BROWDERBOOKS
I am fresh out of author's copies of my latest nonfiction title, Fascinating New Yorkers, having sold three at the Rainbow Book Fair, leaving only one, which I have since mailed to a friend who couldn't make it to the fair. As for my other nonfiction title, No Place for Normal: New York / Stories from the Most Exciting City in the World, I have only two left, and don't plan to replace them once they are gone. Why? Because they'll compete with my next book, another nonfiction title about New Yorkers and New York, which is in the works and will soon be announced. I'm tired of that book, with its bright cover and the words NEW YORK in bold against a light background, upstaging and outselling all my other books at book fairs. Not that the cover of my forthcoming nonfiction title is disappointing. On the contrary, it's exciting and unique, like no book cover, mine or anyone's, that I've encountered. I'll be displaying it soon.
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| See what I mean? Bright colors and bold letters -- they catch everyone's eye. |
For this and my other books, see my post BROWDERBOOKS.
HOW TO MARRY AN ISLAND
Not being a celebrity fan, I’m not a reader of
obituaries. But one obituary in the
Sunday New York Times of October 13
caught my eye. It was for Robert Goelet, whom the caption identified as a
naturalist, philanthropist, and grandee.
I had never heard of him, but the name “Goelet” struck a chord in me. Long ago, when I was researching my biography
of the nineteenth-century Wall Street speculator Daniel Drew, who lived in a
brownstone mansion on Union Square, I read that one of his neighbors, a Goelet,
charmed and amazed passersby by having peacocks strutting in his yard. This struck me not as the brazen
attention-getting gesture of a nouveau
riche, but as an indication of endearing patrician eccentricity. Though I couldn’t even pronounce it, the name
“Goelet” suggested Old Money.
Old New York money in those days meant the Knickerbockers, the
long-established Dutch and English families who kept grubby newcomers at a
distance. “We keep ourselves to
ourselves” was their motto. Marrying
only other Knickerbockers, they lived quietly and tastefully, the walls of
their parlors adorned with gilt-framed portraits of this mayor and that
governor of the distant past, their forebears, who viewed serving the public as
a duty incumbent upon respectable, well-moneyed citizens. Their fortune had usually been acquired
through commerce long ago, permitting them to likewise keep the grubby ways of
business at a distance. But by the 1860s
politics repelled them, for Tammany, the notoriously corrupt Democratic
machine, now ruled the city, courting the votes of the rabble.
Such were my thoughts inspired by the name “Goelet,” which
the Times obit said is pronounced
“guh-LET.” Robert Goelet, its subject,
was certainly a modern-day example of a Knickerbocker, being independently
wealthy and devoting much of his time to civic causes. But were his forebears really the elite
Knickerbockers that I had imagined? To
find out, I consulted the sources close at hand in my apartment. Back in the 1840s, in the wake of the Panic of
1837, which had brought down many a supposed millionaire, Moses Beach, the
publisher of the New York Sun, saw
the need of a published list of the city’s wealthy, showing the size and nature
of their fortunes. The result was Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens
of New York City, Comprising an Alphabetical Arrangement of Persons Estimated
to be Worth $100,000, and Upwards. When
it was published, I suspect that it flew off the shelves. Thanks to tireless Xeroxing by my deceased
partner, Bob, I have a copy of the sixth edition, published in 1845.
Cornelius Vanderbilt and assorted Astors dominate its pages,
Cornelius with a mere one-inch column and a fortune of $1,200,000, and old John
Jacob Astor, the fur trade magnate, with a whole page to himself and a fortune
of $25 million, the largest in the list and the country. Moses himself sneaks in with a two-inch
column and $250,000, and Phineas Barnum, the future circus man, with slightly
less space and $150,000. So how do the
Goelets fare? Rather well, in
appropriately discreet entries:
· Almie Goelet (widow of Peter P.), $250,000.
· George Goelet, the name only, $100,000.
· Margaret Goelet (widow of Robert R.), $100,000.
