When the Astors Owned New York Read Free

would endow a public building there. When not at his country estate, Astor lived and entertained luxuriantly in his brownstone on Broadway. He filled the house with expensive works of art that the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, his paid cultural tutor and daily companion, encouraged him to buy. They included a portrait of Astor by Gilbert Stuart, who was then “all the rage,” according to a contemporary, and counted George Washington and Thomas Jefferson among his distinguished sitters. A silver plaque mounted on the front door of his Broadway house bore the words MR. ASTOR. Sometimes his servants, black, white, and Chinese, could be seen out on the sidewalk tossing him in a blanket to stimulate his circulation.
    The diary of Philip Hone, New York businessman and mayor, gives a memento-mori picture of the eighty-one-year-old Astor at dinner four years before his death, “a painful example of the insufficiency of wealth to prolong the life of man”:
    He would pay all my debts if I could ensure him one year of my health and strength, but nothing else could extort so much from him. His life has been spent in amassing money, and he loves it as much as ever. He sat at the dinner table with his head down upon his breast, saying very little, and in a voice almost unintelligible; the saliva dripping from his mouth, and a servant behind him to guide the victuals which he was eating, and to watch him as an infant is watched. His mind is good, his observation acute, and he seems to know everything that is going on. But the machinery is all broken up, and there are some people, no doubt, who think he has lived long enough.
    When Astor died in 1848, at the age of eighty-four, he was the richest man in the United States. He may have been the young country’s first millionaire, at a time when the word “millionaire” itself was new, before he moved on to far greater wealth. His eventual fortune, an estimated $20 million to $30 million, mainly founded on holdings in Manhattan real estate, was several times greater than that of the nearest contenders in that line, the inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. William, the old man’s heir, had the body put on display in the parlor of his own house on fashionable Lafayette Place, across the street from his father’s. The undertaker installed a glass window in the black silk velvet pall so that citizens who pushed their way in through the crowd of gawkers outside could look upon the face of wealth incarnate.
    Six clergymen; Astor’s servants, with napkins pinned to their sleeves; and perhaps as many as five hundred mourners, Washington Irving among them, followed the body to St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church. Eventually it would be placed in the Astor vault at Trinity Cemetery about seven miles uptown on 155th Street and Broadway. Although entombed like an Egyptian deity, in life the dead man had been nothing less than a “self-invented money-making machine,” James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald said in its obituary. As portrayed by the press, and as indelibly fixed in the public mind, like the Greek poet’s famous hedgehog, John Jacob Astor had known one thing and known it supremely well, and that was “To get all he could, and to keep nearly all he got,” as the popular biographer James Parton wrote two decades later. “The roll-book of his possessions was his Bible. He scanned it fondly, and saw with quiet but deep delight the catalogue of his property lengthening from month to month. The love of accumulation grew with his years until it ruled him like a tyrant.” This predatory, stony-hearted, parsimonious monster of greed, as he was remembered, allegedly enjoyed nothing better than to count his wealth down to the last penny, drive up tenement rack rents, foreclose mortgages, and put widows and orphans out on the street. For his mentally incompetent son, John Jacob II, he provided