When the Astors Owned New York (8 page)

“In the evolved city of the future,” Jack had written in a letter in
Scientific American,
“street pavements will of course be smooth and easily cleaned—asphalt, bitumen, macadam, or sheet steel; and to keep horses in large cities will doubtless be prohibited by the Board of Health, as stabling cows, pigs, or sheep is now. Second-story sidewalks composed largely of translucent glass, leaving all the present street level to vehicles, are already badly needed…and will doubtless have made their appearance in less than twenty years.”

Peace reigned in Jack's world of the future. “As zoology shows us,” he wrote, “the amphibian metamorphosed into the land vertebrate, followed by the bird, so history reveals the aborigine's dugout, the Fifth Avenue omnibus, and the oxcart, followed by the automobile which is preparing the light and powerful engine that will soon propel the flying machine. That will be a happy day for earth-dwellers, for war will become so destructive that it will probably bring its own end; and the human caterpillar, already mechanically converted into the grasshopper, will become a fairly beautiful butterfly.” “Next to religion,” Jack believed, “we have most to hope from science.”

Chronically humorless, he was not given to practical joking, although practical joking, instead of an unquestioning eagerness to believe, would have been the only charitable explanation for a signed article Jack published in William Randolph Hearst's daily
New York American
. He recounted a remarkable discovery. “While automobiling in the Pyrenees mountains a few years ago, [I] observed an unusual creature. It had a shaggy coat, thick legs, and a slouching gait. It belonged to some gypsies who had a number of dogs and a performing bear, and they described it as a bear-dog.” Astor bought the animal, which he found to be “intellectually and physically far superior to an ordinary dog,” and took it back with him to Ferncliff, where he kept it along with his pedigreed sheep and other prized livestock. He cited his bear-dog as proof of a long-standing belief of his that animals of different genera could together produce a creature that was neither one nor the other but at least theoretically more valuable and useful than either.

According to Dr. William Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoological Garden, Astor's bear-dog was probably just a dwarf St. Bernard that the Gypsies had put over on this rich innocent. He suggested that Astor apply his mind to genetic engineering and animal husbandry. He might make a second Astor fortune, Hornaday said, “if he could invent an animal to eat dirt, for dirt is very cheap.”

SCIENTISTS SCOFF AT ASTOR'S BEAR-DOG,
the
Times
headlined its two-column story.
BRONX ZOO DIRECTOR THINKS [ASTOR] OUGHT TO
OFFER A PRIZE FOR A REAL LIVE MASTODON.
In his article in the
American,
Astor cited laboratory experiments with frogs' eggs conducted by a Professor Albert Oppel of the University of Halle, in Germany. Professor Oppel had apparently succeeded in breeding a frog two feet high. Astor saw no reason other creatures could not be similarly enlarged by selective breeding. It might even be possible to bring back extinct giant creatures of the Carboniferous period; use them both as farm animals, like oxen and draft horses, and as a meat source for humans; and, meanwhile, feed them cheaply. His nutritional logic appeared to be impeccable. “While our coal was being formed,” he explained, “vegetation as we know it probably did not exist. Since the mammoths and their contemporaries must have eaten the plants that became coal, why may not their descendants eat some preparation of peat, coal, crude oil, or even limestone when the progress of the world requires that they should?” Astor was “so deeply interested,” the
Times
reported, “that he has offered a prize of $5000 for the best bear-dog to be entered at next year's dog show at Madison Square Garden.”

In 1894 Jack had followed cousin Willy's ventures into novel writing with a work of science fiction,
A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future,
published by D. Appleton and Company. The illustrations were by Dan Beard, who had done the pictures for Mark Twain's
A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court
. His work for Jack's novel showed, among other wonders, an ascent by flying machine from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx; a race with a comet; space travel to Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn; and encounters there with mastodonic animals and the souls of the righteous dead. Jack's tale, inspired by Jules Verne, was set in the year 2000, by which time Manhattan dwellers, presumably kept in check by the Republican Party, the Episcopal Church, and a terror of socialism and anarchism, enjoyed many blessings of science and technology: the “kintograph”—“a visual telegraph”—that put scientists in New York in visual contact with engineers and workmen on the shores of Baffin Bay; fast electric automobiles; a convenient subway system; and an existence made want free through the harnessing of a force Jack called “Apergy.” Apergy combined “negative and positive electricity with electricity of the third element or state.” Elijah, Jesus, and other ancients had at least suspected the existence of this miraculous force.

