When the Astors Owned New York

by Justin Kaplan

  FOUR

  Palaces for the People

  i.

  WRITING IN 1884, E. L. Godkin, editor and founder of the Nation, recalled that American hotels had long been among the wonders of the New World. Impressed by their size and lavishness, some travelers from abroad came near to assuming that the natives lived in hotels and that “home life in a house was almost unknown on this side of the Atlantic.” Putting up such hotels, and becoming, in effect, innkeepers, was far from maverick behavior for John Jacob Astor’s breed of American capitalist and for his great-grandsons three generations later.

  A Scots newspaper editor named John Leng, visiting the United States in 1876, the centennial of the Republic, noted what he called “a peculiar propensity,” not found among Europeans, “of men who have become rich in the States to build hotels” on a scale that reflected “the largeness of American ideas” and of the North American continent. Looking back, Leng cited the founding Astor along with Astor’s near contemporary, New York merchant prince Alexander Turney Stewart. Along with the world’s largest dry-goods store, a five-story “iron palace” (as it was called) that displayed acres of quality goods, and the marble mansion on Fifth Avenue where he lived, Stewart built and owned two hotels: the opulent Metropolitan on lower Broadway and the Grand Union, at Saratoga Springs, a fashionable health resort and horse-racing center in upstate New York. San Francisco real estate tycoon James Lick put up a fancy hotel at the corner of Montgomery and Sutter streets, named it after himself, and lived there until he died in 1876. Lick House’s restaurant, where Mark Twain and other local celebrities dined on oysters, buffalo steak, and champagne, copied the banquet hall in the palace of Versailles.

  Another San Francisco mogul, William Chapman Ralston, founder and president of the Bank of California, the dominant financial institution of the Far West, opened his gigantic Palace Hotel in 1875. Built to be earthquakeproof and enclosed within three-foot-thick brick walls girdled with iron bands, “the Greatest Caravansary in the World,” as a local newspaper described it, occupied an entire city block—over two acres—and stood seven stories high over Market and Montgomery streets. Among other wonders, Ralston’s Palace offered “Promenades Amidst Tropical Verdure,” innovative water closets that functioned “without producing the horrid noise one usually hears,” and “Electric Bells Everywhere” that required 125 miles of wiring. A run on his bank together with the deficit financing of his no-expense-spared hotel left Ralston several million dollars in debt. Possibly a suicide, he was last seen alive swimming off North Beach in the direction of Alcatraz Island.

  Put up in 1892 by wealthy businessman and real-estate promoter Henry Cordis Brown, the Palace Hotel in Denver had a seven-story balconied lobby with a stained-glass ceiling, served food from its own outlying farms and dairies, and briefly offered a crematorium for guests who had made their last stop on earth at the hotel. Brown’s Palace was almost as famous, although still not nearly so grand as merchant prince Potter Palmer’s hotel in Chicago. An earlier Palmer House, although advertised as “the only fireproof hotel in the world,” had been one of the first buildings to go in the great fire of 1871. Palmer replaced it immediately with a larger and more ambitious place. At eight stories, it was the city’s tallest building and occupied an entire block along State Street. Palmer made the hotel his wedding gift to his highborn and cultivated wife, Bertha Honoré of Louisville, famous for her Paris couture and her trademark item of personal adornment, a seven-strand necklace of 2,268 pearls.

  The most lavishly decorated and upholstered establishment of its kind, Palmer House was quickly known the world over for its liveried staff and sixty-foot bar. Its marble-pillared lobby-arcade served as informal stock and commodities exchange, news center, and public clubhouse. In the basement was a magnificent “tonsorial parlor” which the lessee decorated with 225 silver dollars set in a checkerboard pattern on its tiled floor. An immediate sensation, Palmer House’s barbershop floor was soon copied all over the country. The epidemic of “Silver Dollar Saloons” extended to a gangster hangout on New York’s Lower East Side that outdid Palmer House: in the floor were 1,000 silver dollars, while an additional 500 glittered in the gaslit chandeliers.

