i.
AT SEVENTEEN John Jacob Astor, founder of an American dynasty, left the German village of Waldorf, where he was born in 1763, and came to New York by way of London. Son of a village butcher, he could barely read and write. Toward the end of his life, attended by a butler and household staff who served him on silver dishes, he ate peas with his knife, spoke with a heavy German accent, and was not averse to using a guest’s sleeve as his napkin. A visitor from England was appalled to see him remove his chaw of tobacco from his mouth and trace patterns on the window with it. When he first landed in America, for a while young Astor worked for a Quaker named Bowne who bought undressed pelts; scraped, cleaned, and cured them; and then sold them as furs. After two years Astor started his own fur business and traded for furs with the Indians, sometimes paying for their pelts in cut or adulterated rum. He married, and with his wife, Sarah Todd, lived above his shop on Water Street, close by the East River docks. Still a relatively poor man, Astor admired a row of newly erected buildings on Broadway, far to the west of his shabby street. According to Washington Irving, later one of Astor’s close friends, these residences were “the talk and boast of the city” because of “the superior style of their architecture.” In the time-honored rhetoric of American strive-and-succeed stories, Astor told the author many years later that he had vowed “to build one day or other, a greater house than any of these, and in this very street.”
After fifteen years in business for himself Astor was worth about a quarter of a million dollars and moved his family and fur business to a three-story brick building in the row he admired. By then Astor and his network of agents virtually monopolized the trade, but he lived pretty much the way he and Sarah had at Water Street, frugally and without show. He watched every penny, conducted business in a malodorous shop and warehouse on the ground floor, and employed his son William to beat and air the furs to dispel moths. Astor’s reach soon became global. He set in motion a trading scheme designed to rack up enormous profits at each junction in its triangular traffic. His fleet of merchantmen were to load their hulls with furs from Astoria, the trading post he established in 1811 at the mouth of the Columbia River; bring them to Shanghai; exchange them there for tea, spices, silks, musical instruments, and fans; transship the goods to Liverpool; trade them there for British manufactures; and sell these in the New York market. Astor believed that his plan to create a commercial empire based in the Pacific Northwest might have made him the richest man that ever lived had it not been frustrated by blundering subordinates, Indian treachery, the War of 1812, bad weather, and just plain bad luck. “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, “attended with a greater variety of misfortune?” But he accepted defeat with what Washington Irving, who became the appointed historian of the Astoria enterprise, called “his usual serenity of countenance.” “What would you have me do?” Astor asked. “Would you have me stay at home and weep for what I cannot help?”
Astor turned his energies away from the fur trade to acquiring land in Wisconsin, Missouri, and, especially, in Manhattan. He held on with a death grip to what he acquired, eventually about five hundred properties in the city, and watched its value increase at an almost geometric rate. His motto was “Buy and hold.” If he had his life to live over again, he often said, and knowing what he now knew, he would have bought up every foot of land on Manhattan Island. 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. Meanwhile and accordingly, the residential and commercial areas of Manhattan had become denser and expanded at a pace that dazzled old settlers. The New York of Astor’s youth, Washington Irving wrote in 1847, “was a mere corner of the present huge city.” 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. Even though he never did buy up every foot of Manhattan, Astor owned and bequeathed so much property there, prime real estate as well as entire slum districts, that William, his son and heir and a comparably relentless accumulator, came to be known as the landlord of New York. William guarded the family treasure as if he were the red dragon of the Apocalypse.
John Jacob and his son managed their affairs from an office building on Prince Street where each day they supposedly toted up dollars by the tens of thousands. Burglarproof, fireproof, and apparently earthquakeproof as well, the Astor business headquarters had massive masonry walls, an iron roof, doors of iron, iron-grated windows, and heavy iron braces thrown from wall to wall. John Jacob eventually began to live on a scale that more nearly matched his wealth. Standing on the snow-covered Broadway pavement on a January day, the young Walt Whitman watched the great man being readied for an outing. “Swathed in rich furs, with a great ermine cap on his head,” Astor was “led and assisted, almost carried, down the steps of his high front stoop…and then lifted and tuck’d in a gorgeous sleigh, envelop’d in other furs…. The sleigh was drawn by as fine a team of horses as I ever saw.”
