John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) made his original fortune from trading furs and might have become, in his own estimation, the richest man that ever lived, not merely the richest man in the United States, had his commercial empire in the Pacific Northwest not been ‘frustrated by blundering subordinates, Indian treachery, the War of 1812, bad weather, and just plain bad luck’. Yet the founding father of the dynasty was derided as a ‘Dutch sausage peddler’ (his father had been a butcher back in the old country, which had been Germany, not Holland) and while ‘Mrs Astor’ invented and ruled New York ‘society’, the male Astors were regarded as outsiders. For a century they embodied what it was to be rich in America’s imperial city and successive generations were responsible for ushering in a new ‘hotel civilisation’ (as Henry James called it) that was quintessentially American. The Astors were New York’s first family at a time when that city was coming of age. When The Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age
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