  Palmer House was “a gilded and mirrored rabbit-warren,” according to Rudyard Kipling. “A Hottentot would not have been guilty of this sort of barbarism.” The lobby was “crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about everywhere,” he wrote. “Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno with letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted at each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for him told me that this was ‘the finest hotel in the finest city on God Almighty’s earth.’” At a Sunday service in a nearby church Kipling listened to a sermon “delivered with a voice of silver and with imagery borrowed from the auction-room.” The minister offered congregants the vision of “a heaven on the lines of the Palmer House (but with all the gilding real gold and all the plate-glass diamond).”

  Although busy with more profitable and extensive ventures in Chicago real estate, Palmer supervised every detail of the building and furnishing of his hotel. After it opened for business he kept in touch with daily operations from a little windowed office looking into the main lobby. For all the gaudiness and bustle of the place, Palmer saw to it that at least upstairs it had some of the character of a refined private house. No such private house, however, presented guests with an illustrated room-service menu that showed, on one side, a pigsty and hovel, symbolic of “Chicago forty years ago,” and, on the other, an idealized image of “The Chicago of To-day!” In addition to gargantuan beefsteaks and roasts of bear, antelope, and mountain sheep, the menu offered delicate fare like boned quail, blackbird, and partridge, and fairyland confections of spun sugar and fruit ices. Palmer, his wife, and their two sons, both born on the premises, lived in the hotel. He called it “my house,” “my home.” Bertha, the Mrs. Astor of the Midwest, maintained a dignified silence when a guest of honor at Palmer House, the infanta Eulalia, representing the king and queen of Spain at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, snubbed her because she was “an innkeeper’s wife.” According to her biographer, Ishbel Ross, Bertha maintained her composure and said she “had no objection to being called the innkeeper’s wife. She was quite fond of the innkeeper.”

  Rockefeller partner and secretary-treasurer of the Standard Oil Company, by the 1880s Henry M. Flagler was one of the richest men in the country. A former freight handler on the Erie Canal and part owner of a whiskey distillery, after making his pile in petroleum with Standard Oil, he entered a second youth as a builder of hotels and rail lines along Florida’s east coast. He transformed the area’s desolate beaches and steamy alligator-infested wilderness into a winter playground for the rich. Moving like Sherman’s army on its March to the Sea, Flagler’s construction battalions swept south from Jacksonville and St. Augustine. “He seemed but to wave his magic wand,” Colonel William D’Alton Mann’s book of vanity biographies, Representative Americans, said about Flagler, “and there arose out of the earth a palatial caravansary which for architectural beauty and magnificence has never been equaled in any land.” Flagler’s “discovery” of Florida proved to be more consequential than Ponce de León’s four centuries earlier. He took a hands-on as well as a close supervisory interest in his hotels, sometimes pitching in to speed up construction and, on at least one occasion, slashing furniture upholstery to check on the springs and stuffing underneath. According to local legend, when his Royal Poinciana was finished, Flagler decided to upgrade the social landscape by ousting the surrounding community (known as the “Styx”) of black construction workers. He declared a holiday, sent the workers and their families off to attend a circus as his guests, and, while they were gone, burned down their tents and shacks. He resettled his workers in West Palm Beach.

  Among the reverses Flagler met up with in his otherwise unimpeded progress as innkeeper was his failure—the cause of a permanent estrangeme
nt—to transmit his passion for hotels to his son Harry. Harry cared about music, not business, and after two years of forced apprenticeship in Florida fled to New York and became a patron of the Philharmonic. Meanwhile, Ida Alice, Flagler’s second wife, had conceived a passion for Czar Nicholas II, Autocrat of All the Russias, and claimed to be communicating with him by means of her Ouija board. She believed that the czar returned her love and they would marry as soon as Henry died, assuming she managed to survive attempts by Henry and their family doctor to poison her. In 1897 Alice was put away for good in a sanitarium in Pleasantville, New York. She told her keepers she was of royal blood, born Princess Ida Alice von Schotten Tech. Applying cash and clout, in 1901 Flagler levered the Florida state legislature into passing a general law (known to the tabloid-reading public as the “Flagler Divorce Law” and soon repealed) that made four years of insanity grounds for divorce. Seven days after the divorce went through, Flagler, seventy-one, announced his engagement to his long-standing companion, thirty-four-year-old Mary Lily Kenan. His wedding gift to her was a $2.5 million marble mansion, “Whitehall,” commissioned from the firm of John Carrere and Thomas Hastings, architects of Flagler’s first hotel in St. Augustine (and, later, of the monumental New York Public Library building on Fifth Avenue, opened in 1911).

