There was no more thrilling place for a twenty-six-year-old entrepreneur than Manhattan at the height of the Gilded Age. It was a city of stunning contrasts, of squalid tenements and lavish mansions. A handful of tycoons had amassed great wealth—the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, the steel mogul Andrew Carnegie, the banking giant J. Pierpont Morgan, the shipping and railroad titan Cornelius Vanderbilt.
