When the Astors Owned New York Read online

  “Think of it!” said Robert Stewart, a journalist writing in 1899.

  You arrive tired, dusty, irritable. Your bag is whisked out of your hand, and you are conducted through a brilliant hall…Presto! You find yourself in a bijou of a suite, your trunks awaiting you, with a bed which simply beseeches you to lie on it, and with a porcelain tiled bathroom all your own. You press one button in the hall; electric lights flash up. You press another; a maid or valet…knocks to unpack your luggage and help you to dress. You press a third; a hall boy appears, like the slave of Aladdin’s lamp, to execute any possible command monsieur may issue, from fetching a glass of iced water to ordering a banquet served up to you.

  The great department stores of the late nineteenth century “democratized luxury,” Emile Zola wrote, by offering ordinary people the opportunity to view and touch expensive goods of all sorts without obliging them to buy anything. In the same way, hotels such as the Waldorf-Astoria “brought exclusiveness to the masses” (said Oliver Herford, a contemporary wit) and allowed the masses to see how the other (the upper) half lived. The Waldorf-Astoria made dining and lunching in public fashionable, brought society out into the open, and inspired an age of lavish entertainments, parties, balls, and dinners—grand occasions previously confined to private houses.

  The main restaurant’s maître d’, almost immediately famous as “Oscar of the Waldorf,” was its Cerberus and absolute monarch. He introduced the velvet rope, a simple but remarkably effective device for flattering the elect and reminding outsiders of their outsiderness. The velvet rope created an instant atmosphere of privilege and a social economy of scarcity. Oscar also introduced the dining public to after-theater suppers, the chafing dish, lobster Newburg, chicken à la king, and trademark “Waldorf” salads of apples, nuts, celery, and mayonnaise. Even the chief house detective, Captain Joe Smith, trained at Scotland Yard, was a celebrity and had a book written about his career as watchdog and gumshoe, Crooks of the Waldorf. “The Waldorf was his church,” his biographer wrote, “and violation of its sanctity was a desecration.”

  The financiers, architects, and decorators of the great fin de siècle hotels had recognized in the American public a taste for luxury and social spectacle and turned this into a need. Far more than a convenience or commercial venture, the luxury hotel was a visionary attempt to create a world that was materially near-perfect down to its smallest details and workings, flattered the senses, anticipated and satisfied needs, and conferred status on anyone, guest or tourist, who entered its precincts. The private palaces of the robber barons of the Gilded Age had outgrown their limits and evolved into the grand hotel, an establishment bigger and grander and more impressive than any private palace: accessible and logical, organized from cellar scullery to roof garden on principles of comfort and display married to efficiency, ingenuity, fanatical attention to detail, technical improvement, and publicity. Combining the functions of marketplace and town square, the hotel lobby, only recently evolved from barroom and parlor, became one of the theaters of modern life.

  In the early 1860s the British novelist Anthony Trollope noted that American hotels had a more central and expressive function in community life than in any other country he had visited and were built on a scale that seemed to him “unnecessarily extravagant.” “In the States of America,” he wrote, “the first sign of an incipient settlement is a hotel five stories high, with an office, a bar, a cloak-room, three gentlemen’s parlors, two ladies’ parlors, a ladies’ entrance, and two hundred bedrooms…. When the new hotel rises up in the wilderness, it is presumed that people will come there with the express object of inhabiting it. The hotel itself will create a population.” But the hotel cuisine of that time, he complained, featured grease, not gravy—“undisguised grease, floating in rivers, not grease caused by accidental bad cookery, but grease on purpose…. I never yet made a single comfortable meal at an American hotel.”