During the last twelve years of his life Astor enjoyed semiretirement at his country estate at Hellgate, still mainly farmland, on the banks of the East River, near where the mayor’s official house, Gracie Mansion, now stands. Looking across the estuary turbulence that gave Hellgate its name, he could see the village of Astoria, named in his honor by the citizens of Queens County in the hope, eventually disappointed, that in return for the compliment he would endow a public building there. When not at his country estate, Astor lived and entertained luxuriantly in his brownstone on Broadway. He filled the house with expensive works of art that the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, his paid cultural tutor and daily companion, encouraged him to buy. They included a portrait of Astor by Gilbert Stuart, who was then “all the rage,” according to a contemporary, and counted George Washington and Thomas Jefferson among his distinguished sitters. A silver plaque mounted on the front door of his Broadway house bore the words MR. ASTOR. Sometimes his servants, black, white, and Chinese, could be seen out on the sidewalk tossing him in a blanket to stimulate his circulation.
The diary of Philip Hone, New York businessman and mayor, gives a memento-mori picture of the eighty-one-year-old Astor at dinner four years before his death, “a painful example of the insufficiency of wealth to prolong the life of man”:
He would pay all my debts if I could ensure him one year of my health and strength, but nothing else could extort so much from him. His life has been spent in amassing money, and he loves it as much as ever. He sat at the dinner table with his head down upon his breast, saying very little, and in a voice almost unintelligible; the saliva dripping from his mouth, and a servant behind him to guide the victuals which he was eating, and to watch him as an infant is watched. His mind is good, his observation acute, and he seems to know everything that is going on. But the machinery is all broken up, and there are some people, no doubt, who think he has lived long enough.
When Astor died in 1848, at the age of eighty-four, he was the richest man in the United States. He may have been the young country’s first millionaire, at a time when the word “millionaire” itself was new, before he moved on to far greater wealth. His eventual fortune, an estimated $20 million to $30 million, mainly founded on holdings in Manhattan real estate, was several times greater than that of the nearest contenders in that line, the inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. William, the old man’s heir, had the body put on display in the parlor of his own house on fashionable Lafayette Place, across the street from his father’s. The undertaker installed a glass window in the black silk velvet pall so that citizens who pushed their way in through the crowd of gawkers outside could look upon the face of wealth incarnate.
Six clergymen; Astor’s servants, with napkins pinned to their sleeves; and perhaps as many as five hundred mourners, Washington Irving among them, followed the body to St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church. Eventually it would be placed in the Astor vault at Trinity Cemetery about seven miles uptown on 155th Street and Broadway. Although entombed like an Egyptian deity, in life the dead man had been nothing less than a “self-invented money-making machine,” James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald said in its obituary. As portrayed by the press, and as indelibly fixed in the public mind, like the Greek poet’s famous hedgehog, John Jacob Astor had known one thing and known it supremely well, and that was “To get all he could, and to keep nearly all he got,” as the popular biographer James Parton wrote two decades later. “The roll-book of his possessions was his Bible. He scanned it fondly, and saw with quiet but deep delight the catalogue of his property lengthening from month to month. The love of accumulation grew with his years until it ruled him like a tyrant.” This predatory, stony-hearted, parsimonious monster of greed, as he was remembered, allegedly enjoyed nothing better than to count his wealth down to the last penny, drive up tenement rack rents, foreclose mortgages, and put widows and orphans out on the street. For his mentally incompetent son, John Jacob II, he provided a house and garden on West Fourteenth Street and an allowance of $5,000 a year to keep him there. But with the exception of the members of his immediate family, Astor was far from openhanded in the terms of his will. His single large benefaction, $400,000 for an Astor Library on Astor Place, represented less than one-fortieth of his fortune. The Herald denounced it as “a poor, mean, and beggarly” figure. Astor left his faithful companion and cultural tutor, Fitz-Greene Halleck, an annuity of $200, so pitiable an amount that William, although only slightly less tightfisted than his father, increased it, out of his own pocket, to $1,500. William was said to be the author of a widely quoted nugget of wisdom on the subject of wealth: “A man who has a million dollars is as well off as if he were rich.”
ii.
