When the Astors Owned New York

by Justin Kaplan

  Opening-night charity patrons listened to a concert by Walter Damrosch’s New-York Symphony Orchestra performing selections from Georges Bizet’s Carmen, Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger, and, somewhat less predictably, Max Bruch’s Kol Nidre. Then the guests sat down to the supper Boldt’s staff set out for them. It included oysters in béchamel sauce, cutlets of braised sweetbreads, terrapin, various pâtés, and other rich delicacies washed down with champagne and claret punch. Even a last-minute strike by workers in the pantry failed to disrupt the evening: an assistant steward mounted a behind-the-scenes rescue operation and recruited replacement dishwashers from men off the streets.

  Boldt’s opening event established a formula that has never lost its effectiveness: in a setting that invited glittering displays of gowns from Paris and jewels from Tiffany and Cartier, he brought together money, the upper class, fashion, good works, and upscale entertainment. A publicity and public-relations triumph, his opening night, “a brilliant social event,” was the lead story on page one of the next day’s New York Times. There, an article of five thousand words or so spilled over onto page two and listed the names of the more prominent guests, and described what some of them wore. It even included a tribute to the generosity of “Mr. Boldt, a gentleman who does not allow his wonderful energy to obscure his affability.” He saw to it that the Waldorf, and soon after its larger twin, the Astoria, became both temples of pleasure and theaters of cultural and social life in a great city.

  Jack had threatened at first to get back at his cousin by tearing down his mother’s house and replacing it with a row of stables. It was both gratifying and reasonable for him to expect that a stable, in effect a hotel for horses, would turn away business from William’s hotel next door. Jack’s proposed stable, a millionaire’s weapon in the real-estate and family wars, was clearly intended to be a thumb in William’s eye, but solid money-shrewd sense prevailed. Jack canceled his stable plan, just as he had done with the stable he had planned to build next door to B’Nai Jeshurun and its anguished worshippers. He and his advisers realized that the Waldorf, which was to gross over $4 million its first year, was a profitable venture.

  Through troops of lawyers and accountants on both sides of the partition dividing the Astor estate office on Twenty-sixth Street, Jack negotiated an ad hoc alliance with William. Enlisting the Waldorf’s architect, Henry Hardenbergh, and with Boldt as manager, he planned an abutting $3 million hotel to fill out the entire Fifth Avenue block front and considerable footage westward along Thirty-fourth Street. Harmonious in style with the Waldorf but much larger and several stories taller, Jack’s hotel dwarfed, enveloped, and subsumed his cousin’s, in outward appearance at least, a victory in their long-standing battle. He wanted to name it the Schermerhorn, after his mother’s distinguished Old New York family. William, however, refused to allow even this vicarious honor to his aunt, the most powerful woman in American society. He persuaded Jack to settle instead on the name Astoria, after their ancestor’s fur-trading post on the Columbia River. For the opening of the new hotel on November 1, 1897, Boldt staged another extravaganza that went on from noon to midnight, mixed charity, wealth, fashion, and entertainment, and generated columns of news coverage.

  By the terms of a painfully hashed-out contract, corridors connecting the two buildings could be sealed off if the fragile truce, uncomfortable for both parties, failed to hold. The great double building was a house divided, like the Astor dynasty itself, which was riven by old resentments ripening into flagrant insults.* But the house stood nonetheless and even flourished. The two buildings, married in name by a hyphen and known thereafter as the Waldorf-Astoria, opened for combined business in 1897 as the world’s largest and most luxurious hotel. “Like New York itself,” the historian Lloyd Morris wrote, “the Waldorf-Astoria crystallized the improbable and fabulous. It was more than a mere hotel. It was a vast, glittering, iridescent fantasy that had been conjured up to infect millions of plain Americans with a new idea—the aspiration to lead an expensive, gregarious life as publicly as possible.” Combining forces and fortunes in their double hotel, the two otherwise warring Astor cousins created what Henry James was to describe as “a new thing under the sun” that gave him a glimpse of “perfect human felicity.”