  Almost half a century later, Henry James argued that what he identified as “the hotel spirit may just be the American spirit most seeking and finding itself.” Whatever deficiencies or betrayal of ideal he was to see in his rejected homeland, he discovered in the “amazing hotel world” a “synonym for civilization.” He expected to write “brilliant chapters” on the subject of hotel life and considered himself qualified for the task not by gift alone but by a continuity of experience going back to his earliest years. This was when he and his siblings were “nothing less than hotel children” whisked by their restless father from one place to another. Among the many places James recalled from his childhood was a summer hotel on Staten Island, the Pavilion, that even toward the end of his life evoked images of “a great Greek temple shining over the blue waters in the splendor of a white colonnade and a great yellow pediment.” Other hotels that remained lodged in his memory when he was seventy were the Hamilton House, on the south shore of Long Island; in New York, A. T. Stewart’s Metropolitan, on lower Broadway; and the Clarendon on Broadway at Thirty-eighth Street, “then the latest thing in hotels” and favored by foreign visitors. But mostly he remembered the Astor House, the astonishing hotel on lower Broadway that old John Jacob Astor had built in 1836.

  Usually critical and restrained in his responses to American life, James could hardly restrain his exclamations of wonder and discovery when he visited Henry Flagler’s Breakers, Royal Poinciana, and Alhambra-like Ponce de Leon: these were “monster hotels,” John Bunyan’s Vanity Fair “compressed under one vast cover” and producing “the illusion of romance.” In California he stayed at the Hotel del Monte in Monterey and, across the bay from San Diego, the Victorian gingerbread Hotel del Coronado, reputed to be the largest wooden structure in the world.

  As far back as 1878, in his first popular success, Daisy Miller, James had claimed great hotels as a territory of the modern novelist. In a late (1910) story, “A Round of Visits,” he described his fictional “Pocahontas”—a “great gaudy hotel”—as “a complete social scene in itself, on which types might figure and passions thicken and dramas develop, without reference to any other sphere, or perhaps even to anything at all outside.”

  The American hotel had become a forcing bed and popular setting for fiction. The original Astor House figures as landmark and measure of success in nearly every one of Horatio Alger Jr.’s immensely popular strive-and-succeed, pluck-and-luck stories. The heroine of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, a country girl from the Midwest, follows her rising star to success on the Broadway stage and a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. Seated in her rocking chair by the window, she looks out on an “unending procession of carriages rolling up Fifth Avenue.” Her former lover, meanwhile, has hit bottom and kills himself in a Bowery flophouse. Clyde Griffiths, in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, has his first, and fatally seductive, taste of luxury in the lobby of the Green-Davidson Hotel in Kansas City. “It was all so lavish. Under his feet was a checkered black and white marble floor. Above him a coppered and stained and gilded ceiling. And supporting this, a veritable forest of black marble columns.”

  Plucked from genteel poverty, Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart (The House of Mirth) enters “the world of the fashionable New York hotel—a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert.” Wharton calls one of her generic establishments “The Emporium Hotel,” another “The Stentorian.” The windows of these places are triple-curtained, the rooms stifled in upholstery and “ornamental excrescence” bathed in a blaze of electric light. “Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert-hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from ‘art exhibit’ to dressmaker’s opening.”

  Captive of extravagant fantasies, the victim-hero of Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” steals a thousand dollars fro
m his employer in Pittsburgh and runs away to New York, where he takes a suite at the Waldorf and fulfills his visions of luxury: “the plot of all dreams, the text of all romances, the nerve-stuff of all sensations.” “On every side of him towered the glaring affirmation of the omnipotence of wealth.” He explores “the chambers of an enchanted palace, built and peopled for him alone.” “Everything was quite perfect,” and for the few days he spends at the Waldorf, Paul becomes “exactly the kind of boy he had always wanted to be,” living “the sort of life he was meant to live.” With his theft discovered and reported in the papers, he sees no way out of his delicious dream except to throw himself under the wheels of a train.

  Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel, originally published in German as Menschen im Hotel (1929), was both an immensely popular novel and an all-star film (1932) with Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, and Lionel Barrymore. (A 1944 remake, Weekend at the Waldorf, starred Ginger Rogers and Lana Turner.) Baum had researched her story of romance, chicanery, broken hopes, and bedroom intrigue by working six weeks as a parlor maid in Berlin’s fashionable Hotel Adlon. Her novel gave full play to the idea of the grand hotel as a social microcosm and literary archetype. Its cast of characters—faded ballerina, bankrupt baron, sluttish stenographer—updated Sebastian Brant’s fifteenth-century satire, The Ship of Fools. “Grand hotel. Always the same,” her brandy-soaked Dr. Otternschlag says at the end. “People come, people go. Nothing ever happens.” Novelists who adopted Baum’s microcosm template with popular success included Arthur Hailey, whose Hotel (1965) dramatized the crises of daily life at the fictional St. Gregory in New Orleans. Hailey’s novel enjoyed a later career as a movie and television series.

  The hero of Steven Millhauser’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Martin Dressler (1996), is fascinated by the operational aesthetic of hotels, the way their complex systems work. He rises from bellboy to builder and presiding genius of a thirty-story dreamworld hotel, a place of wonders. His Grand Cosmo, dedicated to “Culture, Commerce, and Commodious Living,” is an eighth wonder of the world. It “rendered the city unnecessary. For whether the Grand Cosmo was the city itself, or whether it was the place to which one longed to travel, it was a complete and self-sufficient world, in comparison with which the actual city was not merely inferior, but superfluous.”…

  Life in a great social marketplace like the Waldorf-Astoria possessed an overheated quality, a vehemence and intensity that gave even trivial, vulgar, or meretricious appearances at least a passing aura of consequence. So long as he was presentable, in overstuffed lobbies and glittering corridors the hotel tourist was allowed to linger night afer night without having to spend a penny. The spectator was a vital part of the spectacle. There he could catch celebrities on the wing and maybe even rub feathers with them in passing. On some evenings he might even see the opulently arrayed Lillian Russell, weighing in at about two hundred pounds—“San Simeon in corsets,” as A. J. Liebling described her—and her sometime paramour, financier and heavy feeder Diamond Jim Brady. Among other celebrities were Prince Henry of Prussia, the kaiser’s brother, here on a semiofficial visit to christen a royal yacht on its launching from an American shipyard; and Horace Fletcher, the nutritional guru whose gospel of “Fletcherism” led thousands of Americans to believe they could fight obesity and dyspepsia by chewing each mouthful of solid food thirty-two times (once for each tooth) until it turned to liquid and, in his words, “swallowed itself.” (“Fletcherism” is “the greatest thing that ever was,” Henry James said in 1906. But a few years later he blamed it for his depression and “loathing” of food.)

  In a specially furnished suite served by his own imported staff, the Japanese plenipotentiary Baron Jutaro Komura hammered out terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) that ended the war with Russia (his opposite number in the negotiations, Minister Sergius Witte, stayed a mile uptown at the new St. Regis). The French engineer and international intriguer, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, called his customary room on the eleventh floor “the cradle of the Panama Republic.” There he plotted the insurrection and drafted the treaty that eventually gave the United States control of the Panama Canal. Populist political leader and celebrated orator William Jennings Bryan often ate in the hotel café. Following the habits of his early years in the Midwest, he declined the fancy French-style offerings that were the pride of the house and ordered instead large farm-style meals of fried beefsteaks (or sometimes ham and eggs), German fried potatoes, and a loaf of bread, all of this washed down with two jugs of water.

  One night financier and stock market plunger John W. “Betchaa-million” Gates, a former dealer in hardware and barbed wire, sat down to a frugal supper of milk and crackers in the café and announced to his waiter that he had just made another million on the Street. Gates’s sobriquet supposedly derived from a gambling game he invented one rainy afternoon: as if they were ponies, he started betting on raindrops moving down the windowpane. He habitually bet large sums of money on any proposition on which he thought he had a better-than-even chance. Gates’s gambling headquarters were located in his regular suite at the hotel. Among those who sat in on his poker games were coke and steel magnate Henry Clay Frick, who had yet to build his private art palace on Fifth Avenue, and Gates’s business partner, Colonel John Lambert, former warden of the Joliet, Illinois, penitentiary. One of Gates’s poker games, begun in his private railroad car on the way from Chicago and continued on arrival in New York, went on virtually day and night for a week, with meals brought directly to the poker table. At the end about $500,000 changed hands, $300,000 of it coming from the pockets of Joseph Leiter, the Chicago wheat speculator.