IN HIS SEVENTIES, still mourning the death of his wife, Sarah, in 1834, John Jacob Astor had set in motion his last great project. Characteristically bold and ambitious, what he planned was also uncharacteristically self-indulgent and even, surprisingly, a mediocre investment, compared to his other ventures. It was less an act of commerce than one of willful self-commemoration on an impressive scale. Astor determined to put up a hotel without equal anywhere in the world for luxury and architectural grandeur: “A New York palais royal,” Philip Hone wrote, “which will cost him five or six hundred thousand dollars…and will serve, as it was probably intended to, as a monument to its wealthy proprietor.”
To build his hotel, financed from his own coffers on Prince Street, Astor bought up and demolished the entire block of three-story brick houses that had been the seamark of his ambitions as a young man. Although famously close with a dollar, he was even willing to pay an extortionate $60,000, about three times the market value, to get one of the holdout property owners to move. According to a contemporary newspaper account, when Astor learned the owner was still in residence on the transfer date of May 1, 1832, he instructed his foreman, “Well, never mind. Just start by tearing down the house anyhow. You might begin by taking away the steps.” Not even number 223 Broadway, the house where he and Sarah lived many of their years together, was spared the wreckers’ sledgehammers and pickaxes. For two weeks, as the buildings were pulled down, a stretch of Broadway between City Hall Park and St. Paul’s Chapel, the most opulent and fashionable retail street in the country, became a devastation of dust and rubbish, a barrier to the customary tide of foot and wheeled traffic.
Astor’s great hotel opened for business on May 31, 1836. After a brief hesitation, during which it was called the Park Hotel, its projector, builder, and owner settled on the majestic and unabashedly declarative name Astor House. Choosing this name gave him an opportunity to offset the failure of Astoria, his fur-trading post on the Pacific coast, as well as the disappearance of “Astor,” in Wisconsin, a township tract of land that instead of perpetuating its owner’s name was swallowed up by the city of Green Bay.
Two years before he opened his hotel for business, Astor conveyed title to his son William for the token sum of “one Spanish milled dollar.” But apart from this transaction, which was intended to avoid death duties, he held on to an extraordinary degree of personal control over the project, from conception and choice of architect to decisions about management, furnishings, and the number of bathrooms. As Hone and other contemporaries recognized, the new building, although only one of hundreds of Astor properties in Manhattan alone, differed from all the others: it was to be the old man’s self-willed, imposing monument. Astor House was one of his very few ventures that not only did not make him a great deal of money but could even be called, by his exacting standards, a poor investment: carried on his books at $750,000, Astor House paid out only an annual 3 percent or so.
As model for his venture, Astor had cast a covetous and admiring eye on the Tremont House in Boston, the nation’s first hotel built on grandiose lines for the specific purpose of being a hotel, in every modern sense of the word. For the most part, American hotels of the time had barely evolved from roadside inns and taverns in nondescript houses. Their patrons, mainly commercial travelers, had few expectations beyond basic food, drink, and shelter and a bed for the night, preferably one not shared with strangers.
Opened in 1829, Tremont House was a white granite showpiece that gave material expression to Boston’s notion of itself as the Athens of America and its marketplace as well. 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, and for some families a relatively long-term residence that anticipated the later “apartment hotel.” Tremont House was so innovative that for the next fifty years Rogers’s designs, lavishly published in book form in 1830, were the bible of hotel architecture in the United States.
A massive, classically correct building, the four-story, 170-room Tremont House, the largest and costliest hotel of its time, presented to its guests on their arrival a majestic Doric portico, a rotunda with a stained-glass dome ceiling adapted from frescoes in the Baths of Titus, and reception halls floored with marble mosaic. Also on the ground floor were a pillared dining room seventy-three feet long with space for two hundred diners at a sitting, an open piazza, a reading room stocked with newspapers and magazines, separate drawing rooms for gentlemen and ladies, private parlors, several apartments with their own street entrances, and, Charles Dickens noted, “more galleries, colonnades, piazzas and passages than I can remember, or a reader would believe.”
