When the Astors Owned New York Read online

  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.

  The Astor House closed in 1875 for the long-overdue installation of elevators, running hot water, gas lighting on the upper floors, and a general refurbishing. According to an 1899 guidebook, the lunch and dining rooms in the Astor House’s famous rotunda had continued to attract “on any week day, more representative business and professional men than can be seen elsewhere under any one roof in Manhattan.” Even so, the Astor House, once regarded as “a marvel of the age,” was a dying venture, victim of what Walt Whitman, poet of million-footed Manhattan, nonetheless deplored as the city’s irrepressible “pull-down-and-build-all-over-again spirit.” The Astor House closed for good in 1913 despite an eleventh-hour petition signed by five thousand loyalists. The event also inspired many column inches of editorial nostalgia that claimed for New York’s Astor House a place in the nation’s history along with Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and Boston’s Faneuil Hall. The last guests moved out, the rotunda barroom served its last drinks and sandwiches, the furniture was knocked down for as little as $20 a room, and work crews began to dig a subway tunnel under the building. It had been old John Jacob Astor’s “palais royal,” now being reduced to rubble, that spawned what Henry James, early in the next century, was to call “a new thing under the sun,” a visible, tangible, and accessible “hotel civilization.”

  TWO

  Town Topics

  i.

  PHLEGMATIC AND CAUTIOUS, the founder’s son, William Backhouse Astor (1792–1875), was faithful to two main goals: to protect and increase the Astor fortune and, encouraged by his father, to complete the family’s transition in status from immigrant upstarts to native blue bloods. He married conspicuously up. His wife, Margaret Rebecca Armstrong, was the daughter of a Revolutionary War general, John Armstrong, later a senator, minister to France, and secretary of war. Armstrong himself had married into the powerful Livingston clan, which, in the seventeenth century, had held the title of Lords of the Manor, major landowners in the Hudson River valley.

  William and Margaret had three sons, the youngest of whom, Henry (1830–1918), went his own contrary way and turned his back on his father’s social aspirations. After he married a farmer’s daughter he was drummed out of the family and effectively forgotten. By virtue of birth and wealth, William and Margaret’s two other sons, John Jacob III (1822–1890) and his younger brother, William Backhouse Jr. (1830–1892), assumed a high place in the American aristocracy. In time the two came to occupy adjacent brownstone mansions on Fifth Avenue between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth streets, a notably valuable parcel of real estate, farmland not too many years earlier, that their father had acquired at what proved to be a bargain price. The brothers also shared offices and, to a varying extent, authority in the family counting house on Prince Street. By right of seniority, John Jacob III was the head of the House of Astor, his brother what amounted to junior partner, and this led to jealousy and resentment on William’s part. Disagreements over business matters, compounded with fundamental incompatibility, discordant styles of living, and friction between their wives, had long since frayed the ties of brotherhood. The enmity between them they were to pass on to their sons.

  Imperious and somber, John Jacob III had studied at the University of Gottingen, Columbia College, and Harvard Law School. Encouraged by his wife, the former Charlotte Augusta Gibbes, he gradually relaxed from his dedication to thrift, work, piety, and high morality and learned to enjoy his class’s conventional pleasures: vintage claret, fine book bindings, and a villa on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, where his wife entertained in splendor. A faithful worshipper at Trinity Episcopal Church, he was also a force in the Republican Party, despite his aversion to American politics, which he said did not deserve the attention of a gentleman. Explaining that he had no interest in “public life,” in his late fifties he declined an appointment from President Rutherford B. Hayes as minister to England, a position that only a man as rich as John Jacob could have afforded to occupy. His credo, which he passed on to his only son, William Waldorf, along with scorn for American life in general, was “Work hard, but never work after dinner,” and the equally joyless “Always take the trick. When the opportunity you seek is before you, seize it. Do not wait until tomorrow on t
he supposition that your chance will become better, for you may never see it again.”

