Mr. Dooley, satirist Finley Peter Dunne’s fictional Irish saloon philosopher, had Jack and his ilk in mind when he announced his views of the war in a nationally circulated column in the Chicago Journal. Mr. Dooley depicted a freshly minted officer in mufti, wearing an English suit and accompanied by his valet, as he explained to President McKinley why he was unable to leave immediately for the front in Cuba: “Me pink silk pijammas hasn’t arrived.” “Wait f’r th’ pijammas,” McKinley tells this would-be Alexander the Great. “Thin on to war…an’ let ye’er watchword be, ‘Raymimber ye’er manners.’” Dooley predicted, “We’ll put th’ tastiest ar-rmy in th’ field that iver came out of a millinery shop.” Special correspondents from Butterick’s Patterns and Harper’s Bazaar, he said, would soon be following onto the field of combat in Cuba the most fashionably dressed military force that ever creased its pants.
Jack gave good value for his appointment. He lent the navy his refurbished 250-foot, 745-ton yacht Nourmahal and offered free passage for troops and volunteers on his Illinois Central Railroad. He raised, equipped, and trained at his own expense—$75,000 and much more, as needed—the Astor Battery, a regiment of mountain artillery for service in Cuba and the Philippines: six rapid-firing Hotchkiss field guns served by 102 enlisted men with the words “Astor Battery” stamped in gold letters on uniforms, hats, and knapsacks. Brass buttons on their tunics bore the letter A and an eagle. Jack accompanied his Astor Battery to Cuba. Himself properly kitted out in field uniform and campaign hat, and with binoculars slung around his neck, Astor stood with the artist Frederic Remington within rifle and artillery range of the Spanish fortifications on San Juan Hill. Before they were ordered to move out of “this hellspot,” as Remington called it, they witnessed the uphill charge that was in effect Rough Rider colonel Theodore Roosevelt’s dramatic first step toward the presidency.
Jack returned from a month in Cuba unscathed except for a touch of fever contracted in the field (and a shrapnel wound to his horse). On furlough after delivering dispatches to the War Department, he was reported to be planning to rejoin the army and his Astor Battery in the Philippines. An accompanying news item reported that the Nourmahal, back in its owner’s hands after uneventful service with the navy, had remained true to form: it had run hard and fast aground in the Hudson off Haverstraw, some twenty-five miles downriver from Ferncliff.
For the rest of his life, and posthumously as well, Jack was “Colonel Astor,” patriot, war hero, and gallant gentleman. He had stood “ready to answer any call his country may make upon him,” as he told a reporter from the New York Times, and he was outspoken in his scorn for his renegade cousin William Waldorf Astor. He even played the genealogical card against his cousin. Unlike William, he could cite descent on his mother’s side from patriots of the Revolutionary period. “I have the blood in me of my grandmother, who was a sister of Colonel Henry Armstrong and a daughter of General Armstrong. They were both true Americans and the Armstrong blood is strong in me.” Although somewhat eroded by his exemplary war service, Jack’s old reputation as playboy and dilettante remained nearly impossible to shake. When the Murray Hill Republican Club proposed him for Congress (on a ticket with Colonel Theodore Roosevelt as governor), Tammany boss Richard Croker effectively shot down the idea. “I will stick to it that Astor is an ass,” he declared. “And that an ass even though an Astor has no business in the Congress of the United States.”
With no position in the Congress or any other public body, the demobilized warrior devoted his energies to Caribbean cruises aboard the Nourmahal, his collection of about sixty motorcars, his laboratory and workshop, his stable of Thoroughbreds, and two principal residences: Ferncliff, one of the largest country estates in America; and 840–842 Fifth Avenue, the white marble double mansion he shared with his mother. He belonged to more than forty clubs in New York, Tuxedo, Newport, Paris, and London. European travel, visits to Palm Beach, and, for shooting, to Aiken, South Carolina, were among other pleasures and distractions in what was generally recognized as a life without a significant focus aside from the mainly titular management of his business interests.
