When the Astors Owned New York (15 page)

Some of the subscribers the colonel recruited were agreeable to having considerably more than the nominal $1,500 extracted from them as the price of admission to his hall of heroes. The widow of railroad builder and robber baron Collis P. Huntington, for instance, insisted that her husband deserved a more ample treatment in
Fads and Fancies
than relative nobodies such as match manufacturer Ohio C. Barber; Isaac F. Emerson, a former drugstore clerk who invented Bromo-Seltzer; society sportsman Foxhall Keene; and asphalt millionaire A. L. Barber. She paid $10,000 for eight pages instead of the meager three or four allotted to other eminent corporate operators like Thomas W. Lawson, Boston stock plunger, market manipulator, and author of
Frenzied Finance;
traction magnate and convicted embezzler Charles T. Yerkes, whose “ruling passion” was his love of “all beautiful things,” especially rugs and tapestries; Julius Fleischmann of Cincinnati, heir to the family yeast and vinegar works; and Reginald “Reggie” Vanderbilt, boozer and man about town, whose great-grandfather, the implacable Commodore, was credited in passing with having radiated “pure sunshine in his life and character.” (“I won't sue you, for the law is too slow,” Vanderbilt once told a former business associate. “I'll ruin you.”)

Given four pages, Colonel John Jacob Astor was among the more conspicuous of the men immortalized in the folio pages of
Fads and Fancies
. He clearly cooperated with the publisher and contributed a dozen or so pictures from private albums to go with his write-up. Among them were photos of himself in civilian clothes and in military uniform, armed with a cavalry saber and mounted on his horse. Other pictures displayed his yacht and launches; his Ferncliff mansion, gatehouse, and tennis court; one of his automobiles; and the battery of howitzers he had given to the U.S. Army.

“Of the typical American gentlemen of the first years of the Twentieth Century,” Jack's chapter began,

Among the colonel's recent ventures with claims on his attention during these few business hours had been two new hotels in midtown Manhattan.

i.

I
N SEPTEMBER 1904,
after an absence of five years, William Waldorf Astor, at fifty-six, vigorous and ruddy in face, arrived in New York on the steamship
Majestic
for a short visit. He was accompanied by a valet and seventeen pieces of luggage and went directly to his suite at the New Netherland. Having been burned in effigy in his native city some years earlier, it was with some reluctance that he had left the Tudor world of Hever Castle in the hands of its putative ghost and its army of workmen. He came back to tend to business affairs, chief among them the opening of the Astor, his new luxury hotel at Times Square. A month later his cousin, John Jacob Astor IV, was also to open an ambitious new hotel of his own. Jack's was the St. Regis, and he intended it to exceed all others, including William's, in luxury, modernity, and the smartness of its clientele. Meanwhile the Waldorf-Astoria, their joint venture, continued to prosper, although the tide of fashion and commerce was moving uptown.

Despite his ingrained resentment of the American press, William Waldorf Astor managed to be affable and even forthcoming in conversation with reporters who boarded the ship at quarantine. They were surprised that despite his long residence in England, he sounded as if he had never left Manhattan. So far from selling off his real-estate holdings there, as had been widely rumored, he assured reporters that he was continuing to add to them, the Hotel Astor being his newest acquisition and, as it turned out, the last of his grand gestures on Manhattan Island.

He had committed about $7 million to the building of a brick-and-limestone hotel, to stand twelve stories high and occupy an entire block front in Longacre Square, on the west side of Broadway between Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth streets. In April, five months before his return, Longacre Square, the city's tourist and entertainment hub, had been renamed Times Square. The name recognized the newspaper's rising new headquarters at Forty-second Street, a New World version of Giotto's Florentine bell tower. Twenty-two stories when completed, it was the tallest building in midtown. In its basement, above the pressroom on lower levels, was the Times Square station of financier August Belmont's newly completed Interborough Rapid Transit Company. For a nickel, subway riders could now travel from City Hall to 145th Street and Broadway in fifteen minutes. Along with the Times Tower, the Hotel Astor stood at a critical junction—“The Crossroads of the World”—of foot, surface, and underground traffic flowing north, south, and crosstown. Ablaze with spectacular electrical advertising signs, the city's entertainment and tourist center had already been dubbed the Great White Way and was soon to become as famous a focus of public assembly as London's Piccadilly Circus and the Vatican's St. Peter's Square.

