Under Billy’s stewardship, the Vanderbilt fortune ballooned, and while Billy himself was only one generation away from his father’s rough beginnings on the Staten Island waterfront, his own children—including Cornelius II (who would finish building The Breakers in 1895) and William Kissam—qualified for inclusion in society by Mrs. Astor’s rules. They had the distance. They had clean hands, so to speak. And they certainly had the money. All they needed was the polish. By the 1870s, Billy stood ready to use his fortune to land himself and his children on New York’s social map. But where to
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