When the Astors Owned New York (3 page)

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.
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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, “the 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.”

During the 1850s and 1860s, in his parlor suite, “No. 11,” on the Vesey Street side, Republican Party kingmaker Thurlow Weed held court. There, his grandson recalled, “caucuses were held, campaigns arranged, senators, members of the cabinet, governors, ministers, and even presidents were made and unmade. For nearly a quarter of a century more political power and influence probably emanated from that little apartment than from any other source in the entire republic.”

Walt Whitman was to recall as a moment fixed motionless in time, the arrival from Albany, in February 1861, two months before the Civil War, of President-elect Abraham Lincoln. “A sulky, unbroken, and menacing silence” greeted him (New York City was a nest of Southern sympathizers). “He looked with curiosity upon that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces return'd the look with similar curiosity. The crowd that hemm'd around consisted I should think of thirty or forty thousand men, not a single one his personal friend…. The tall figure gave another relieving stretch or two of arms and legs; then with moderate pace, and accompanied by a few unknown looking persons, ascended the portico steps of the Astor House, disappeared through its broad entrance—and the dumb show ended.” From that moment on, Whitman said, he knew that to paint a true portrait of Lincoln would require the combined genius of Plutarch, Aeschylus, and Michelangelo. From the same vantage point on the Broadway pavement near the Astor House the diarist George Templeton Strong caught a glimpse of “the great rail-splitter's face…a keen, clear, honest face, not so ugly as his portraits.” The thirteen-year-old William Waldorf Astor also saw the president-elect when he passed through New York in 1861. “‘What a fright,' I heard an old lady exclaim, and certainly nothing of the heroic revealed itself in that plebeian exterior.”

Three years later, during the closing months of the war, eight Confederate army officers, in civilian clothes and carrying false papers, arrived by train from Toronto. They had equipped themselves with incendiary devices of phosphorus and naphtha. Their mission was to set fire to the Astor House, about twenty other hotels, and Barnum's American Museum. In the ensuing panic, Southern sympathizers were to seize control of city hall, police headquarters, and the military command center and claim New York for the Confederacy. Along with their firebombs, which simply smoldered instead of breaking into flame, the Confederate plot fizzled, but in theory, at any rate, it made it clear that New York's crowded hotels were essential to its central nervous system and also its richest, most accessible terrorist target.

For all its grandeur and preeminence, by 1875, John Jacob Astor's monument to himself had begun to outlive its time. Compared to the city's bigger, newer, and more fashionable hotels, many of them modeled on it, even the Astor House's famously innovative mechanical arrangements seemed old-fashioned. At first thought by some of the builder's skeptical contemporaries to be too far “uptown” of the city's business district to succeed, it was now too far “downtown” to continue occupying a dominant place in the city's social life. Mansions of the Robber Barons, and the retail establishments catering to them, were sprouting like dragons' teeth along Fifth Avenue north of Forty-second Street. Astor's “palace” had yielded precedence to a newer one at Madison Square, a mile and more north of the Astor House: the white marble Fifth Avenue Hotel, opened in the late 1850s. It offered its eight hundred guests private baths, a fireplace in every bedroom, and the services of a staff of four hundred. The hotel's steam-powered elevator—called “the vertical railroad”—was the first in the city and introduced a radical change in hotel economics and status systems: instead of being less favored because of the stairs involved, upper-story rooms and suites, distant from street noises and street smells and now conveniently reached by elevator, offered comfort and prestige at premium rates.