In making this brilliantly timed and strategically situated investment, Astor had followed the advice of a German-born restaurateur, owner of a popular eatery and gathering place nearby called the Arena, William C. Muschenheim. Once manager of the cadets' mess at West Point, he was an old hand at dispensing loaves and fishes and made a great deal of money at it. Scholar, art lover, and enthusiastic local historian, he owned a notable collection of old New York maps, documents, and prints. He had a sure sense of where the future lay. In the course of his correspondence with Astor and his occasional visits to England he had made a strong case for the claim that Times Square, an increasingly populous stretch of the city's most celebrated area, needed, and would amply support, a fittingly great hotel that should be as renowned for its food, drink, and congenial atmosphere as for its accommodations and architectural splendor. This new hotel was to be an updated version of the Waldorf-Astoria, an equally monumental and decisive venture, but in spirit less snooty, more egalitarian, and more in tune with the commercial values and increasingly relaxed social style of the new American century. Instead of the exotics of high society, its core clientele was to be tourists, businesspeople, and prosperous members of the middle class.

Astor and Muschenheim gave their designers, decorators, engineers, and purchasing agents free rein and a virtually unlimited budget. Their architects, Clinton and Russell, until then mainly known for designing tall business buildings, tore down a shabby block of shops, theatrical boardinghouses, and saloons to provide the site for a new palace for the people. From its wine cellar, two stories below street level, to its roof garden, observatory, belvedere restaurant, and cavernous ballrooms under the mansard roof, the Astor, promoted to the public as “the finest hotel in the world,” was to be “far more than a stopping place”: a self-sufficient, self-enclosed magic city within a city. Muschenheim's exuberant prose hailed the Astor as “the Culmination of Years of Artistic Study.” The cutaway view that he commissioned as an advertisement suggests a combination of industrial plant and bustling ant farm.

“In New York,” his lavishly illustrated promotional booklet declared, “the hotel of ten years ago has undergone an amazing evolution—an evolution which has now produced one of the most magnificent and brilliant factors of modern life. Here has grown up an institution new in the world—a phenomenon—a development of which a decade ago we did not dream, and which the capitals of Europe are only beginning to copy.”

Covering fourteen building lots, the Astor enclosed a vast marble and gilded lobby twenty-one feet high, decorated with murals depicting New York past and present. Almost immediately the lobby became the equivalent of a municipal living room, agora, and trysting place. “She Lost It at the Astor” was a popular song of the 1930s. “Meet me at the Astor” became part of the social vocabulary of well-heeled New Yorkers. Upstairs were more than five hundred bedrooms served by twelve passenger elevators, a banqueting hall seating five hundred, a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot kitchen described as the largest in the world, dozens of public rooms, each with its own distinct character, and guest suites that drew on a lexicon of styles—art nouveau, Empire, Dutch Renaissance—and made inevitable references to Versailles. Some of the Astor's technological innovations were air-conditioning; fire and smoke detectors in every room; electrically controlled fire doors; a “food escalator” connecting the kitchen and banqueting rooms; an ice plant that produced 120 tons each day; an array of dynamos powering the elevators and the hotel's fourteen thousand lights; and a “crematory,” or incinerator, the first of its kind in a hotel, to dispose of trash and garbage. From a glassed-in basement enclosure that protected them from heat and noise, hotel guests, as if they were visiting the innards of an ocean liner, could look out over the engines and boilers that served this gargantuan machine for living. The Astor's interior and exterior walls were fortresslike in thickness and strength.

A carnival of cosmopolitanism, the Astor housed an American Indian grill room; a Chinese tearoom; a Flemish smoking room; a Spanish lounging room; a Pompeian billiard room; a German “Hunt Room” decorated with stag-horn light fixtures and a continuous frieze showing scenes of the chase; and a Mediterranean orangery complete with fountain, a grove of fruit trees and palms, and an electrically lit moon that shed a warm romantic glow on the occupants. Private dining rooms on the ninth floor were fitted out as the cabin of a millionaire's yacht; paintings shaped and framed like portholes depicted the waterway between the harbor and Long Island Sound and created the illusion that diners had embarked on a leisurely cruise out of the city. Muschenheim's pet project, the American Indian Grill Room, was an ethnological museum of sorts furnished with bows and arrows, feathered head-dresses, baskets, ritual artifacts, hunting and fishing implements, busts, rare prints, and photographs. Some of this material had been assembled with advice from the American Museum of Natural History. The Astor's “hall of the aborigines” was to serve as a reminder to diners, the management announced, that “the wigwam of the Indian once stood on the very ground now occupied by our great cities.”