In Jack's world of the future, scientists employed by the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company harnessed apergy to nullify gravity, melt the polar ice cap, and blow up the Aleutian Islands. All this had been done in order “to straighten the axis of the earth, to combine the extreme heat of summer with the intense cold of winter and produce a uniform temperature for each degree of latitude the year round.” By the year 2000, according to Jack's prediction, the United States would have absorbed not only Canada but Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America as well. The banana republics south of the border with Mexico would have finally tired of “incessant revolutions” and turned for protection and stability to the governance of the Great White Father in Washington. And, just as old John Jacob Astor had known in his bones, Manhattan Island had continued to thrive. By 2000, according to Jack's projection, it had a population of 2.5 million and was surrounded by Greater New York's population belt of an additional 12 million. Comic stumbles aside, Jack's free-ranging imagination looked ahead to television, global warming, and genetic engineering and was not without predictive value for someone whose family business was real estate.

i.

W
RITING IN
1884, E. L. Godkin, editor and founder of the
Nation,
recalled that American hotels had long been among the wonders of the New World. Impressed by their size and lavishness, some travelers from abroad came near to assuming that the natives lived in hotels and that “home life in a house was almost unknown on this side of the Atlantic.” Putting up such hotels, and becoming, in effect, innkeepers, was far from maverick behavior for John Jacob Astor's breed of American capitalist and for his great-grandsons three generations later.

A Scots newspaper editor named John Leng, visiting the United States in 1876, the centennial of the Republic, noted what he called “a peculiar propensity,” not found among Europeans, “of men who have become rich in the States to build hotels” on a scale that reflected “the largeness of American ideas” and of the North American continent. Looking back, Leng cited the founding Astor along with Astor's near contemporary, New York merchant prince Alexander Turney Stewart. Along with the world's largest dry-goods store, a five-story “iron palace” (as it was called) that displayed acres of quality goods, and the marble mansion on Fifth Avenue where he lived, Stewart built and owned two hotels: the opulent Metropolitan on lower Broadway and the Grand Union, at Saratoga Springs, a fashionable health resort and horse-racing center in upstate New York. San Francisco real estate tycoon James Lick put up a fancy hotel at the corner of Montgomery and Sutter streets, named it after himself, and lived there until he died in 1876. Lick House's restaurant, where Mark Twain and other local celebrities dined on oysters, buffalo steak, and champagne, copied the banquet hall in the palace of Versailles.

Another San Francisco mogul, William Chapman Ralston, founder and president of the Bank of California, the dominant financial institution of the Far West, opened his gigantic Palace Hotel in 1875. Built to be earthquakeproof and enclosed within three-foot-thick brick walls girdled with iron bands, “the Greatest Caravansary in the World,” as a local newspaper described it, occupied an entire city block—over two acres—and stood seven stories high over Market and Montgomery streets. Among other wonders, Ralston's Palace offered “Promenades Amidst Tropical Verdure,” innovative water closets that functioned “without producing the horrid noise one usually hears,” and “Electric Bells Everywhere” that required 125 miles of wiring. A run on his bank together with the deficit financing of his no-expense-spared hotel left Ralston several million dollars in debt. Possibly a suicide, he was last seen alive swimming off North Beach in the direction of Alcatraz Island.

Put up in 1892 by wealthy businessman and real-estate promoter Henry Cordis Brown, the Palace Hotel in Denver had a seven-story balconied lobby with a stained-glass ceiling, served food from its own outlying farms and dairies, and briefly offered a crematorium for guests who had made their last stop on earth at the hotel. Brown's Palace was almost as famous, although still not nearly so grand as merchant prince Potter Palmer's hotel in Chicago. An earlier Palmer House, although advertised as “the only fireproof hotel in the world,” had been one of the first buildings to go in the great fire of 1871. Palmer replaced it immediately with a larger and more ambitious place. At eight stories, it was the city's tallest building and occupied an entire block along State Street. Palmer made the hotel his wedding gift to his highborn and cultivated wife, Bertha Honoré of Louisville, famous for her Paris couture and her trademark item of personal adornment, a seven-strand necklace of 2,268 pearls.