Single and double guest rooms upstairs—the $2 daily rate, exorbitant for its time, kept out all but well-to-do private citizens—offered not only comfort, security, and prestige but novel features such as a unique lock and key for each door, an annunciator system connected to the front desk, a bowl, a water pitcher, and free soap. Rogers equipped the Tremont House with indoor plumbing—eight water closets on the ground floor as well as bathrooms with running water—at a time when even the grandest Bulfinch residences on Beacon, Chestnut, and Mount Vernon streets had no indoor plumbing of any sort, relied for their needs on outhouses and chamber pots, and drew their water from sometimes polluted wells in the yard. Some Brahmin neighbors, like the grandparents of historian Samuel Eliot Morison, were grateful to be able to come to Tremont House for a weekly tub bath. By introducing and popularizing convenient bathtubs and indoor toilets, Rogers’s Boston hotel, and the public and private buildings all over the country that followed its example, had a dramatically improving effect on personal hygiene. It was also the American hotel, as time went on, that introduced still other mechanical innovations—central heating, gas lighting, incandescent lighting, telephones, elevators, air-conditioning—that became essential features of domestic life in private houses and apartments.
Astor had an infallible sense that his city, not Boston, was to be the nation’s social and financial capital, its most cosmopolitan city. New York’s rapidly growing transient population, arriving by stage, rail, and steamer, already supported more than twenty hotels. Until businesses and residences moved uptown, Astor’s Broadway block south of City Hall Park was Manhattan’s prime location, its focus of fashion and publicity, even though, to the dismay of pedestrians and visitors, nomadic pigs rooted for garbage in the gutters while prostitutes, con men, and pickpockets worked the pavements. A few blocks to the east was the Five Points section of the Lower East Side, so desperate and dangerous a slum that Charles Dickens hired two policemen to escort him when he came visiting. During the decade of the 1840s Astor’s stretch of Broadway, a promenade and thoroughfare already crammed with shops, barrooms, galleries, oyster cellars, and ice-cream palaces, added two popular attractions: photographer Mathew B. Brady’s Daguerrian Miniature Gallery and Phineas T. Barnum’s American Museum. In what Henry James recalled as “dusty halls of humbug,” the master showman displayed his collection of freaks, monsters, relics, and curiosities, including a “Feejee Mermaid” and an aged black woman said to have been George Washington’s nurse.
In the spring of 1832 Astor, nearing seventy, commissioned Rogers to design and build for him a hotel that would overshadow the Tremont House in size, splendor, and mechanical conveniences. He laid the cornerstone on July 4, 1834. Two years and about $400,000 later the noble building he had envisioned as a young man newly arrived in the city opened its doors to an astonished public, which hailed it as a “marvel of the age.” Visitors entered a self-contained, virtually perfected world of luxury and dream fulfillment, evidence of what money could accomplish when joined with vision, energy, mechanical ingenuity, running water, indoor plumbing, and Medician magnificence. “Lord help the poor bears and beavers,” said Colonel Davy Crockett, amazed at the amount of money Astor must have taken out of the fur trade to build such a palace.
Six stories high, with a Greek Revival granite portico opening onto Broadway, Astor’s hotel employed a staff of over a hundred and contained three hundred guest rooms richly furnished with custom-made sofas, bureaus, tables, and chairs of expensive black walnut. A steam engine in the basement pumped water to the upper floors from artesian wells and from two forty-thousand-gallon rainwater cisterns. Anticipating the boutique-ing and malling of the modern big-city hotel, the ground floor housed eighteen shops and served as a marketplace for clothing, wigs, clocks, hats, jewelry, dry goods, soda water, medicines, books, cutlery, trusses, pianos, and the services of barbers, tailors, dressmakers, and wig makers. Lighted with gas from the hotel’s own plant, the lobby, public rooms, and corridors, carpeted and furnished with satin couches, became a social focus, a public stage for the display of celebrity and fashion. An immense dining room, with its silver and china alone costing about $20,000, served meals at any time of day or night, a departure from the standard boardinghouse and hotel practice of fixed sittings.* A French chef presided over the kitchen, twelve cooks, a staff of sixty waiters precision-drilled like an honor guard, and a wine cellar that stocked sixteen sherries and twenty Madeiras. The hotel’s printing plant, another novel feature, turned out the daily bill of fare. During the 1840s Astor allowed the managers to roof over the open courtyard and convert it into a vast barroom and lunch-counter veranda.
