When the Astors Owned New York Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.”

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    P HLEGMATIC 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