was the next town over from Hoboken. When the car arrived at the church, located at the corner of Arlington and Claremont Avenues, the little party entered the rectory. The occasion had been kept a strict secret, to keep the ever-curious reporters away.
Here, in the rectory, with only her son as witness, Hetty was baptized in the Episcopal church. She had not, however, undergone a conversion of faith or become suddenly devout. Her reasons were more practical, and perhaps more touching. The little burial ground in Bellows Falls where her husband lay interred only Episcopalians—and that is where she preferred to be buried, next to Edward, when the time came.

FIFTEEN
I’LL OUTLIVE ALL OF THEM!