Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

Its original translated title is “Picture of the City of Amsterdam in New Netherland,” but it is now referred to as the Castello Plan, because it was rediscovered in the library of the Villa di Castello in Florence in 1900.

Several years would pass before a list of the supposed Four Hundred was published, so, for a time, McAllister could grant or rescind membership almost at will. (Several more years would pass before the list was published in the form of a “blue book,” which persists today as the Social Register.) The artificiality of this distinction, the sheer invention of it, marked New York society then as much as it does now. Even the oldest of old New York was brand spanking new.