  John Jacob III regarded his brother and next-door neighbor as shiftless, a drifter and wastrel. William had abdicated his duty, intelligence, and education (at Columbia College, where he stood near the head of his class) in favor of yachting, womanizing, low company, Thoroughbred horses and bloodhounds, sullenness, and drink. (He was “a one-man temperance society,” said a contemporary, “dedicated to destroying all spirituous liquor even if he had to drink it all himself.”) A chronically absent husband, father, and participant in Astor estate matters, he made pleasure his religion.

  “Society” was the religion of his wife, the formidable and domineering Caroline Webster Schermerhorn, the city’s reigning hostess and clamorously acknowledged queen of New York’s “Four Hundred.” “There are only about 400 people in fashionable New York,” said Ward McAllister, a prominent hanger-on and bon vivant who made the role of arbiter in such matters a virtually fulltime job. “If you go outside that number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease.” A phrase immediately picked up by the newspapers, “the Four Hundred” passed in to the language as an elastic and convenient label for a small group of New Yorkers held together by a code of manners and a principle of exclusiveness based almost entirely on the possession of preferably “old” money acquired in an earlier generation. Money aged more quickly in America than in Europe, where even the Astors might still be considered at least “nouveau très riche” if not just plain “nouveau riche.” The Astors, for their part, looked down on the equally snooty Vanderbilts for being one generation closer than they were to the source of their wealth, the hardfisted railroad and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. “Commodore” Vanderbilt had begun his climb up the ladder from a position as deckhand on the Staten Island ferry. “The class which had the money,” the historian Gustavus Myers was to write in his classic History of the Great American Fortunes, “arrogated to itself all that was superior, and it exacted, and was invested with, a lordly deference. It lived in the finest mansions and laved in luxury. Surrounded with an indescribably pretentious air of importance, it radiated tone, command, and prestige.”

  The New York Times and other papers routinely supplied readers with guest lists, menus, and other details of Mrs. Astor’s notoriously long and dull parties. A typical midnight supper menu in her mansion on Fifth Avenue offered, among main courses served on plates of silver and gold, terrapin, fillet of beef, canvasback duck, partridge with truffles, quail, game, and foie gras in aspic. Pyramids of hothouse fruit and banks of orchids, roses, apple blossoms, and azaleas decorated her table and dining room. As many as 125 outside caterers supported a resident staff of eighteen. The Astor servants wore court livery: green plush coats, white knee breeches, black silk stockings, gold buckles, and red whipcord vests with brass buttons stamped with the coat of arms and motto that the William Astors had awarded themselves, Semper Fidelis. (In keeping with this heraldic dignity, Caroline prevailed on her husband to drop or at least mute his middle name, Backhouse, because of its demeaning associations with privies.) Wearing a black wig to cover her graying hair, Caroline received her guests standing in front of the full-length portrait (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) she had commissioned from the fashionable French academician Emile Carolus-Duran. This was her official portrait, and she discouraged the display of other images of herself. She favored royal purple in her velvets, satins, and silks and was an indispensable source of copy for the daily papers and especially for Town Topics, Colonel William A. D’Alton Mann’s weekly gossip sheet. His genius for nosing out scandal and skating along the edges of outright extortion earned him a comfortable living and a fearsome eminence. The colonel (he had won his rank in the Civil War) made it his profession either to publish or to withhold on proper payment (for accounting purposes politely carried as a “loan”) highly spiced news items of concern to members of society.

  At her last formal reception in 1905, Town Topics reported, Mrs. Astor “wore a massive tiara that seemed a burden upon her head, and she was further weighed down by an enormous dog collar of pearls with diamond pendant attachments. She also wore a celebrated Marie Antoinette stomacher of diamonds and a large diamond corsage ornament. Diamonds and pearls were pinned here and there about the bodice. She was a dozen Tiffany cases personified.” She had a court chamberlain, Harry Lehr, a butterfly who had made his social debut in Baltimore as a female impersonator and was now a commission wine salesman on the side. Lehr said his mistress looked like “a walking chandelier.” Toward the end of her life (she died in 1908) Caroline began to bend with the more liberal times and even ventured out of her palace to make a public appearance by dining at Sherry’s Restaurant on Fifth Avenue at Thirty-seventh Street. This “event,” as the gossip pages recognized it to be, caused almost as much consternation as if she had been seen tucking into the free lunch of pigs’ knuckles and hard-boiled eggs at Steve Brodie’s Bowery Saloon. She joked that she had begun to spice up her usual dinner guest list, long on bloodlines and bloated bank accounts and notably short on wit and intellect, by inviting a few “bohemians” off the street. She said she had in mind J. P. Morgan and Edith Wharton.