Having planned this hotel to surpass all others in America and Europe, Astor kept his hand on its running. He leased the Astor House—at $16,000 for the first year (he had asked for more) rising to $20,500 after the third—to Simeon and Frederick Boyden, members of the same family group that had made a success of running Boston’s Tremont House. He allowed the Boydens to talk him into building seventeen bathing rooms instead of the original ten, but he made the Boydens pay for them as well as for any other improvement or deviation from the original plans. Nothing could be added or changed, not a penny spent, without his approval. When the Boydens’ management lease expired, Astor replaced them with one of their clerks, Charles A. Stetson, who had passed the test of a decisive personal interview with him. Announcing that he considered himself “a hotel-keeper, not a tavern-keeper,” Stetson went on to explain, to Astor’s satisfaction, that a “hotel-keeper” was “a gentleman who stands on a level with his guests.” Defining his job in this way, Stetson may have inaugurated the tradition of manager and leaseholder (“proprietor”) as surrogate seigneur, in-house Cerberus, and first among equals.
By the time Astor died in 1848 his astonishing hotel was securely established as the best of its kind anywhere. The parents of Henry James had taken up residence there the winter following their marriage in 1840, and they often returned. Henry’s brother William, the future philosopher and psychologist, was born in the Astor House, and, according to family legend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a guest under the same roof, came up from the lobby to greet the infant in his cradle. “The great and appointed modern hotel of New York,” as Henry recalled the Astor House, “the only one of such pretensions, continued to project its massive image, that of a vast square block of granite, with vast warm interiors, across some of the late and more sensitive stages of my infancy.”
During its almost eighty-year career—a long one, given the fevered pace of demolition, change, and “renewal” on Manhattan Island—Astor’s palace, its lobby and sidewalk outside habitually crowded with onlookers, housed the great and famous of the day: Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Henry Clay, and Stephen Douglas; Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray; the French tragic actress Rachel; former president of the Confederate States Jefferson Davis, recently released from a federal prison; Louis Kossuth, Hungarian revolutionary hero, and Grand Duke Alexis of Russia; Horace Greeley and Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, onetime Whig candidate for president, his enormous bulk gorgeously uniformed; Jenny Lind, Barnum’s “Swedish Nightingale,” who sang to a rapt audience at Castle Garden; and the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, the first British royalty to visit New York. These and others of their kind arrived at Astor House and were welcomed like deities descending to earth. Dozens of papers published on nearby Newspaper Row regularly reported hotel arrivals: James Gordon Bennett told his New York Herald staff, “Anyone who can pay two dollars a day for a room must be important.” Astor House was to be the mecca and transmission center for a growing cult of celebrity.
Statesman and orator Daniel Webster had been guest of honor at the hotel’s opening and always stayed there when he was in town. “If I were shut out of the Astor House,” he once said, “I would never again go to New York.” He was the towering presence at a marathon Whig Party dinner there in 1837. It began at 7:30 and did not reach its high point until 2 a.m. It was then that Webster rose to his feet and spoke for two hours “in a vein of unwearied and unwearying eloquence,” Philip Hone wrote in his diary. No one else on the globe, Hone went on, “could thus have fixed their attention at such an unseasonable hour…. I verily believe not a person left the room while he was speaking.” Whenever the great man took up residence, and also on his birthday for ten years after his death in 1852, the Astor House flew “the Webster Flag”—a large white banner inscribed with the words “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” Denied his party’s presidential nomination in 1852, Webster stood for the last time in the doorway of his suite and announced, his indignation and Ciceronian cadences never failing him although his health had, “My public life is ended. I go to Marshfield to sleep with my fathers, carrying with me the consciousness of duty done. When perilous times come to you, as come they will, you will mourn in bitterness of spirit your craven conduct and your base ingratitude. Gentlemen, I bid you a good-night.”
During the 1850s and 1860s, in his parlor suite, “No. 11,” on the Vesey Street side, Republican Party kingmaker Thurlow Weed held court. There, his grandson recalled, “caucuses were held, campaigns arranged, senators, members of the cabinet, governors, ministers, and even presidents were made and unmade. For nearly a quarter of a century more political power and influence probably emanated from that little apartment than from any other source in the entire republic.”
