When the Astors Owned New York

by Justin Kaplan

  Soon after his debut, Jack got into a much-publicized brawl with another young blade of blue-blood extraction, Beekman Kip Burrowe, in the men’s room at fashionable Sherry’s Restaurant. They quarreled over which of them should have the privilege of sitting with a young upper-class beauty they both fancied. The two gentlemen went at each other with fists and walking sticks before someone separated them. “It’s been a long time,” a newspaper commented, “since any incident has occasioned so much amusement in society.” In consequence the press awarded Jack Astor the inevitable punning nickname that was to follow him most of the days of his life, “Jack Ass.”

  Caroline Astor’s son had a reputation for making clumsy and urgent advances to the wives, sisters, and daughters of his social class and for getting himself into other sorts of scrapes. To serve the white marble double house he later built for himself and his mother on upper Fifth Avenue, he announced his intention to put up a two-story stable for their horses and carriages. The proposed site for the stable was a twenty-five-by-one-hundred-foot lot he owned around the corner on Madison Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street. If built there, his stable would have abutted B’Nai Jeshurun, the city’s largest Orthodox synagogue. Synagogue officers and the neighbors, non-Jews as well as Jews, were outraged. “We condemn the spirit of Mr. Astor in disregarding our desires, interests, and rights in the premises, and we denounce his threatened act as unbecoming a landowner of this city, to which he is so greatly indebted.” Jack and the managers of the Astor estate refused the offer of the synagogue trustees to buy the lot from him for $61,000. According to a spokesman at the estate office, “Mr. Astor needs another stable, and he is going to build it there.” The protesters drew up a formal resolution listing their grievances and submitted a bill (subsequently vetoed by the governor) forbidding “the housing of animals…within 100 feet of a house of worship.” After six months of acrimonious debate—and playful editorial discussions of fleas, stable odors, stable noises, and equine hygiene in general—Jack withdrew his plan, but not before leaving an indelible impression of contemptuous behavior.

  With such a reputation, anything even conventionally laudable that he did was bound to attract surprise and comment. JOHN JACOB ASTOR A JUROR, the New York Times reported in a page-one story. He had answered the summons and presented himself for jury duty, it was noted, instead of buying his way out by paying a fine, like other “millionaires of prominence,” among them polo enthusiast George Gould. Astor gave his business as “real estate” and served attentively on a case involving a shipment of eggs. He then had himself excused from further service on the grounds of having a prior engagement.

  At about the same time (November 1893) as the stable-synagogue dustup, Jack inserted himself in the case of a drifter named John Garvin, an unemployed former grocery clerk and worker in a Bowery shooting gallery. A laundress in the Astor mansion had returned from a night out to find Garvin naked and sound asleep in her bed, with his hat, coat, shirt, and trousers piled on a chair. How Garvin got into the Astor house in the first place no one knew for sure, not even Garvin. He clearly “had a few pin wheels in his head,” according to Mrs. Astor’s English butler, and may have suffered a brain injury from a rifle-loading accident at his Bowery job. A judge at the Jefferson Market Police Court fined Garvin $5 for disorderly conduct and released him after a benevolent stranger paid the fine. “I am utterly at a loss,” Jack said, “to understand why anyone should want to pay the fellow’s fine and let him get away, and I think it is a most outrageous act…. It does not seem to me right that a man can enter the house of a citizen and be fined only $5,” Jack went on. “A great piece of injustice has been done.” He put himself forward as protector of the public welfare as well as the Astor property. “My mother is naturally alarmed by her experience and something must be done to punish Garvin, so that he will not attempt to repeat his offense. If he goes free, hundreds of persons may imitate his example…. Such a state of things is not to be tolerated, and I do not propose that it shall be.” On Jack’s insistence, Garvin was immediately rearrested, charged with attempted burglary, locked up, and held on $1,000 bail.

  Soon famous as the tramp who slept in one of Mrs. Astor’s beds, even celebrated in a popular song, Garvin became a sort of public pet, a victim, as it appeared, of double jeopardy, false arrest, and the privileged wrath of a rich man who had appointed himself a champion of justice and appeared to have lost any sense of proportion. At the expense of his admirers, for about six months Garvin enjoyed cigars and steak-and-egg dinners with extra bread in his cell in the Tombs. He was finally carted off to the State Asylum for Insane Criminals at Matteawan.