· Peter Goelet, son of Peter P., $400,000.
A substantial note under
Margaret Goelet states that Robert R., her deceased husband, and his brother
Peter P. were of English birth, and that Robert R. made his fortune in the
hardware business. Both brothers married
daughters of Thomas Buchanan, a Scotch merchant of this city, prior to the American
Revolution. So the Goelets of that time
were doing well, their known fortunes totaling $850,000. Also, one suspects, they were marrying
well. The taint of commerce was still
upon them, to some extent, but they were thriving.
Another trusted source, Burrows and Wallace’s Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 –
a hulking volume that, because of its size, I rarely use – adds a few more
details. Money for buildings to house
the city’s surging population came from old landed families like the
Stuyvesants, Roosevelts, Lenoxes, and – you guessed it – Goelets. Clearly, they were in good company as well as
in the chips. Goelets were also among
the real estate princes who for years blocked the granting of franchises to let
horsecars operate on Broadway, until, in the 1880s, their opponents outbribed
the state legislature and obtained a franchise for the newfangled cable cars to
operate there.
Not that the Goelets were always the enemies of
progress. When William H. Vanderbilt,
the Commodore’s son, found himself and other New Money folks excluded from the
Academy of Music by Old Money’s monopoly of the boxes there, he martialed an
army of New Money people to build the first Metropolitan Opera House way uptown
at Broadway and 39th Street.
And among his backers were a few “older patricians,” including one Ogden
Goelet. One wonders how enamored of
opera Mr. Vanderbilt’s confederates were; certainly they and their wives were
enamored of having an opera box where they could be seen by other moneyed arrivistes.
Goelets
were also among the elite clients of McKim, Mead, & White, the stellar
architectural firm of the 1880s and 1890s that created such masterpieces as the
Washington Square Arch, the pillared magnificence of Low Library at Columbia
University, and the Madison Square Garden rooftop theater where the firm’s
leading light, Stanford White, would be shot to death in 1906 by a jealous
rival in an affair of the heart. And
when millionaires flocked to build palatial residences for themselves on the
upper Fifth Avenue, another Robert Goelet was among them. In decade after decade, the Goelets seem to
have been discreetly involved in the city’s eventful history.
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And the recently deceased Robert of today? A photo shows a slender, elderly man, clean-shaven and smiling, formally attired with a black bow tie. The Times
obit states that Robert Guestier Goelet was born in 1923 in a chateau in
Amblainville, France, on a 10,000-acre estate owned by his mother’s family, the
Guestiers. His mother’s family were
French wine merchants, and his father, Robert Walton Goelet, managed his
inherited real estate, railways, hotels, and “other holdings” from homes in New
York, Newport, R.I., and France. Dad
must have been a busy guy, to keep track of all that property and all those
homes. Clearly, his son was born with a
silver spoon – maybe several – in his mouth.
That wasn’t the case at the start. The obit says that the Goelets were French
Huguenots, whom the Sun King, Louis XIV, had made personae non gratae in France
with the repeal of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.
Always ahead in the game, the first Goelets to arrive on these blessed
shores were ten-year-old Jacobus and his widowed father (whose name the obit
doesn’t give), who came from Amsterdam in 1676.
Jacobus’s grandson, Peter, was an ironmonger during the Revolution, but
then invested in real estate. However
prosperous ironmongering might have been, it couldn’t match real estate on
Manhattan. By the end of the nineteenth
century, the family owned some 55 acres on Manhattan. Now 55 acres may not sound like much,
compared to 10,000 acres in France, but those acres were on the East Side of
Manhattan, from Union Square to 48th Street, and therefore worth a
fortune.
As for the subject of the obit, he too was a pretty busy guy. Among his accomplishments (not all of them
simultaneous):
· President of the American Museum of Natural History
· President of the New York Historical Society
· President of the New York Zoological Society
· President of the French Institute / Alliance Française
· Board member of the National Audubon Society
· Board member of the Carnegie Institution for Science
· Board member of the Chemical Bank (now my bank, J.P.
