When the Astors Owned New York Read Free Page A

a house and garden on West Fourteenth Street and an allowance of $5,000 a year to keep him there. But with the exception of the members of his immediate family, Astor was far from openhanded in the terms of his will. His single large benefaction, $400,000 for an Astor Library on Astor Place, represented less than one-fortieth of his fortune. The Herald denounced it as “a poor, mean, and beggarly” figure. Astor left his faithful companion and cultural tutor, Fitz-Greene Halleck, an annuity of $200, so pitiable an amount that William, although only slightly less tightfisted than his father, increased it, out of his own pocket, to $1,500. William was said to be the author of a widely quoted nugget of wisdom on the subject of wealth: “A man who has a million dollars is as well off as if he were rich.”
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    I N HIS SEVENTIES, still mourning the death of his wife, Sarah, in 1834, John Jacob Astor had set in motion his last great project. Characteristically bold and ambitious, what he planned was also uncharacteristically self-indulgent and even, surprisingly, a mediocre investment, compared to his other ventures. It was less an act of commerce than one of willful self-commemoration on an impressive scale. Astor determined to put up a hotel without equal anywhere in the world for luxury and architectural grandeur: “A New York palais royal, ” Philip Hone wrote, “which will cost him five or six hundred thousand dollars…and will serve, as it was probably intended to, as a monument to its wealthy proprietor.”
    To build his hotel, financed from his own coffers on Prince Street, Astor bought up and demolished the entire block of three-story brick houses that had been the seamark of his ambitions as a young man. Although famously close with a dollar, he was even willing to pay an extortionate $60,000, about three times the market value, to get one of the holdout property owners to move. According to a contemporary newspaper account, when Astor learned the owner was still in residence on the transfer date of May 1, 1832, he instructed his foreman, “Well, never mind. Just start by tearing down the house anyhow. You might begin by taking away the steps.” Not even number 223 Broadway, the house where he and Sarah lived many of their years together, was spared the wreckers’ sledgehammers and pickaxes. For two weeks, as the buildings were pulled down, a stretch of Broadway between City Hall Park and St. Paul’s Chapel, the most opulent and fashionable retail street in the country, became a devastation of dust and rubbish, a barrier to the customary tide of foot and wheeled traffic.
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    Astor’s great hotel opened for business on May 31, 1836. After a brief hesitation, during which it was called the Park Hotel, its projector, builder, and owner settled on the majestic and unabashedly declarative name Astor House. Choosing this name gave him an opportunity to offset the failure of Astoria, his fur-trading post on the Pacific coast, as well as the disappearance of “Astor,” in Wisconsin, a township tract of land that instead of perpetuating its owner’s name was swallowed up by the city of Green Bay.
    Two years before he opened his hotel for business, Astor conveyed title to his son William for the token sum of “one Spanish milled dollar.” But apart from this transaction, which was intended to avoid death duties, he held on to an extraordinary degree of personal control over the project, from conception and choice of architect to decisions about management, furnishings, and the number of bathrooms. As Hone and other contemporaries recognized, the new building, although only one of hundreds of Astor properties in Manhattan alone, differed from all the others: it was to be the old man’s self-willed, imposing monument. Astor House was one of his very few ventures that not only did not make him a great deal of money but could even be called, by his