Word: astors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Vincent was at Harvard-where Franklin Roosevelt had been before him -when John Jacob Astor escorted his wife (Vincent's stepmother) to a life boat on the deck of the Titanic, tipped his cap and stepped back among the crowd to meet his Maker. Vincent went to Halifax to claim his father's body, returning, not to Harvard, but to Manhattan. Then & there he graduated to man's estate, although it was several months before his 21st birthday. It became his job to manage the $63,000,000 worth of real estate which his father left, mostly...
Franklin Roosevelt was at that time a not particularly hard working lawyer, with no personal fortune but an amazing ability to make friends. And he was setting out on the polite career of being a county squire in politics. Vincent Astor, working in his real estate office on 26th Street just west of Broadway, had no such gift for making friends; he was in fact a thoroughly serious-minded and, save for his money, socially unequipped young...
...Vincent Astor was, in his way, as socially progressive as the young upstate legislator from Hyde Park who was fighting Tammany at Albany. He gave-and still gives-boating excursions up the Hudson to poor women & children. He even ventured far enough into politics to hold down a desk in New York City's Fusion campaign headquarters when John Purroy Mitchel successfully ran for mayor in 1913. But he soon discovered that he had no flair for politics. He married Helen Dinsmore Huntington-a member of another county family-and settled down to his real estate business...
...built a public market on upper Broadway but it was not a financial success. The Astor policy with real estate had always been to buy, hold for a rise and sell at a profit but put up no improvements. Vincent Astor, during the booming '20s, sold a great deal of property. On onetime Astor land now stands Manhattan's Paramount Building, its Longacre Building, half of its Empire State Building and many another. But Vincent Astor broke family tradition by improving Astor property. He put up $10,000,000 worth of buildings, modernized many old ones, became proud...
That feeling was responsible for Mr. Astor's taking a place on the finance committee for the Roosevelt campaign. His cash contributions to the cause of a man who was suspected of wanting to undo all rich men exceeded $25,000. Soon after the election of his friend he started talking with Raymond Moley about founding a magazine to propound the Roosevelt philosophy, which appealed to the liberal side of his own nature. The same feeling was responsible nearly a year later, when Professor Moley had talked himself out of the Brain Trust, for the founding of Today...