Walt Whitman was to recall as a moment fixed motionless in time, the arrival from Albany, in February 1861, two months before the Civil War, of President-elect Abraham Lincoln. “A sulky, unbroken, and menacing silence” greeted him (New York City was a nest of Southern sympathizers). “He looked with curiosity upon that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces return’d the look with similar curiosity. The crowd that hemm’d around consisted I should think of thirty or forty thousand men, not a single one his personal friend…. The tall figure gave another relieving stretch or two of arms and legs; then with moderate pace, and accompanied by a few unknown looking persons, ascended the portico steps of the Astor House, disappeared through its broad entrance—and the dumb show ended.” From that moment on, Whitman said, he knew that to paint a true portrait of Lincoln would require the combined genius of Plutarch, Aeschylus, and Michelangelo. From the same vantage point on the Broadway pavement near the Astor House the diarist George Templeton Strong caught a glimpse of “the great rail-splitter’s face…a keen, clear, honest face, not so ugly as his portraits.” The thirteen-year-old William Waldorf Astor also saw the president-elect when he passed through New York in 1861. “‘What a fright,’ I heard an old lady exclaim, and certainly nothing of the heroic revealed itself in that plebeian exterior.”
Three years later, during the closing months of the war, eight Confederate army officers, in civilian clothes and carrying false papers, arrived by train from Toronto. They had equipped themselves with incendiary devices of phosphorus and naphtha. Their mission was to set fire to the Astor House, about twenty other hotels, and Barnum’s American Museum. In the ensuing panic, Southern sympathizers were to seize control of city hall, police headquarters, and the military command center and claim New York for the Confederacy. Along with their firebombs, which simply smoldered instead of breaking into flame, the Confederate plot fizzled, but in theory, at any rate, it made it clear that New York’s crowded hotels were essential to its central nervous system and also its richest, most accessible terrorist target.
For all its grandeur and preeminence, by 1875, John Jacob Astor’s monument to himself had begun to outlive its time. Compared to the city’s bigger, newer, and more fashionable hotels, many of them modeled on it, even the Astor House’s famously innovative mechanical arrangements seemed old-fashioned. At first thought by some of the builder’s skeptical contemporaries to be too far “uptown” of the city’s business district to succeed, it was now too far “downtown” to continue occupying a dominant place in the city’s social life. Mansions of the Robber Barons, and the retail establishments catering to them, were sprouting like dragons’ teeth along Fifth Avenue north of Forty-second Street. Astor’s “palace” had yielded precedence to a newer one at Madison Square, a mile and more north of the Astor House: the white marble Fifth Avenue Hotel, opened in the late 1850s. It offered its eight hundred guests private baths, a fireplace in every bedroom, and the services of a staff of four hundred. The hotel’s steam-powered elevator—called “the vertical railroad”—was the first in the city and introduced a radical change in hotel economics and status systems: instead of being less favored because of the stairs involved, upper-story rooms and suites, distant from street noises and street smells and now conveniently reached by elevator, offered comfort and prestige at premium rates.
The Astor House closed in 1875 for the long-overdue installation of elevators, running hot water, gas lighting on the upper floors, and a general refurbishing. According to an 1899 guidebook, the lunch and dining rooms in the Astor House’s famous rotunda had continued to attract “on any week day, more representative business and professional men than can be seen elsewhere under any one roof in Manhattan.” Even so, the Astor House, once regarded as “a marvel of the age,” was a dying venture, victim of what Walt Whitman, poet of million-footed Manhattan, nonetheless deplored as the city’s irrepressible “pull-down-and-build-all-over-again spirit.” The Astor House closed for good in 1913 despite an eleventh-hour petition signed by five thousand loyalists. The event also inspired many column inches of editorial nostalgia that claimed for New York’s Astor House a place in the nation’s history along with Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and Boston’s Faneuil Hall. The last guests moved out, the rotunda barroom served its last drinks and sandwiches, the furniture was knocked down for as little as $20 a room, and work crews began to dig a subway tunnel under the building. It had been old John Jacob Astor’s “palais royal,” now being reduced to rubble, that spawned what Henry James, early in the next century, was to call “a new thing under the sun,” a visible, tangible, and accessible “hotel civilization.”