As head of the American branch of the Astor estate he controlled immense business and residential realty holdings all over Manhattan, including his half of the Waldorf-Astoria and the old Astor House. He had a seat on the boards of the Delaware and Hudson Railroad, the Illinois Central Railroad, New York Life Insurance, Niagara Falls Power, Western Union Telegraph, several banks, and at least a dozen other companies. Fast trains between Albany and New York City made special stops for him at Rhinecliff to accommodate his business trips to the Astor estate office on West Twenty-sixth Street.
Together with eighty-five other “representative men,” in 1905 Colonel John Jacob Astor was a subject of virtual canonization in a mammoth (twelve-by-eighteen-inch) gilt-edged, opulently bound and illustrated album, offered to subscribers at $1,500 a copy: Fads and Fancies: Representative Americans at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, Being a Portrayal of Their Tastes, Diversions, and Achievements. The creator of this ultimate vanity book was the longtime gossip journalist and shakedown artist Colonel William D’Alton Mann, publisher of Town Topics. With Fads and Fancies, a grotesquely mild title for a hagiography of American capitalists and firebooters, Colonel Mann hoped to cash in on a lifetime of work.
Some of the subscribers the colonel recruited were agreeable to having considerably more than the nominal $1,500 extracted from them as the price of admission to his hall of heroes. The widow of railroad builder and robber baron Collis P. Huntington, for instance, insisted that her husband deserved a more ample treatment in Fads and Fancies than relative nobodies such as match manufacturer Ohio C. Barber; Isaac F. Emerson, a former drugstore clerk who invented Bromo-Seltzer; society sportsman Foxhall Keene; and asphalt millionaire A. L. Barber. She paid $10,000 for eight pages instead of the meager three or four allotted to other eminent corporate operators like Thomas W. Lawson, Boston stock plunger, market manipulator, and author of Frenzied Finance; traction magnate and convicted embezzler Charles T. Yerkes, whose “ruling passion” was his love of “all beautiful things,” especially rugs and tapestries; Julius Fleischmann of Cincinnati, heir to the family yeast and vinegar works; and Reginald “Reggie” Vanderbilt, boozer and man about town, whose great-grandfather, the implacable Commodore, was credited in passing with having radiated “pure sunshine in his life and character.” (“I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow,” Vanderbilt once told a former business associate. “I’ll ruin you.”)
Given four pages, Colonel John Jacob Astor was among the more conspicuous of the men immortalized in the folio pages of Fads and Fancies. He clearly cooperated with the publisher and contributed a dozen or so pictures from private albums to go with his write-up. Among them were photos of himself in civilian clothes and in military uniform, armed with a cavalry saber and mounted on his horse. Other pictures displayed his yacht and launches; his Ferncliff mansion, gatehouse, and tennis court; one of his automobiles; and the battery of howitzers he had given to the U.S. Army.
“Of the typical American gentlemen of the first years of the Twentieth Century,” Jack’s chapter began,
the “Master of Ferncliff” affords as admirable an example as a wide knowledge of men and the times can choose. Born with the proverbial silver spoon, yet inheriting the tastes of the scholar and the traveler rather than that of the Sybarite, together with a strong but bravely tolerant patriotism, his equipment for the role was at once liberal and promising. In his country’s recent conquests in the West Indies and the South Pacific he has played a worthy part, and his personal services, as well as his riches, were placed at his nation’s command in her time of need.
In his ability to combine recreation with a painstaking attention to the many duties that of necessity devolve upon the conscientious man of millions, Colonel Astor possesses a rare and valuable gift. To the average observer he must appear as a gentleman of careless leisure; nevertheless, Colo
nel Astor personally oversees the conduct of the Astor estate in every particular. Clear-headed and keen-witted, no detail escapes him. Surrounded by capable lieutenants who have been trained to his methods, he has reduced this labor to a matter of a few hours a day in a few days of the year.
Among the colonel’s recent ventures with claims on his attention during these few business hours had been two new hotels in midtown Manhattan.
EIGHT
“Mine! All Mine!”
i.