  Missteps aside, to his mother’s immense gratification and relief, Jack entered into a diplomatically brilliant alliance that reinforced her own already secure standing as queen of American society. At twenty-six he married Ava Lowle Willing of Philadelphia, a great beauty of impeccable breeding and bloodlines. “It was not alone her beautiful face,” said society eminence Mrs. J. Bordon Harriman, a respected authority on such matters, “but the tout ensemble, arms, wrists, hands, ankles, and a brilliant distinction that was unforgettable.” “She rides well,” the Times reported, “dances beautifully, is musical, quite literary and uncommonly intelligent.” What was more, this spectacular specimen of American young womanhood came from a blood-proud and prominent family. Genealogists hired by the Philadelphia Willings had drawn up a family tree showing descent, on Ava’s mother’s side, from Alfred the Great and several other potentates, including Henry I of France and Henry IV of England. Their glittering history put the Willings several rungs above the Astors, whose not-so-distant patriarch, as they were often reminded, had come from the bottom.* Among the wedding gifts from the groom’s parents were a furnished house on Fifth Avenue and diamonds from Caroline Astor’s jewel case.

  The same hand that assembled Jack apparently assembled the Astor-Willing marriage as well. It was even rumored that the bride had wept on the eve of her wedding and begged her parents to call it off. The day of the wedding private trains laid on by the Pennsylvania Railroad carried the cream of New York society to a city by tradition unaccustomed to such bustle and splendor. The marriage proved to be a miserable affair almost from the moment in February 1891 that the couple exchanged vows in the parlor of the Willing town house on South Broad Street. Ava did her dynastic duty by producing a son, William Vincent, nine months after the wedding night. Then she turned her energies elsewhere. She devoted herself to tennis, skiing, bridge, and other fashionable amusements. Once the then-current mah-jongg fever infected her, she was to be seen in Chinese restaurants on Mott Street in Manhattan taking lessons from Oriental masters of the game. By all accounts, Ava was self-indulgent, extravagant, and sharp-tongued. But, especially in contrast to her husband, she was also spirited, untrammeled, charming, and distinctly unstuffy, not above stopping in for a beer at a neighborhood saloon. She persuaded Jack to commission a friend of theirs, the architect Stanford White, to build an athletic complex at Ferncliff, the Astor country estate near Rhinebeck: it comprised a tennis court, two squash courts, a marble swimming pool, a bowling alley, a billiard room, and a rifle range. Ava had no interest in her husband beyond his money, which paid for such expensive improvements, and she made no attempt to hide this, even abusing him in front of guests and the help.

  Elizabeth Lehr, partner in a mariage blanc with Harry Lehr, one of Caroline Astor’s pets, was often a guest at Ferncliff. She recalled that while Ava and her coterie played bridge, Jack “shambled from room to room, tall, loosely built, and ungraceful, rather like a great overgrown colt, in a vain search for someone to talk to.” When he switched on one of the player pianos he had installed in the house, a footman informed him that Mrs. Astor complained the music was disturbing her bridge players and wanted it stopped. “And he would sigh and turn it off.” Elizabeth went on:

  He was not particularly fond of music, but the mechanical system of the pianos interested him; it offered a temporary divers
ion at least…. He would go up to his room and dress faultlessly for dinner, come down, prepared to talk and entertain his guests, and find everyone scurrying upstairs to make hasty, last-minute toilets. Of course they would all be late, which annoyed him intensely, for he made a god of punctuality, and the probability of a spoiled dinner in consequence did not improve his temper, for he was a notable epicure. The house party would come down to find him, watch in hand, constrained and irritable.

  Jack mostly remained silent at Ava’s dinner table, where the conversation generally turned to postmortems of the afternoon’s bridge games. On Sundays “he would come downstairs ready for church in cutaway coat and immaculate topper, only to find rubbers in progress already. So he would sit alone in his front pew, come back to lunch off a tray in his study, and return to New York in the afternoon, a lonely man in spite of all his acquaintances.”

