Astor, John Jacob
John Jacob (1763-1848), an enterprising American fur merchant. He was a native of Walldorf, near Heidelberg, Germany. The name, Americanized by dropping out one 1, has been given to various members of the family and is commemorated in the Waldorf, or rather the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City. Astor's boyhood days were spent laboring on a farm with his peasant father. At the age of sixteen he joined a brother in London, and engaged in the making of musical instruments. At twenty he came to New York and, through the advice of a fur merchant, engaged in that business. He gradually established fur trading posts throughout the Missouri region, at many points in the Rocky Mountains, and as far west as the mouth of the Columbia, where a trading post was named Astoria in his honor. Washington Irving has given a good account of this enterprise in his Astoria. Astor being a man of thrift, ability, and foresight, made a vast fortune which he increased by judicious investments in New York City real estate. This real estate is the basis of the present wealth of the Astor family. A very considerable portion of his fortune was left for various charitable purposes. Fifty thousand dollars went to the poor of his native village, Walldorf. A bequest of $400,000 was left to build the Astor Public Library, which stands on Lafayette Square. Washington Irving was the first president of the board of management. The endowment has been increased by liberal gifts from other members of the family.
WILLIAM B. (1792-1895), a son of the John Jacob known as "the landlord of New York," amassed a fortune of $30,000,000. He added $600,000 to the funds of the Astor Library. The present head of the family, William Waldorf Astor, is a great-grandson of the first Astor. In 1890 he inherited a fortune of $200,000,000, and removed to London, where he has since bought the Pall-Mall Gazette. In 1899 he renounced his allegiance to the United States and became a British subject.
The headquarters of the Astor estate is a two-story red brick building on Twenty-sixth Street, just west of Broadway. Its heavily barred windows are expressive of the policy of exclusiveness and silence which reign within. It is divided by a heavy partition, the eastern half utilized by what may be called the Foreign, or English Department, the western by the American branch. Day after day files in a procession in every way typical of New York. At one time it is an unkempt Russian Jew from the East Side; at another a paragon of fashion from Fifth Avenue; at another a dapper business man from downtown. They come to lease fashionable residences or great business buildings, in many cases to pay over the counter their monthly tribute. Every morning arrives a mass of mail, from which the clerks collect a huge bulk of checks-0the rent money for the thousands of Astor tenements, residences, hotels, office buildings, docks, and leased lands. Periodically a certain portion of this is sent up to Fifth Avenue and Sixty-sixth Street, where Mr. John Jacob Astor, fourth of that name, lives in state. How much it is few men except the recipient know, the Astors, above all, never talking of their wealth. According to the closest observers, however, it cannot be less than $3,000,000 a year. Twice, if not three times that amount, is sent to Clieveden, Taplow, Bucks, England, where lives the greatest absentee landlord in the world, the present head of the Astor family. His one connecting link with his abjured country, and the one touch of sentiment in the Astor office, is a little back room, formerly the business headquarters of William Waldorf's father, the third John Jacob. The desk is precisely as he left it when he died in 1890, and every morning, by the orders of his now British son, a cluster of fresh roses is placed upon it. Here, then, in the most democratic city of democratic America, is a great family established on purely aristocratic lines, whose collective fortune cannot be far from $450,000,000.-Burton J. Hendrick, McClure's Magazine, April, 1905.