When the Astors Owned New York (2 page)

i.

A
T 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 every 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.”

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”:

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.

I
N 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.