  Virtually a specter in his own houses, Jack spent much of his time away from Ava in the company of their son, Vincent (as he preferred to be called), who adored him and was adored in return. Ava called the boy stupid and avoided him because he was clumsy and lumpish looking, had big feet, and, perhaps worst of all, reminded her of his father. Jack was happiest sailing with Vincent on board Nourmahal, the steel-hulled steam yacht he had inherited from his pleasure-loving father. In refitting the yacht he added, among other features, a dining saloon capable of sitting sixty people, a forty-two-foot steam launch, an electric launch, and a battery of rapid-firing guns. They were installed on deck in readiness to repel Caribbean and Barbary Coast pirates Nourmahal might encounter on her cruises. Newspapers dutifully reported mishaps on the water that shaped Jack’s reputation as a lubberly yachtsman, although his hired captains and crews were mostly to blame. Over a period of only a few years the accident-prone Nourmahal ran aground in the Hudson, rammed the Vanderbilt yacht North Star, impaled herself on rocks off Newport, and collided with a ferry in New York Harbor. The yacht’s electric launch, the Corcyra, built to Jack’s design and specifications, sank after being run over by a steamer.

  Ashore, Jack isolated himself in the laboratory he ordered built for himself at Ferncliff. From his lonely boyhood on, and especially after his science education at Harvard, he had been a passionate tinkerer and aspiring inventor. Electricity and speed fascinated him, as did machinery of all sorts, in particular motor cars: his garage contained as many as eighteen, some of them designed for racing. In Paris in 1903 he was to make an ascent in the personal flying machine invented by the Brazilian dandy Alberto Santos-Dumont. Jack was happy and confident at the throttle of an Illinois Central locomotive that he drove for six hours one day with as much panache, the papers reported, as if it had been one of his own fast cars. (In taking over the throttle of the locomotive, engineer Jack, living out the daydream of many American boys, exercised his authority as the railroad’s major stockholder.) He invented or projected an improved bicycle brake; a “rain-inducer” that blew warm moist air up into the clouds (he never tried it, he said, “but it would probably work”); a “pneumatic road-improver” that blasted away dust and dried horse manure from paved surfaces (it won a prize at the Chicago Exposition in 1893); a suction-cup system mounted on the legs of deck chairs and other steamer furniture to keep them from sliding in heavy weather; and an improved marine turbine engine. In its May 1909 issue Scientific American reported that Astor was constructing at Ferncliff a plant to compress and convert deposits of peat into a gas usable as a fuel for vehicles and machines. “The patent application is now pending and on its being allowed Colonel Astor intends to present it to the public.” He pasted in his scrapbook about two dozen news clips on the subject from the Times and papers across the country, all of them promising a bright future of cheap fuel. Two of the headlines were PEAT GAS ERA MAY BE NEAR AND EVERY FARM MAY NOW PRODUCE GAS. The device probably required too much energy in processing the raw material to make the end product worthwhile.

  “In the evolved city of the future,” Jack had written in a letter in Scientific American, “street pavements will of course be smooth and easily cleaned—asphalt, bitumen, macadam, or sheet steel; and to keep horses in large cities will doubtless be prohibited by the Board of Health, as stabling cows, pigs, or sheep is now. Second-story sidewalks composed largely of translucent glass, leaving all the present street level to vehicles, are already badly needed…and will doubtless have made their appearance in less than twenty years.”

  Peace reigned in Jack’s world of the future. “As zoology shows us,” he wrote, “the amphibian metamorphosed into the land vertebrate, followed by the bird, so history reveals the aborigine’s dugout, the Fifth Avenue omnibus, and the oxcart, followed by the automobile which is preparing the light and powerful engine that will soon propel the flying machine. That will be a happy day for earth-dwellers, for war will become so destructive that it will probably bring its own end; and the human caterpillar, already mechanically converted into the grasshopper, will become a fairly beautiful butterfly.” “Next to religion,” Jack believed, “we have most to hope from science.”