Although lord of Cliveden and Hever Castle, William Waldorf Astor had no hesitation about dining in public view at this unashamedly commercial and democratic hotel and allowing it to bear the family name. Himself an appreciative feeder and wine drinker, he was delighted with the Astor cuisine, which he claimed was the best in New York. Muschenheim's encyclopedic menus offered rare dishes like wild boar, English snipe, and Egyptian quail. Astor admitted to some slight unease when he saw that the hotel chinaware bore a prominent design of flowering asters. “I am not responsible for the use of the China Aster as a joke upon my name,” he told Amy Richardson. “Muschenheim hit upon the idea and was delighted with it.” The new hotel proved to be so successful that in 1906, less than two years after it opened, Astor invested a further $4 million. He doubled the building's size by extending it to the west, added the Astor Theater on the corner of Forty-fifth Street, and topped the entire structure with the world's largest roof garden. The Astor's guest book eventually contained the names of practically every hero and famous person of the era. Among them were transatlantic solo flier Charles A. Lindbergh; General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I; and the humorist Will Rogers. Republican presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes went to bed at the Astor on election night, 1916, believing he had defeated Woodrow Wilson. He woke up the next morning, after the returns from California had come in, to be told by a reporter he was “no longer president.”

Despite the triumph of his new venture, Astor's mood turned glum after a few days of what he complained had been the customary “notoriety, abuse, and ridicule” he received at the hands of the local press. His stay “would have been pleasanter,” he said, “had the newspaper men not dogged me about and Kodak-ed me with such patient industry.” His enormous American-derived wealth combined with his declared allegiance to the British Crown had made him both a curiosity and a notoriety, subject of the inevitable references to Benedict Arnold and to the rabbit skinner in the Astors' ancestry. As he had on previous occasions, he vowed “never to set foot in New York again.”

ii.

F
OLLOWING
his cousin's example, John Jacob Astor IV also built in Times Square, on the southeast corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. His Hotel Knickerbocker, opened in 1906 after construction costs of about $3.5 million, stood on one of the most valuable pieces of land in his Manhattan Island holdings, but, compared to the Astor, it was relatively low-key in decor and amenities and positioned in the hotel market to draw out-of-town visitors of moderate means. The management promised Fifth Avenue comforts at Broadway prices. Despite the fame of its barroom adorned with the popular artist Maxfield Parrish's mural
Old King Cole and His Fiddlers Three,
the Knickerbocker was never a success, and Prohibition finished it off. (The
Old King Cole
mural was moved uptown and installed in the St. Regis.)

Much closer to Jack Astor's heart and technological interests was his St. Regis, opened in 1904 a month or so after his cousin's Astor. It was a direct challenge to William's imperial style and asserted Jack's own personality, chronically undervalued but now enhanced by his public identity as Colonel Astor. Suggesting a decidedly masculine sort of competition, the new St. Regis was one story higher than the vaunted seventeen of William's New Netherland. The $6 million hotel Jack Astor erected on the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street was acknowledged right away to be the last word in the design, furnishings, and technology of “a great modern American hotel,” wrote Arthur C. David, a critic for
Architectural Record
. In the grip of an apparent paroxysm of wonderment, he went on to describe the St. Regis (named after a resort area in upstate New York) as an example of “probably the most complicated piece of mechanism which the invention and ingenuity of man have ever been called upon to devise. The only other modern mechanical contrivances which might be in the same class are a contemporary battleship and ocean-liner; and in some respects the requirements of a hotel are more numerous and various than those even of a steamship of the highest class…. The bowels and frame of such a building are in truth comparable only to the human body in the complexity and interdependence of the processes that go on within.”

Unlike the frankly egalitarian Hotel Astor in Times Square, the St. Regis was located in what had become known as “Vanderbilt Alley,” a neighborhood of mansions, town houses, exclusive clubs, and high-end retail establishments like Cartier that catered to society and the very rich. It implicitly defined its clientele as the smart set: moneyed, luxury-loving, fastidious but elegantly casual, harbingers of an era of plush nightclubs, café society, and a general loosening of old-line social and sexual conventions. Inevitably, given the modernity of its presiding spirit, Jack's St. Regis began to draw younger patrons away from the old (by Manhattan standards) Waldorf-Astoria. Jack's passion for invention and innovation was visible in the hotel's air-conditioning and forced-air ventilation system, thermostats and telephones in every room, and mail chutes on each floor by the banks of bronze-doored elevators. Normally aloof from her husband and his interests, Ava reportedly had a hand in designing some of the period interiors.

Whatever guests required in the way of convenience, comfort, novelty, and visual splendor, Jack's new hotel offered them, including a library of leather-bound books, an “Elizabethan” tearoom hung with Flemish tapestries depicting incidents in the life of King Solomon, a sidewalk café, a skylight ballroom on the eighteenth floor, and a bronze-and-glass sentry box for the doorman. In the immense dining room, modeled on the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, Harry Lehr's wife was able to give a party for 150 guests. She seated all of them at one table that was so long, she recalled, that in laying out the hotel's silver, Royal Worcester china, crystal, and linen, the waiters had to telephone “directions from one end of the table to another; while the florist's men, in special shoes of white felt, walked about on the surface of the table to arrange their trails of roses and carnations.”