When the Astors Owned New York Read Online Free PDF

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 the 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.
    â€œSociety” 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