When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age (review)

Justin Kaplan's When the Astors Owned New York is a probing account of how and why the two cousins—William Waldorf Astor and John Jacob Astor IV—spent much of their lives decorating Manhattan's skyline with grand hotels. Kaplan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Mark Twain, draws on personal papers, contemporary press accounts, and various literary works to locate the Astors in Gilded Age New York high society. The Astors built hotels not simply to make money, Kaplan contends, but also to conjure "the hotel imagination—a vision of extravagance, grandeur, amplitude, order, and efficiency" (p. 7). The sumptuous ballrooms, cafés, and lobbies of hotels like the Waldorf-Astoria put the nation's political and social elite on display for ordinary Americans to observe, admire, and emulate.

William Waldorf (Willy) and John Jacob IV (Jack) grew up in neighboring Fifth Avenue brownstones. As great grandsons of fur and real-estate magnate John Jacob Astor, they enjoyed the wealth and privilege of "crown princes in a society without a throne" from birth (p. 31). Yet, their temperaments could not have been more different. Willy's strict Calvinist parents instilled in him, a sense of purposefulness and self-discipline that led him to master several languages, earn a law degree, write fiction, and collect art. Yearning for aristocratic status, Willy moved to England, purchased the title of Viscount, and lived in a castle. In 1919, Viscount Astor died in a most ignoble position, on the toilet. Unlike Willy, Jack was "pampered and something of a dabbler" (p. 7). In his youth, Jack earned the moniker "Jack Ass" after a scuffle over a woman (p. 56). Like his playboy father, Jack spent his fondest days on the yacht Nourmahaul, meaning "light of the harem." During the Spanish–American War, Jack acquired the rank of colonel after he donated Nourmahaul to the navy, raised a regiment, and provided passage for troops on his Illinois Central Railroad (p. 135). In 1912, Jack sank with the Titanic after helping his teenage wife onto a life raft.

Willy and Jack had spent much of their lives locked in a bitter competition to outdo one another as hotel builders. Like several other nineteenth-century capitalists—including Chicago's Potter Palmer, San Francisco's William Chapman Ralston, and the first John Jacob Astor—the Astor cousins regarded the grand hotels as monuments to their own greatness. For Willy and Jack, hotels were also "the stage for a family drama of pride, spite, rivalry, self projection, and the love of grandeur and prominence" (p.148). The two hotels that would become the Waldorf-Astoria were a case in point. Driven by what Kaplan describes as "feelings of oedipal succession, long-standing clan antagonism … and undisguised vindictiveness," Willy built the Waldorf in 1891 on the site of his parents' brownstone, dwarfing the neighboring home of Jack's mother (p. 74). In revenge, Jack threatened to replace his mother's house with malodorous stables, but his advisors convinced him to build an even larger hotel, the Astoria, instead. After tense negotiations, the cousins agreed to connect their hotels with corridors that could be sealed off should they quarrel.

The Waldorf-Astoria put the rich and famous "on display" for ordinary people to observe and "maybe learn from as part of their own education in polite customs" in preparation for a possible "climb up the ladder" (p. 88). Like other Astor hotels—including the Astor, the St. Regis, and the New Netherland—it shaped popular conceptions of wealth and luxury, offering aristocratic splendor and modern conveniences such as telephones, elevators, and air conditioners. Not surprisingly, writers ranging from Horatio Algerm, Jr. and Theodore Dreiser to Edith Wharton and Willa Cather made Astor hotels settings for their stories of the well-to-do.

Kaplan, too, has successfully made the hotel, the setting for his...