  Caroline was determined to be known to society, the United States postal system, and the world at large simply as “Mrs. Astor,” sole, generic, needing no forename, and tolerating no competition for that title from her nephew’s wife, who of course was also a “Mrs. Astor.” Caroline’s husband seemed uninterested in his wife’s guests and preferred to live far away from the stupefying and gluttonous tumult of her balls and dinner parties. He was generally to be found in Europe and Florida; at Ferncliff, his country estate at Rhinebeck on the Hudson; or, with female guests, both social and professional, aboard Ambassadress, the biggest yacht afloat. He eventually replaced it with the more sumptuous 250-foot all-steel Nourmahal, meaning “Light of the Harem.” When asked about her husband’s absences, Caroline would reply placidly, as Elizabeth Lehr, Harry’s wife, reported, “Oh, he is having a delightful cruise. The sea air is so good for him. It is a great pity I am such a bad sailor, for I should so much enjoy accompanying him. As it is, I have never even set foot on the yacht.”

  In 1890 John Jacob III died of heart disease in his Fifth Avenue mansion, and two years later William Backhouse died of a ruptured aneurysm in a Paris hotel suite. Their sons inherited their differences and genetic incompatibility. William Waldorf Astor and John Jacob Astor IV, sixteen years younger, scarcely knew but disliked and resented each other all the same and rarely met. The immense wealth each of them inherited conferred on them the status of crown princes in a society without a throne: William Waldorf’s stake, estimated at his death at $150 million to $300 million, made him (said the New York Times) “the wealthiest man in America, if not the world.” However much these princes sought privacy, their wealth made them de facto public figures, especially vulnerable to comment because the Astors, along with the trustees of Trinity Church, were the city’s major slumlords. They drew rent money from festering tenements that harbored three-quarters of the city’s population in conditions that put Calcutta to shame. An unspoken but iron code exposed Astor scions to scrutiny and abuse by the newspapers, as well as envy and suspicion, if not downright hostile regard at every turn. That code held them accountable not only for how they used their wealth and how it had been gotten but also the degree, if at all measurable, to which they had deserved to possess it in the first place. They were in debt to their money, even captives of it, but any complaints from them on that score invited ridicule as “unhappy millionaires.”

  Relatively few career choices outside of banking and the law were open to most members of New York’s moneyed upper class. They practiced these professions in a part-time, gentlemanly way and were mainly occupied with conserving rather than expanding their family interests. “Even the acquiring of wealth,” Edith Wharton recalled of New York’s “old money” fa
milies, “had ceased to interest the little society into which I was born. In the case of some of its members, such as the Astors and Goelets, great fortunes, originating in a fabulous increase of New York real estate values, had been fostered by judicious investments and prudent administration, but of feverish money-making, in Wall Street or in railway, shipping or industrial enterprise, I heard nothing in my youth.” If, as rarely happened, a very rich man such as William Waldorf Astor chose to enter politics and public life instead of living a life of leisure, he was likely to find that derision, resentment, and suspicion were the price of entrance. “A wealthy man,” Tocqueville had written in the 1830s, “would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living. It is for the purpose of escaping this obligation to work that so many rich Americans come to Europe, where they find some scattered remains of aristocratic society, among whom idleness is still held in honor.” In a society that, unlike Europe, had no tolerance for “idleness” and no commonly accepted concept of leisure (“the nonproductive consumption of time,” in Thorstein Veblen’s definition), wealth alone could condemn its possessors to dwindle into playboys, “clubmen,” sportsmen, alcoholics, expatriates, and eccentrics who pursued amusement and novelty to allay their boredom, lassitude, and inertia.