  Chronically humorless, he was not given to practical joking, although practical joking, instead of an unquestioning eagerness to believe, would have been the only charitable explanation for a signed article Jack published in William Randolph Hearst’s daily New York American. He recounted a remarkable discovery. “While automobiling in the Pyrenees mountains a few years ago, [I] observed an unusual creature. It had a shaggy coat, thick legs, and a slouching gait. It belonged to some gypsies who had a number of dogs and a performing bear, and they described it as a bear-dog.” Astor bought the animal, which he found to be “intellectually and physically far superior to an ordinary dog,” and took it back with him to Ferncliff, where he kept it along with his pedigreed sheep and other prized livestock. He cited his bear-dog as proof of a long-standing belief of his that animals of different genera could together produce a creature that was neither one nor the other but at least theoretically more valuable and useful than either.

  According to Dr. William Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoological Garden, Astor’s bear-dog was probably just a dwarf St. Bernard that the Gypsies had put over on this rich innocent. He suggested that Astor apply his mind to genetic engineering and animal husbandry. He might make a second Astor fortune, Hornaday said, “if he could invent an animal to eat dirt, for dirt is very cheap.”

  SCIENTISTS SCOFF AT ASTOR’S BEAR-DOG, the Times headlined its two-column story. BRONX ZOO DIRECTOR THINKS [ASTOR] OUGHT TOOFFER A PRIZE FOR A REAL LIVE MASTODON. In his article in the American, Astor cited laboratory experiments with frogs’ eggs conducted by a Professor Albert Oppel of the University of Halle, in Germany. Professor Oppel had apparently succeeded in breeding a frog two feet high. Astor saw no reason other creatures could not be similarly enlarged by selective breeding. It might even be possible to bring back extinct giant creatures of the Carboniferous period; use them both as farm animals, like oxen and draft horses, and as a meat source for humans; and, meanwhile, feed them cheaply. His nutritional logic appeared to be impeccable. “While our coal was being formed,” he explained, “vegetation as we know it probably did not exist. Since the mammoths and their contemporaries must have eaten the plants that became coal, why may not their descendants eat some preparation of peat, coal, crude oil, or even limestone when the progress of the world requires that they should?” Astor was “so deeply interested,” the Times reported, “that he has offered a prize of $5000 for the best bear-dog to be entered at next year’s dog show at Madison Square Garden.”

  In 1894 Jack had followed cousin Willy’s ventures into novel writing with a work of science fiction, A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future, published by D. Appleton and Company. The illustrations were by Dan Beard, who had done the pictures for Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. His work for Jack’s novel showed, among other wonders, an ascent by flying machine from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx; a race with a comet; space travel to Jup
iter, Mars, and Saturn; and encounters there with mastodonic animals and the souls of the righteous dead. Jack’s tale, inspired by Jules Verne, was set in the year 2000, by which time Manhattan dwellers, presumably kept in check by the Republican Party, the Episcopal Church, and a terror of socialism and anarchism, enjoyed many blessings of science and technology: the “kintograph”—“a visual telegraph”—that put scientists in New York in visual contact with engineers and workmen on the shores of Baffin Bay; fast electric automobiles; a convenient subway system; and an existence made want free through the harnessing of a force Jack called “Apergy.” Apergy combined “negative and positive electricity with electricity of the third element or state.” Elijah, Jesus, and other ancients had at least suspected the existence of this miraculous force.

  In Jack’s world of the future, scientists employed by the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company harnessed apergy to nullify gravity, melt the polar ice cap, and blow up the Aleutian Islands. All this had been done in order “to straighten the axis of the earth, to combine the extreme heat of summer with the intense cold of winter and produce a uniform temperature for each degree of latitude the year round.” By the year 2000, according to Jack’s prediction, the United States would have absorbed not only Canada but Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America as well. The banana republics south of the border with Mexico would have finally tired of “incessant revolutions” and turned for protection and stability to the governance of the Great White Father in Washington. And, just as old John Jacob Astor had known in his bones, Manhattan Island had continued to thrive. By 2000, according to Jack’s projection, it had a population of 2.5 million and was surrounded by Greater New York’s population belt of an additional 12 million. Comic stumbles aside, Jack’s free-ranging imagination looked ahead to television, global warming, and genetic engineering and was not without predictive value for someone whose family business was real estate.