  From their glowing palace the happy couple ruled over Palm Beach, the town Flagler had created and made into an American Riviera. “This is an amazing winter resort,” Henry James wrote from his rooms at the Breakers, “the well-to-do in their tens, their hundreds of thousands, from all over the land, the property of a single enlightened despot, the creator of two monster hotels…. It will give me brilliant chapters on hotel-civilization.” When this seigneurial innkeeper, Henry Flagler, died in 1913, his widow had his body embalmed and transported over the rail lines his battalions had built, from Palm Beach to St. Augustine. There he lay in state, his own guest of honor, in the lobby of the Ponce de Leon, his first Florida hotel.

  Luxury aside, one feature common to these showplaces and civic ornaments was that they had been planned and built by men at the top of the social and financial heap and proud to be innkeepers. Not without enjoying the enhancement of their personal grandeur, Flagler, Palmer, and the others created intricate artificial worlds that were self-contained and self-sustaining and aimed at achieving perfection in every detail. For all the bricks, marble, velvet, structural iron, and financial accounting that went into their construction, their grand hotels could even be called ventures in the ideal.

  ii.

  BY THE 1890s the Astor estate, comprising the assets of both cousins, was worth about $200 million. In the 1930s the historian Burton J. Hendrick called it “the world’s greatest monument to unearned increment…a first mortgage on Fate itself.” By extrapolation Hendrick figured the Astor holdings would be worth $80 billion by the year 2000. The Fifth Avenue block alone, where the two had grown up in their parents’ adjacent houses, was valued at $35 million. This was about a thousand times what the founder’s son, William Backhouse Sr., “landlord of New York,” had paid for it half a century earlier when it was part of a farm. Along with their enormous fortune William Waldorf and John Jacob IV had inherited their great-grandfather’s cast-iron certainty that the island of Manhattan, thirteen miles long and two at its broadest, was destined to be the capital of the New World and of the Old World as well.

  Obeying the ancestral impulse that in the 1830s led the family founder to build Astor House, the grandest American hotel of its time, William Waldorf Astor, too, became a builder of hotels on a grand scale. He commissioned the towering steel-framed New Netherland (the original name of the Dutch settlement in North America) on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street. He also bought a large parcel of property on Broadway, in the crossroads area soon to be named Times Square, where he would eventually build the Hotel Astor. But the most imperial and innovative of such ventures of his was one that would revolutionize both hotel keeping on the North American continent and the social rhythms of New York City.

  William was to name it the Waldorf, as much in honor of himself as of old John Jacob Astor’s hometown in Baden. His choice of a site for the Waldorf, Fifth Avenue and Thirty-third Street, was equally freighted with a sense of history but also motivated by feelings of oedipal succession, long-standing clan antagonism and rivalry, and undisguised vindictiveness. Both his mother and father had died by 1890–1891, when he ordered construction of the Waldorf. He tore down the house where they had lived for almost all of their married life, where he had been born in 1848, and where he had grown up in an atmosphere of solemn and unblemished probity. His aunt Caroline’s redbrick-and-brownstone house next door, long the scene of her famous entertainments, was to be made virtually uninhabitable by the noise, dust, traffic, and general tumult of excavation and construction. Dwarfed and demeaned, her house and garden cowered in the shadow of William’s immense building. To the south Caroline could see eleven stories of blank brick wall interrupted only by an open-sided air shaft.