  FIVE

  “A New Thing Under the Sun”

  i.

  IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 1904 Henry James came home from England for a ten-month visit. He had been gone for over twenty years, as long an absence as the sleep from which Rip Van Winkle, born a subject of King George III, awakened to find himself citizen of a new nation, the United States. Measured by the changes Henry James saw in the pace, feel, and institutions of daily life, a second American Revolution might as well have run its course since he had left.

  Three recent novels—The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl—certified him, at least in the view of a handful of critics and readers, as master in the house of fiction, just as he was, but without any doubt this time, master in his fastidiously regulated bachelor establishment, Lamb House, at Rye on the Sussex coast. A subtenant now occupied the property and enjoyed the sea air, garden study, flowering peach trees, and companionship of a ruby-colored dachshund, Maximilian, whose pedigree, James said, was as long as a typewriter ribbon. Maximilian’s absent owner, meanwhile, was in transit, visiting a dozen and more American cities as he traveled from New England to Florida and from New York and Washington to California and the Pacific Northwest. He had gone on the lecture circuit, a routine occupation for many other literary celebrities and entertainers, but not something comfortable for this fierce exquisite who yearned for perfection but also needed to cover the expenses of his trip. Weaving seamless sentences that drifted like cigar smoke in the somnolent air of the lecture hall, he articulated the art of fiction to audiences in half a dozen American cities.

  He extracted from his travels what he called “features of the human scene” and “properties of the social air.” The self-styled “visionary tourist,” “restless analyst,” and “irrepressible story seeker” planned to study “the working of democratic institutions” as they “determine and qualify manners, feelings, communications, modes of contact, and conceptions of life.” Three years later, with his gathered impressions plucked, cleaned, trussed, and done to a turn, he served them up, sauced with his celebrated qualifiers and discriminations, in a travel book The American Scene. If the title had not already been taken, he said, he could have called his book “The Return of the Native.”

  Like other visitors from abroad, James was overwhelmed by the rush and vehemence of turn-of-the-century American life, and, on one level, its immense wealth, extravagance, and ostentation. Nowhere was this display more flagrant than in New York, the nation’s social, cultural, and financial capital. During the 1890s and a few years after, old John Jacob Astor’s city of the future, where every square foot of land doubled in value year after year, had been the setting for social events that were Roman carnivals of gluttony, sottishness, and vulgar display: imitations of the royal courts of Europe, for example, and banquets that honored dogs, horses, and chimpanzees.

  Mining, oil, steel, and railroad Golcondas had created a breed of sudden millionaires eager to enjoy and flaunt their wealth. They built French and Italian Renaissance palaces along Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue and seasonal counterparts in the marble and granite “cottages” of Newport—tangible evidences, as James described them, of “witlessness” and “affronted proportion.” For H. G. Wells, Newport’s “triumphs of villa architecture in thatch and bathing bungalows in marble” sounded “the same note of magnificent irresponsibility” as the Manhattan residences of steel masters Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, the Astors, Vanderbilts, Havemeyers, and Huntingtons. The owners of these palaces, Wells thought, were like children scattering toys on the playroom floor and leaving them there. A newly moneyed leisure class, although secure in its sense of self as commanding deference and privilege, nevertheless aspired to higher
membership in a small, established nucleus, “society,” founded on relatively “old” money.

  Recognizing tectonic shifts in New York’s social and physical landscape, Henry James felt dispossessed, uprooted, his past amputated, leaving him with a chill in his heart. His birthplace off Washington Square had vanished, torn down to make way for a nearby factory building that in March 1911 was to be the site of a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory that took the lives of 146 workers, mostly Jewish immigrants. Trinity Church, long a commanding ornament of lower Broadway, cringed in the shadow of a steel-framed, elevator-served, twenty-story office building. Immigration and trade had transformed the town James remembered from his childhood as small, warm, and ingenuous, with some of the feel of a family party. His New York was now the largest Irish, Italian, and Jewish city in the world. Surface and elevated lines and a new subway system that ran through 134 miles of tunnels webbed the city’s sprawl.

