[WSJ]
"Astor" Review: The Name on Every Block
After John Jacob Astor made his fortune in the fur trade, he invested in
cheap real estate in Manhattan. A New York dynasty was born.
In 1981, when Anderson Cooper was 13, he joined his mother, Gloria
Vanderbilt, for lunch at Mortimer's on Manhattan's Upper East Side. There
she introduced him to a "very small lady in a very big fur coat" who swept
in and sat down at the next table. It was Brooke Astor, the doyenne of New
York society. A major philanthropist, she had given tens of millions of
dollars to the city's charities, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the
New York Public Library. Looking at the "delicate, well-groomed woman
about to enjoy a delicate, well-groomed lunch," Mr. Cooper writes that he
was unaware at the time of the "brutality" at the heart of her inherited
wealth.
Mr. Cooper's "Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune,"
co-authored with Katherine Howe, is a lively, well-written and
satisfyingly detailed account of the family that came to own New York--a
follow-up to their bestselling collaboration "Vanderbilt: The Rise and
Fall of an American Dynasty" (2021). "Astor" provides a fascinating
history of the city, from the populist riots in 1849 stirred up by a
production of "Macbeth" at the Astor Opera House to the gay scene that
thrived for decades in the bar of the Astor Hotel that once stood on
Broadway at 44th Street
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