When the Astors Owned New York Quotes

“By February 1930 Henry Hardenbergh’s great building, one of the architectural wonders of Manhattan, had been leveled. Its two-acre site, where the parents of the Astor cousins once dwelt in their brownstone mansions, was cleared for another architectural milestone, the 102-story Empire State Building.”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“He demanded from his guests inflexible conformity to schedule, decreeing, for example, precisely when they should write their letters, stroll about the grounds, or ride into the village”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“For a century before William became its master, Cliveden had been open to visitors and sightseers, one of several showplaces in England that were in effect, and by long tradition, public parks maintained at private expense. The new owner enclosed Cliveden within a high wall topped with broken glass, forbade access to a spring of water that had been a local pleasure site, and erected a blank wall to replace the iron grille gate that had allowed a sweeping view up the long driveway leading to the forecourt of the house.”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“Duke of Buckingham, a sometime favorite of King Charles II and famously satirized by poet laureate John Dryden: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong; Was everything by starts, and nothing long: But in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“William’s money, purpose, and pride eventually prevailed over all the resistance and resentment he provoked. He could outspend, outcollect, outentertain, and outbuild anyone in England.”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“The great event had proved to be so blatant and heartless in its abdication of taste and social conscience that public opinion, along with a punitive doubling of their tax assessment, eventually pushed the Bradley-Martins into exile or, as they thought of it, preferred residence in England. Two years after the ball they emptied their house on Twentieth Street and shipped the furnishings to London. In the last of their several farewells to New York society they gave a banquet for eighty-six of their friends at the Waldorf-Astoria. The guests consumed green turtle soup, timbales of shad roe, and mignons of spring lamb while the hotel orchestra played Spanish melodies and popular black songs, among them a particular favorite of those in attendance, “If You Ain’t Got No Money, You Needn’t Come ’Round.”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“In addition to generous quantities of whiskey, brandy, and still wines, Cornelia Bradley-Martin’s guests consumed sixty cases of a Moët & Chandon champagne that a local historian recalled as “the most expensive sparkling wine known in the United States in 1897.”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“It was at about this time, on the eve of their annual sailing to London for the social and sporting season there, that Cornelia and her husband, the couple formerly known as Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Martin, sprouted a hyphen in their surname, somewhat like a supernumerary nipple, and, in parallel fashion to the orthographic coupling of the Waldorf and the Astoria hotels, began to call themselves the Bradley-Martins. In a similar status uptick they followed the virtually hallowed practice of their class by acquiring for their daughter an impecunious but titled mate, the twenty-five-year-old fourth Earl of Craven. A secure room in the basement of the Bradley”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“Recognizing tectonic shifts in New York’s social and physical landscape, Henry James felt dispossessed, uprooted, his past amputated, leaving him with a chill in his heart. His birthplace off Washington Square had vanished, torn down to make way for a nearby factory building that in March 1911 was to be the site of a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory that took the lives of 146 workers, mostly Jewish immigrants. Trinity Church, long a commanding ornament of lower Broadway, cringed in the shadow of a steel-framed, elevator-served, twenty-story office building. Immigration and trade had transformed the town James remembered from his childhood as small, warm, and ingenuous, with some of the feel of a family party.”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“the Waldorf-Astoria crystallized the improbable and fabulous. It was more than a mere hotel. It was a vast, glittering, iridescent fantasy that had been conjured up to infect millions of plain Americans with a new idea—the aspiration to lead an expensive, gregarious life as publicly as possible.”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“BY THE 1890s the Astor estate, comprising the assets of both cousins, was worth about $200 million. In the 1930s the historian Burton J. Hendrick called it “the world’s greatest monument to unearned increment…a first mortgage on Fate itself.”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“Ida Alice, Flagler’s second wife, had conceived a passion for Czar Nicholas II, Autocrat of All the Russias, and claimed to be communicating with him by means of her Ouija board. She believed that the czar returned her love and they would marry as soon as Henry died, assuming she managed to survive attempts by Henry and their family doctor to poison her. In 1897 Alice was put away for good in a sanitarium in Pleasantville, New York. She told her keepers she was of royal blood, born Princess Ida Alice von Schotten Tech.”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“In point of authenticity, the Astorga/Astor connection scarcely differed from other fanciful lineages that American plutocrats were buying by the yard, along with needy dukes and lords as mates for their daughters. Referring to William as “an eminent semi-American,” a New York Times editorial said, “Everybody knew before that ‘family trees’ were delicate vegetables, soon to be shaken to pieces by the wind of investigation.” As always William refused to be shaken by either ridicule or revelation. His Spanish Crusader was the central actor in his version of what Sigmund Freud was to call “family romances,” daydreams about replacing forebears with “others of better birth.”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“A child of the new age of iron, steam, and mechanical wonders, the architect, Isaiah Rogers, virtually invented the modern hotel: a functionally complex and self-contained structure (and social organization) that was a sort of human terrarium. A closed world designed from the ground up for the specific purpose of welcoming, housing, maintaining, and feeding guests in advanced comfort, the hotel was no longer just a stop along the way: it was a destination in itself,”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“In 1828 Broadway, the city’s spinal thoroughfare, ended at Tenth Street, according to the grid plan for the city streets. Forty years later Broadway extended northward to 155th Street and beyond that into the Bronx. Only the three rivers that enclosed Manhattan could limit its horizontal growth.”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“The population of Manhattan jumped from about twenty-five thousand in 1780, when Astor arrived there, to about five hundred thousand in 1848, the year he died.”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

“Was there ever an undertaking of more merit, of more hazard and more enterprising,” he is supposed to have written soon after the collapse of his Pacific Fur Company,”
― Justin Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods & Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age