  The brick-and-limestone federal immigration center on Ellis Island served as the main portal through which a nation of 80 million admitted a million newcomers each year. The vast caravansary was a monument to the open-door policy, the nation’s hunger for cheap labor, and its genius for assembly-line, rational organization on a heroic scale. Some days as many as 21,000 immigrants passed through Ellis Island’s reception halls, refectories, dormitories with banks of steel beds, examination rooms, baths, chutes, and holding pens, its hospital, dental clinic, registries, currency exchange, and, at the end of the process, ticket office selling transportation to the sweatshops, mills, and wheat fields of the golden land. The overall impression, James wrote after touring Ellis Island as a guest of the commissioner, was that of a scientific feeding of the mill. “It is a drama that goes on, without pause, day by day and year by year, this visible act of ingurgitation on the part of our body politic and social, and constituting really an appeal to amazement beyond that of any sword-swallowing or fire-swallowing of the circus.”

  About five miles north of Ellis Island, on Fifth Avenue between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth streets, stood a radically opposed but equally distinctive feature of American life. This was the Waldorf-Astoria, epitome of the fin de siècle luxury hotel and an expression of the American worship of bigness and rationality. This immense establishment comprised over a thousand guest rooms and half a hundred public rooms. Pleasure dome and social force, theater and theme park, the Astors’ great hotel, the most expensive of its kind, was a place of artistic, mechanical, and sybaritic wonders. Its splendor legitimized the open existence of an American leisure class. In its unashamed pride and opulence the Waldorf-Astoria declared that New York was now a world capital with a place in history like Athens, Rome, and London.

  Loosely described as German (or “Dutch”) Renaissance in style, the Waldorf-Astoria was topped with an eye-catching array of turrets, chimneys, and red-tiled gables, all producing an effect that was both quaint and homely. Internally even more than externally, the massive building showed that superfluity and sometimes giantism (as exemplified by native strawberries and oysters) were themselves attractive goals. The ninety-five-foot-long ballroom, for example, was three stories high. Like Isaiah Rogers before him, the architect, Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, was the premier hotel builder of his era and would go on from the Waldorf-Astoria to build other landmark hotels like the exuberant Beaux-Arts Plaza (1907) in New York and the more restrained Copley Plaza (1910) in Boston. He had already set a pattern for residential luxury with his Dakota Apartments (1882), a brick-and-stone chateau crowned with a three-story mansard roof that dominated the West Side skyline. Visually and institutionally, his Dakota was a Manhattan icon even before the first tenants moved in, and this was true of both his Plaza Hotel and each of the two components of his Waldorf-Astoria.

  Like the Dakota, the buildings Hardenbergh designed for the Astor cousins had a richly textured, multidimensional, picturesque cladding of balconies, arches, pilasters, bays, loggias, and alternating courses of terra-cotta, brick, and stone. His buildings had a touch of whimsy as well and disclosed nooks, turrets, and similar surprises that gave them the look of mammoth cuckoo clocks. In mood and style they were in the forefront of a general turning away from the brownstone monotony and mournfulness of post–Civil War New York, the “intolerable ugliness,” as Edith Wharton saw it, of a “low-studded rectangular” city “cursed with its universal chocolate-colored coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried, this cramped horizontal gridiron of a town without towers, porticoes, fountains, or perspectives.” The Waldorf-Astoria was an architectural lexicon of historical allusions and Beaux-Arts conceits. Especially in its public rooms, Hardenbergh’s hotel combined a caliph’s palace with one of mad King Ludwig’s Bavarian castles.