The most lavishly decorated and upholstered establishment of its kind, Palmer House was quickly known the world over for its liveried staff and sixty-foot bar. Its marble-pillared lobby-arcade served as informal stock and commodities exchange, news center, and public clubhouse. In the basement was a magnificent “tonsorial parlor” which the lessee decorated with 225 silver dollars set in a checkerboard pattern on its tiled floor. An immediate sensation, Palmer House's barbershop floor was soon copied all over the country. The epidemic of “Silver Dollar Saloons” extended to a gangster hangout on New York's Lower East Side that outdid Palmer House: in the floor were 1,000 silver dollars, while an additional 500 glittered in the gaslit chandeliers.

Palmer House was “a gilded and mirrored rabbit-warren,” according to Rudyard Kipling. “A Hottentot would not have been guilty of this sort of barbarism.” The lobby was “crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about everywhere,” he wrote. “Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno with letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted at each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for him told me that this was ‘the finest hotel in the finest city on God Almighty's earth.'” At a Sunday service in a nearby church Kipling listened to a sermon “delivered with a voice of silver and with imagery borrowed from the auction-room.” The minister offered congregants the vision of “a heaven on the lines of the Palmer House (but with all the gilding real gold and all the plate-glass diamond).”

Although busy with more profitable and extensive ventures in Chicago real estate, Palmer supervised every detail of the building and furnishing of his hotel. After it opened for business he kept in touch with daily operations from a little windowed office looking into the main lobby. For all the gaudiness and bustle of the place, Palmer saw to it that at least upstairs it had some of the character of a refined private house. No such private house, however, presented guests with an illustrated room-service menu that showed, on one side, a pigsty and hovel, symbolic of “Chicago forty years ago,” and, on the other, an idealized image of “The Chicago of To-day!” In addition to gargantuan beefsteaks and roasts of bear, antelope, and mountain sheep, the menu offered delicate fare like boned quail, blackbird, and partridge, and fairyland confections of spun sugar and fruit ices. Palmer, his wife, and their two sons, both born on the premises, lived in the hotel. He called it “my house,” “my home.” Bertha, the Mrs. Astor of the Midwest, maintained a dignified silence when a guest of honor at Palmer House, the infanta Eulalia, representing the king and queen of Spain at Chicago's Columbian Exposition in 1893, snubbed her because she was “an innkeeper's wife.” According to her biographer, Ishbel Ross, Bertha maintained her composure and said she “had no objection to being called the innkeeper's wife. She was quite fond of the innkeeper.”

Rockefeller partner and secretary-treasurer of the Standard Oil Company, by the 1880s Henry M. Flagler was one of the richest men in the country. A former freight handler on the Erie Canal and part owner of a whiskey distillery, after making his pile in petroleum with Standard Oil, he entered a second youth as a builder of hotels and rail lines along Florida's east coast. He transformed the area's desolate beaches and steamy alligator-infested wilderness into a winter playground for the rich. Moving like Sherman's army on its March to the Sea, Flagler's construction battalions swept south from Jacksonville and St. Augustine. “He seemed but to wave his magic wand,” Colonel William D'Alton Mann's book of vanity biographies,
Representative Americans,
said about Flagler, “and there arose out of the earth a palatial caravansary which for architectural beauty and magnificence has never been equaled in any land.” Flagler's “discovery” of Florida proved to be more consequential than Ponce de León's four centuries earlier. He took a hands-on as well as a close supervisory interest in his hotels, sometimes pitching in to speed up construction and, on at least one occasion, slashing furniture upholstery to check on the springs and stuffing underneath. According to local legend, when his Royal Poinciana was finished, Flagler decided to upgrade the social landscape by ousting the surrounding community (known as the “Styx”) of black construction workers. He declared a holiday, sent the workers and their families off to attend a circus as his guests, and, while they were gone, burned down their tents and shacks. He resettled his workers in West Palm Beach.

Among the reverses Flagler met up with in his otherwise unimpeded progress as innkeeper was his failure—the cause of a permanent estrangement—to transmit his passion for hotels to his son Harry. Harry cared about music, not business, and after two years of forced apprenticeship in Florida fled to New York and became a patron of the Philharmonic. Meanwhile, Ida Alice, Flagler's second wife, had conceived a passion for Czar Nicholas II, Autocrat of All the Russias, and claimed to be communicating with him by means of her Ouija board. She believed that the czar returned her love and they would marry as soon as Henry died, assuming she managed to survive attempts by Henry and their family doctor to poison her. In 1897 Alice was put away for good in a sanitarium in Pleasantville, New York. She told her keepers she was of royal blood, born Princess Ida Alice von Schotten Tech. Applying cash and clout, in 1901 Flagler levered the Florida state legislature into passing a general law (known to the tabloid-reading public as the “Flagler Divorce Law” and soon repealed) that made four years of insanity grounds for divorce. Seven days after the divorce went through, Flagler, seventy-one, announced his engagement to his long-standing companion, thirty-four-year-old Mary Lily Kenan. His wedding gift to her was a $2.5 million marble mansion, “Whitehall,” commissioned from the firm of John Carrere and Thomas Hastings, architects of Flagler's first hotel in St. Augustine (and, later, of the monumental New York Public Library building on Fifth Avenue, opened in 1911).