  Putting up the Waldorf where he did had been motivated by a punitive as well as an ego-serving purpose. It was a preemptive strike against Caroline and her son Jack, this time on a field of combat larger than a pasteboard calling card. The Times recognized that the prospect of this hotel rising where it did sparked “a variety of rumors,” some of them hardly new, that indicated “something in the nature of a family feud between the two branches of the Astors.” To accommodate his mother and his own family, Jack spent $2 million to build a four-story French Renaissance chateau uptown on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street. The double house designed by the fashionable architect Richard Morris Hunt boasted the city’s largest private ballroom.

  Even before the cornerstone was laid, the Times had hailed the imminent arrival of Willliam Waldorf Astor’s “veritable palace,” the most luxurious hotel in the United States. To somber and low-lying brownstone New York, Astor’s Waldorf brought exuberant high-rise architecture, European glitter, elegance, and detailing. It was an expatriate’s declaration of personal magnificence, blue-blood pride, and superiority in imagination, style, and intellect to the members of his class and the nation at large. He kept an eye on the layout and decoration of his hotel, stipulating, for example, hand-painted decorative ceilings in each room, bathrooms that opened out on a wide court, and such imported innovations as a concierge to preside over the hotel entrance and bestow at least a fleeting sense of electedness on those he admitted. One of the small private restaurants replicated the dining room of his parents’ house, its furnishings intact and the table set for fourteen places with the Astor family service. When the building was done, William came to see it only once on a visit from London, and he walked quickly through the corridors. He stopped for no one and kept his eyes focused on the floor. This was in keeping with his personal style of aristocratic aloofness. He did not attend the opening in 1893.

  To run the Waldorf he leased it to a man who was equally autocratic and had similar aspirations for a new and superior sort of establishment that would introduce Americans to “marvelous ways of living and luxuries hitherto unattainable.” George C. Boldt, former proprietor of the successful Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia, was a natural-born public-relations master. Boldt knew where the social and money power lay, how to attract and massage it, how to transform an occasion into an event, and an event like the Waldorf’s opening into an archetype of its kind. Obsequious or overbearing, as the circumstances demanded, he lavished wine, flowers, baskets of fruit, cigars, and special privileges on favored guests. He treated the less favored with a hauteur and an abruptness that established a stereotype for future hotel executives. He once tore up the bill of a guest who had the temerity to question some charges and then banished him from the premises forever. (“I fought with the management, over everything as with beasts at Ephesus,” an English friend told Henry James after staying a day or two at the Waldorf. “It’s an awful place, and my bill was the awfullest part of it.”) For his Pal
m Garden restaurant, the most exclusive and expensive eating place in the city, he hired only waiters who could speak French and German. He wore a mustache and a beard, but he ordered his employees, and even the cab drivers lined up outside for fares, to shave theirs off. The order stuck, despite charges of infringed personal liberties from labor unions and the governor, a bearded man named Roswell Pettibone Flower. Boldt was a perfect surrogate for William Waldorf Astor.

  Boldt launched his long career at the hotel in March 1893 with a spectacular concert evening for the benefit of St. Mary’s Hospital for Children. To celebrate the Waldorf’s official opening he recruited leaders of New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia society to sponsor an event that drew about 1,500 select guests. The line of carriages delivering them extended along Fifth Avenue from Washington Square to Fifty-ninth Street. Once arrived, Boldt’s guests were encouraged to explore the splendors of the new hotel, its private rooms and suites, its display of Venetian silk, Russian marble, and ornate furnishings that invoked the Medici, Versailles, and Napoleon’s Empire. “Louis XIV,” said a dazzled reporter from the New York Sun, “could not have got the like of the first suite of apartments set apart for the most distinguished guests of the hotel. Here is a canopied bed upon a dais, as a king’s should be. Upon this couch shall repose the greatnesses and, looking about them, see many thousands of dollars’ worth of fineries. Think of the joy of being great!” “So numerous were the conveniences,” wrote Albert S. Crockett, a journalist whose beat was New York hotels, “so many and so appealing were the luxuries offered, and so widely were these read about and talked about, that in time, if a man wished to be of any importance when he came to New York, he simply had to stop at the Waldorf.”