  Filling out the spaces assigned to them by the architect, hotel decorators raided history and racked up enormous stylistic indebtedness to the Medicis and the Pharaohs, the Sun King’s court and Napoleon’s Empire. Hotel decorators were theatrical set designers at heart. Like D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille a little later on, they provided the culturally untraveled with adventure, visual thrills, a sense of history, and something of a museum and amusement park experience. Shortly after the end of World War II a flamboyant American architect named Morris Lapidus was to reconceive the luxury hotel as a “movie set” in itself, a spectacle so overwhelming that, he believed, people would “walk in and drop dead” in astonishment at such sights as a lobby furnished with a full-scale monkey jungle or a swamp of live alligators to remind guests, he said, that “they were in Florida.” He intended his Fontainebleau and Eden Roc hotels in Miami Beach to fulfill “dreams of tropical opulence and glittering luxury.” His trademark features were weird lighting, vibrant colors, birdcages on poles, floating ceilings punctured by “cheese-holes,” M. C. Escher–like flying stairways that went nowhere, and a dizzying potion of French Provincial and Italian Renaissance styles. As well as entertainment and surprise, Lapidus’s “palaces of kitsch” (as they were often called) provided a stage and backdrop for guests to show off gowns and jewels. Lapidus’s boyhood visits to Coney Island’s Luna Park had introduced him to fantasy architecture. Later, when he was an apprentice architect, a stay at the Palmer House in Chicago gave him a firsthand experience of the luxury hotel executed on a grand scale.

  The Astors’ double hotel built on the sites of their parents’ mansions was indeed “a new thing under the sun,” Henry James said. A writer of cool and appraising sentences as delicately equipoised as a jeweler’s balance, the novelist, “a palpitating pilgrim,” found himself in the grip of nothing short of a paroxysm of enthusiasm. The great hotel offered him, he wrote, “one of my few glimpses of perfect human felicity,” and of “a social order in positively stable equilibrium.” He had discovered “a world whose relation to its form and medium was practically imperturbable; here was a conception of publicity as the vital medium organized with the authority with which the American genius for organization, put on its mettle, alone could organize it…. a gorgeous golden blur, a paradise peopled with unmistakable American shapes.” “There are endless things in ‘Europe,’ to your vision, behind and beyond the hotel, a multitudinous complicated life; in the States, on the other hand, you see the hotel as itself that life, as constituting for vast numbers of people the richest form of experience.” Here at the Astors’ great hotel was “a supreme social expression,” “the essence of the loud New York story” of power, wealth, display, and spending. The “immense promiscuity” of the place—an unleashed social pluralism—broke down every barrier except “money and presentability” (which he tended to take for granted) and breached the wall between private and public life.

  Avatar of modernity, the Astors’ great and expensive hotel even had a leveling effect. Rich, famous, beautiful, and fashionable men and women, whose daily lives had in the past been led in private, were now to be seen enjoying the pleasures of ornate function rooms exposed to public view. Bathed in the full glare of attention, these rare creatures, the
subject of news and gossip stories, were on display for ordinary citizens to observe and maybe learn from as part of their own education in polite customs and demeanor, all of this and more in preparation for a prospective climb up the ladder. At least from a distance, celebrities and society exotics could be seen dancing, entertaining one another at tea or at dinner in the glass-enclosed Palm Garden (in obligatory full evening dress), conversing in casual encounters in alcoves, mingling with fashionable young bucks and Wall Street titans in the men’s café, or sipping Turkish coffee served them in the lobby by a genuine Turk and his boy assistant. “In such great hotels as the Waldorf-Astoria,” H. G. Wells wrote, “one finds the new arrivals, the wives and daughters from the west and south, in new bright hats and splendors of costume…. From an observant tea-table beneath the fronds of a palm, I surveyed a fine array of these plump and pretty pupils of extravagance,” acolytes of a religion of spending and flaunting. On ordinary days the Waldorf-Astoria’s floating population was in the thousands, mostly composed of transient spectators in a three-hundred-foot-long, deep-carpeted, mirrored and amber marble corridor that invited and favored displays of finery and came to be known as Peacock Alley.