IN SEPTEMBER 1904, after an absence of five years, William Waldorf Astor, at fifty-six, vigorous and ruddy in face, arrived in New York on the steamship Majestic for a short visit. He was accompanied by a valet and seventeen pieces of luggage and went directly to his suite at the New Netherland. Having been burned in effigy in his native city some years earlier, it was with some reluctance that he had left the Tudor world of Hever Castle in the hands of its putative ghost and its army of workmen. He came back to tend to business affairs, chief among them the opening of the Astor, his new luxury hotel at Times Square. A month later his cousin, John Jacob Astor IV, was also to open an ambitious new hotel of his own. Jack’s was the St. Regis, and he intended it to exceed all others, including William’s, in luxury, modernity, and the smartness of its clientele. Meanwhile the Waldorf-Astoria, their joint venture, continued to prosper, although the tide of fashion and commerce was moving uptown.
Despite his ingrained resentment of the American press, William Waldorf Astor managed to be affable and even forthcoming in conversation with reporters who boarded the ship at quarantine. They were surprised that despite his long residence in England, he sounded as if he had never left Manhattan. So far from selling off his real-estate holdings there, as had been widely rumored, he assured reporters that he was continuing to add to them, the Hotel Astor being his newest acquisition and, as it turned out, the last of his grand gestures on Manhattan Island.
He had committed about $7 million to the building of a brick-and-limestone hotel, to stand twelve stories high and occupy an entire block front in Longacre Square, on the west side of Broadway between Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth streets. In April, five months before his return, Longacre Square, the city’s tourist and entertainment hub, had been renamed Times Square. The name recognized the newspaper’s rising new headquarters at Forty-second Street, a New World version of Giotto’s Florentine bell tower. Twenty-two stories when completed, it was the tallest building in midtown. In its basement, above the pressroom on lower levels, was the Times Square station of financier August Belmont’s newly completed Interborough Rapid Transit Company. For a nickel, subway riders could now travel from City Hall to 145th Street and Broadway in fifteen minutes. Along with the Times Tower, the Hotel Astor stood at a critical junction—“The Crossroads of the World”—of foot, surface, and underground traffic flowing north, south, and crosstown. Ablaze with spectacular electrical advertising signs, the city’s entertainment and tourist center had already been dubbed the Great White Way and was soon to become as famous a focus of public assembly as London’s Piccadilly Circus and the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square.
In making this brilliantly timed and strategically situated investment, Astor had followed the advice of a German-born restaurateur, owner of a popular eatery and gathering place nearby called the Arena, William C. Muschenheim. Once manager of the cadets’ mess at West Point, he was an old hand at dispensing loaves and fishes and made a great deal of money at it. Scholar, art lover, and enthusiastic local historian, he owned a notable collection of old New York maps, documents, and prints. He had a sure sense of where the future lay. In the course of his correspondence with Astor and his occasional visits to England he had made a strong case for the claim that Times Square, an increasingly populous stretch of the city’s most celebrated area, needed, and would amply support, a fittingly great hotel that should be as renowned for its food, drink, and congenial atmosphere as for its accommodations and architectural splendor. This new hotel was to be an updated version of the Waldorf-Astoria, an equally monumental and decisive venture, but in spirit less snooty, more egalitarian, and more in tune with the commercial values and increasingly relaxed social style of the new American century. Instead of the exotics of high society, its core clientele was to be tourists, businesspeople, and prosperous members of the middle class.
Astor and Muschenheim gave their designers, decorators, engineers, and purchasing agents free rein and a virtually unlimited budget. Their architects, Clinton and Russell, until then mainly known for designing tall business buildings, tore down a shabby block of shops, theatrical boardinghouses, and saloons to provide the site for a new palace for the people. From its wine cellar, two stories below street level, to its roof garden, observatory, belvedere restaurant, and cavernous ballrooms under the mansard roof, the Astor, promoted to the public as “the finest hotel in the world,” was to be “far more than a stopping place”: a self-sufficient, self-enclosed magic city within a city. Muschenheim’s exuberant prose hailed the Astor as “the Culmination of Years of Artistic Study.” The cutaway view that he commissioned as an advertisement suggests a combination of industrial plant and bustling ant farm.