Morgan Chase), founded in 1824 by his ancestor, Peter Goelet
· Husband of Alexandra Gardiner Creel.
That last entry might seem puzzling, but when he married
her, at age 52, in 1976, she was co-owner, with her eccentric uncle Robert
Gardiner, of Gardiners Island, under a trust from her aunt. Gardiners Island! I had long heard of it as a privately owned 3,300-acre island off the eastern tip of Long Island, rich in history, but also an idyllic wildlife site not open to the public. A Gardiner had bought the island from the Mantaucket Indians in 1639. With the Gardiner family's permission, Captain Kidd had buried some treasure there in 1699, before facing charges of piracy in Boston, where the governor ordered the Gardiners to fork over the treasure as evidence. (The reigning Gardiner kept one diamond and gave it to his daughter.) During both the Revolution and the War of 1812 a British fleet anchored there, and its crew came ashore to either buy supplies or steal them. In 1812, when the Americans captured some of the British crew, the British came to arrest the current Lord of the Manor. He received them lying in bed, feigning debility, and with a supply of medicines in evidence. Not wanting a sick man on board, the British left him alone. And in 1820 the island saw the birth of Julia Gardiner, who would become the second wife of President John Tyler and preside over the White House as First Lady.
So now this storied island, with its white pine and oak forests, colonial buildings, 200-year-old windmill, family cemetery, and more ospreys than people, was linked to the Goelet clan. The reigning Gardiner uncle styled himself the “Sixteenth Lord
of the Manor” and viewed everyone in the Hamptons as nouveau riche. He had
no heirs, and engaged in a three-decade legal imbroglio with his niece over
maintenance costs and visitation rights on the island. He also accused her husband of trying to run
over him with a truck, prompting New York
Magazine to describe the island in 1989 as a wasps’ nest. When the old man died in 2004, Robert and his wife took full
possession, restored its colonial buildings and natural habitat, and maintained
it as a wildlife sanctuary. It’s fine to
be president of this or that, but to marry Gardiners Island was no small feat.
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| Aerial view of Gardiners Island, 2007. dsearls |
The Gardiners, by the way, were just as savvy as the Goelets
in amassing a fortune and hanging on to it.
“We have always married into wealth,” Robert Gardiner told a British
newspaper in 2003. “We covered all our
bets.” Indeed they did, being on both
sides in the Revolution and the Civil War. Whatever their loyalties as Americans, they were at the mercy of the British navy and had to deal with them as best they could.
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| The Gardiners Island windmill, built in 1795. |
Robert Goelet grew up in France and came to New York at age
12. As a result, he had never seen a
baseball game, nor did he ever want to.
He got a B.A. in history from -- where else? – Harvard. In the course of his career in philanthropy
and civic matters, he acquired a reputation for joining a board when there was
an emergency, and somehow resolving it.
Not that he always got his way.
When he wanted to sell Lever House, the glass-box skyscraper on Park
Avenue, to a developer, the Landmarks Preservation Commission saved it from
demolition. And when he wanted to rescue
the New York Historical Society from bankruptcy by building an apartment tower
over it, that same commission stopped him again. But the presidency that thrilled him the most
was that of the Museum of Natural History.
He confessed to a personal weakness for fish and birds. “I’m nuts for fossils, and I have a healthy
respect for poisonous snakes.” Which
went back to his school days when, blocked from sports by rheumatism, he took
to climbing trees to inspect birds’ nests.
So I say, let’s forgive him his antipathy to baseball (which
I share), and his outrageous wealth and privilege, and applaud his love of
wildlife (which I also share). He didn’t
learn that on a 10,000-acre estate in France; he learned it over here. So may he rest in peace.
Source note: This post was
inspired by the obituary of Robert Goelet by Sam Roberts in the New York Times of Sunday, October 13,
2019, and owes many of its details to that source.
© 2019
Clifford Browder
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