From their glowing palace the happy couple ruled over Palm Beach, the town Flagler had created and made into an American Riviera. “This is an amazing winter resort,” Henry James wrote from his rooms at the Breakers, “the well-to-do in their tens, their hundreds of thousands, from all over the land, the property of a single enlightened despot, the creator of two monster hotels…. It will give me brilliant chapters on hotel-civilization.” When this seigneurial innkeeper, Henry Flagler, died in 1913, his widow had his body embalmed and transported over the rail lines his battalions had built, from Palm Beach to St. Augustine. There he lay in state, his own guest of honor, in the lobby of the Ponce de Leon, his first Florida hotel.

Luxury aside, one feature common to these showplaces and civic ornaments was that they had been planned and built by men at the top of the social and financial heap and proud to be innkeepers. Not without enjoying the enhancement of their personal grandeur, Flagler, Palmer, and the others created intricate artificial worlds that were self-contained and self-sustaining and aimed at achieving perfection in every detail. For all the bricks, marble, velvet, structural iron, and financial accounting that went into their construction, their grand hotels could even be called ventures in the ideal.

ii.

B
Y THE
1890s the Astor estate, comprising the assets of both cousins, was worth about $200 million. In the 1930s the historian Burton J. Hendrick called it “the world's greatest monument to unearned increment…a first mortgage on Fate itself.” By extrapolation Hendrick figured the Astor holdings would be worth $80 billion by the year 2000. The Fifth Avenue block alone, where the two had grown up in their parents' adjacent houses, was valued at $35 million. This was about a thousand times what the founder's son, William Backhouse Sr., “landlord of New York,” had paid for it half a century earlier when it was part of a farm. Along with their enormous fortune William Waldorf and John Jacob IV had inherited their great-grandfather's cast-iron certainty that the island of Manhattan, thirteen miles long and two at its broadest, was destined to be the capital of the New World and of the Old World as well.

Obeying the ancestral impulse that in the 1830s led the family founder to build Astor House, the grandest American hotel of its time, William Waldorf Astor, too, became a builder of hotels on a grand scale. He commissioned the towering steel-framed New Netherland (the original name of the Dutch settlement in North America) on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street. He also bought a large parcel of property on Broadway, in the crossroads area soon to be named Times Square, where he would eventually build the Hotel Astor. But the most imperial and innovative of such ventures of his was one that would revolutionize both hotel keeping on the North American continent and the social rhythms of New York City.

William was to name it the Waldorf, as much in honor of himself as of old John Jacob Astor's hometown in Baden. His choice of a site for the Waldorf, Fifth Avenue and Thirty-third Street, was equally freighted with a sense of history but also motivated by feelings of oedipal succession, long-standing clan antagonism and rivalry, and undisguised vindictiveness. Both his mother and father had died by 1890–1891, when he ordered construction of the Waldorf. He tore down the house where they had lived for almost all of their married life, where he had been born in 1848, and where he had grown up in an atmosphere of solemn and unblemished probity. His aunt Caroline's redbrick-and-brownstone house next door, long the scene of her famous entertainments, was to be made virtually uninhabitable by the noise, dust, traffic, and general tumult of excavation and construction. Dwarfed and demeaned, her house and garden cowered in the shadow of William's immense building. To the south Caroline could see eleven stories of blank brick wall interrupted only by an open-sided air shaft.

Putting up the Waldorf where he did had been motivated by a punitive as well as an ego-serving purpose. It was a preemptive strike against Caroline and her son Jack, this time on a field of combat larger than a pasteboard calling card. The
Times
recognized that the prospect of this hotel rising where it did sparked “a variety of rumors,” some of them hardly new, that indicated “something in the nature of a family feud between the two branches of the Astors.” To accommodate his mother and his own family, Jack spent $2 million to build a four-story French Renaissance chateau uptown on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street. The double house designed by the fashionable architect Richard Morris Hunt boasted the city's largest private ballroom.