“In New York,” his lavishly illustrated promotional booklet declared, “the hotel of ten years ago has undergone an amazing evolution—an evolution which has now produced one of the most magnificent and brilliant factors of modern life. Here has grown up an institution new in the world—a phenomenon—a development of which a decade ago we did not dream, and which the capitals of Europe are only beginning to copy.”
Covering fourteen building lots, the Astor enclosed a vast marble and gilded lobby twenty-one feet high, decorated with murals depicting New York past and present. Almost immediately the lobby became the equivalent of a municipal living room, agora, and trysting place. “She Lost It at the Astor” was a popular song of the 1930s. “Meet me at the Astor” became part of the social vocabulary of well-heeled New Yorkers. Upstairs were more than five hundred bedrooms served by twelve passenger elevators, a banqueting hall seating five hundred, a thirty-five-thousand-square-foot kitchen described as the largest in the world, dozens of public rooms, each with its own distinct character, and guest suites that drew on a lexicon of styles—art nouveau, Empire, Dutch Renaissance—and made inevitable references to Versailles. Some of the Astor’s technological innovations were air-conditioning; fire and smoke detectors in every room; electrically controlled fire doors; a “food escalator” connecting the kitchen and banqueting rooms; an ice plant that produced 120 tons each day; an array of dynamos powering the elevators and the hotel’s fourteen thousand lights; and a “crematory,” or incinerator, the first of its kind in a hotel, to dispose of trash and garbage. From a glassed-in basement enclosure that protected them from heat and noise, hotel guests, as if they were visiting the innards of an ocean liner, could look out over the engines and boilers that served this gargantuan machine for living. The Astor’s interior and exterior walls were fortresslike in thickness and strength.
A carnival of cosmopolitanism, the Astor housed an American Indian grill room; a Chinese tearoom; a Flemish smoking room; a Spanish lounging room; a Pompeian billiard room; a German “Hunt Room” decorated with stag-horn light fixtures and a continuous frieze showing scenes of the chase; and a Mediterranean orangery complete with fountain, a grove of fruit trees and palms, and an electrically lit moon that shed a warm romantic glow on the occupants. Private dining rooms on the ninth floor were fitted out as the cabin of a millionaire’s yacht; paintings shaped and framed like portholes depicted the waterway between the harbor and Long Island Sound and created the illusion that diners had embarked on a leisurely cruise out of the city. Muschenheim’s pet project, the American Indian Grill Room, was an ethnological museum of sorts furnished with bows and arrows, feathered head-dresses, baskets, ritual artifacts, hunting and fishing implements, busts, rare prints, and photographs. Some of this material had been assembled with advice from the American Museum of Natur
al History. The Astor’s “hall of the aborigines” was to serve as a reminder to diners, the management announced, that “the wigwam of the Indian once stood on the very ground now occupied by our great cities.”
Although lord of Cliveden and Hever Castle, William Waldorf Astor had no hesitation about dining in public view at this unashamedly commercial and democratic hotel and allowing it to bear the family name. Himself an appreciative feeder and wine drinker, he was delighted with the Astor cuisine, which he claimed was the best in New York. Muschenheim’s encyclopedic menus offered rare dishes like wild boar, English snipe, and Egyptian quail. Astor admitted to some slight unease when he saw that the hotel chinaware bore a prominent design of flowering asters. “I am not responsible for the use of the China Aster as a joke upon my name,” he told Amy Richardson. “Muschenheim hit upon the idea and was delighted with it.” The new hotel proved to be so successful that in 1906, less than two years after it opened, Astor invested a further $4 million. He doubled the building’s size by extending it to the west, added the Astor Theater on the corner of Forty-fifth Street, and topped the entire structure with the world’s largest roof garden. The Astor’s guest book eventually contained the names of practically every hero and famous person of the era. Among them were transatlantic solo flier Charles A. Lindbergh; General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I; and the humorist Will Rogers. Republican presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes went to bed at the Astor on election night, 1916, believing he had defeated Woodrow Wilson. He woke up the next morning, after the returns from California had come in, to be told by a reporter he was “no longer president.”
When the Astors Owned New York Page 13