  In Gates’s suite Frick, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Elbert Gary first floated the idea of forming United States Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation. The “Waldorf Crowd,” as it came to be known, consisted of wealthy speculators, most of them westerners, willing to follow Gates’s lead. They had their own wire-service operators there and employed a network of agents to supply them with insider information and early election returns. There was a constant buzz of money talk: the Waldorf-Astoria’s barroom and men’s café had become an extension of the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

  In September 1899 the nation welcomed back to its shores the conquering hero of the Spanish-American War, Admiral of the Navy George Dewey. From his flagship, the cruiser Olympia, in Manila Bay, he had issued an order that became almost instantaneously famous: “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.” In the annals of naval warfare his order took its place with David Farragut’s “Damn the torpedoes!” and Horatio Nelson’s “England expects every man will do his duty.” Without losing a ship or a man (except for an engineer who died of heat prostration), Dewey’s squadron destroyed the naval forces of Spain, captured Manila, and avenged the sinking of the Maine. Although the battle, interrupted by a pause for breakfast, had been more like a turkey shoot than “the Greatest Naval Engagement of Modern Times,” Dewey’s entry into New York City on the twenty-eighth was like the triumphs ancient Rome granted victorious emperors and generals. Dewey’s Olympia led a two-and-a-half-mile-long parade of ships up the Hudson River and anchored opposite Grant’s Tomb. That night, fireworks in the sky traced a thousand-square-foot portrait of the hero. The Waldorf-Astoria, the city’s premier social venue, staged a monster reception—it started in the evening and continued through the next morning—for the most celebrated person who had ever passed through its doors.

  Months earlier there had been fevered talk of Dewey as a presidential candidate in 1900, and he might well have been nominated, if he had not been addicted to blurting. He had barely survived a public-relations disaster when he said to a man he scarcely knew, “Our next war will be with Germany.” He hadn’t realized, he said later, that the person he made this prediction to was a newspaper reporter who knew a story when he heard one. Dewey did not survive the next disaster. Finally announcing his availability as a presidential candidate, he explaine
d that after long and careful study he had concluded that “the office of President is not such a very difficult one to fill, his duties being mainly to execute the laws of Congress. Should I be chosen for this exalted position I would execute the laws of the Congress as faithfully as I have always executed the orders of my superiors.” “I don’t understand how I got the idea in the first place,” he said later. Afloat on billows of public laughter, the admiral sailed into America’s Valhalla of forgotten heroes.

  SIX

  After the Ball Was Over

  i.

  DURING THE WINTER OF 1896–1897 the United States was mired in a period of economic distress and widespread unemployment that had begun with a Wall Street panic in 1893. Financiers, businessmen, and members of the clergy denounced a growing socialist, trade union, and protest movement as a threat to order, decency, and what remained of national prosperity. At a cost of much violence and bloodshed, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to put down a strike at the Pullman Sleeping Car Company that had halted rail traffic in the Midwest and elsewhere. Meanwhile homeless men lined up at soup kitchens in the streets of New York and Chicago. In January 1897 a socially prominent couple, Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Martin, sent out about a thousand invitations to a private costume ball at the Waldorf. The party was to cost its sponsors and guests an estimated total of $500,000, roughly equivalent to $7 million in current purchasing power.

  Mrs. Martin, the former Cornelia Sherman, was the only child of Isaac Sherman and his wife. Enjoying comfortable retirement from the leather and fancy wood business, Sherman was generally thought to be worth a respectable $200,000. Cornelia and her husband, Bradley, who came from a rich upstate manufacturing family and had plenty of money of his own, lived with her parents in their house at 20 West Twentieth Street. Relatively inconspicuous young members of New York society, homebound in their tastes and habits, the young Martins raised four children and were not known for giving parties or fancy entertainments.