Despite the family wealth, Eisner’s grandparents displayed a frugality often associated with Old Money. The young Eisner was once riding in a taxi during a snowstorm when he spotted his grandmother, in her eighties, boarding a bus outside Bloomingdale’s department store. He had the taxi stop, intercepted his grandmother, and insisted she join him. “Why are you wasting money on a cab?” she demanded. His grandfather insisted on crossing into Manhattan on the Willis Avenue Bridge rather than the Triborough Bridge to save the twenty-five-cent toll.
