206. Tiffany

     A large, darkened room with 132 Tiffany lamps on display, each having its own space, each illuminated and casting a soft glow.  Reddish or brown bronze bases topped by polychrome shades of glass, mosaics of small pieces of luminous red, yellow, blue, green, purple, and pink: miracles of glass, of color, of light.  Looking closely at one lamp, one sees a ring of dragonflies with red bodies, their yellow wings extended horizontally, and above them on the shade, a band of green and blue that could be the water they are darting over, and at the very top of the shade, a patch of blue that might be sky.  Another lamp suggests purple wisteria drooping languorously, and another, the wings of a peacock with eyespots of red and green.  Other shades are geometrical, with triangles and squares and ovals of many colors, still others show daffodils or peonies or poppies, or spiders with webs, or butterflies: nature enhanced, transformed.  This room is magic; to leave it is jolting, dispiriting, sad.

Cliff

     The room just described exists only in my imagination, but it or something like it will exist on the fourth floor of the New York Historical Society in 2017, when their new installation is completed and opens to the public.  In the meantime I have to settle for whatever my imagination can cook up.

A wisteria lamp.
Fopseh

A dragonfly lamp, plus pigeons.
Rickjpelleg

    

     “Tiffany”: the name suggests luxury, quality, style.  There are no Tiffany lamps in the West Village apartment shared by me and my partner Bob, but we do possess two genuine Tiffany products.  One is a sterling silver letter opener that Bob once gave his mother and then repossessed after her death; he uses it daily to open mail. 

     Our other Tiffany possession is a small vase that was given to Bob by a friend who inherited it from his mother.  Round-shaped with a narrow mouth, it is two and a half inches in diameter and serves no practical purpose, nor should it, given its exquisite fragility.  To my eye it is silverish, and to Bob’s eye golden, but in either case it emits a soft luster to be marveled at.  Bob keeps it on top of his dresser in a little glass case that he bought specifically to shelter it, and there it sits, asking only to be looked at and admired.

     Our friend John, while serving as co-executor of the estate of a mutual friend, came into possession of a genuine Tiffany lamp lacking a few small pieces of glass.  He and his fellow executor spent $2800 to have it repaired, so they could sell it through Christie’s.  Christie’s estimated its value at $20,000 to $30,000, but at auction it drew not a single bidder.  Undismayed, Christie’s decided to hold off for six months and offer it again.  At the second auction it was sold for $18,000; after Christie’s fee and other expenses were subtracted, the two executors netted $12,000, which as heirs they split evenly.  All of which shows the value of genuine Tiffany lamps today, for which there is an ongoing market.  Because Tiffany’s, to put it bluntly, has class.

     It also has a long and interesting history.  Charles Lewis Tiffany, the founder, and his partner John P. Young opened the first Tiffany’s as a “stationary and fancy goods emporium” in 1837, with the intention of selling not to the moneyed few, but to the masses.  Located at 259 Broadway, opposite City Hall Park, it netted all of $4.98 on the first day, which hardly suggested success.  But the partners persevered, offering umbrellas, Chinese carvings, portfolio cases, fans, gloves, and stationery, and on New Year’s Eve, the peak of the holiday shopping season, they rang up sales of $679. 

Charles Lewis Tiffany in his store, circa 1887.

     In the years that followed, Charles Lewis Tiffany roamed the docks for unusual imports, bargained with sea captains for exotic items, and acquired a reputation for selling such curiosities as dog whips, Venetian-glass writing implements, Native American artifacts, Chinese novelties, “seegar” boxes, and “ne plus ultras” (garters). 

      Jewelry was not at first a significant item, but that changed in 1848, when aristocrats fleeing the revolution in Paris dumped their diamonds on the market, and Tiffany’s partner Young, just arriving in the city, snapped them up.  Arrested as a royalist conspirator, Young talked his way out of it and survived to forward his trove to Tiffany, who publicized his partner’s adventures; ironically, it was Tiffany himself whom the press then christened the “King of Diamonds.” 

     In 1850 Tiffany opened a Paris branch, thus acquiring access to European jewelry markets that no American competitor could match.  Years later Charles Lewis Tiffany would acknowledge that the firm had also acquired the girdle of diamonds of Marie Antoinette, which had disappeared when the 1848 revolutionaries looted the Tuileries palace.  Breaking the girdle up into pieces to sell, Tiffany claimed that its authenticity could not be proven, and thus avoided any awkward revelations about how the item had migrated from the royal vaults of the Tuileries into his own welcoming palms, a mystery that remains unsolved today.

     His reputation for scrupulosity, his ready cash, and his swift judgment made Tiffany the city’s leading dealer in jewelry and Oriental pearls.   Always on the lookout for rarities, in 1856 he bought a perfect pink pearl from a New Jersey farmer who had found it in his dinner mussels.  He promptly sold it to the Empress Eugénie of France, news of which precipitated a mass combing of the waterways of America in hopes of finding another huge triple p: perfect pink pearl.  (None was found.)  And when a Montana prospector unearthed some sapphires and mailed them to him for appraisal, Tiffany appraised them and immediately sent him a check for $12,000.  But in his store haggling over prices was not allowed; one paid the tagged price, however astronomical, and that was that.

Isabella II, before she lost her jewels.

    The tottering monarchies of Europe continued to transfer Old World wealth to the New via Tiffany & Co.  In 1868, when a revolution deposed Queen Isabella II of Spain, the firm acquired her gems for $1.6 million and sold most of them to railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, so they could adorn his spouse.  And in 1887, when the remaining French crown jewels were auctioned off by the very anti-monarchical Third Republic, Tiffany’s agent was of course on hand to acquire them; soon afterward, the necklace of the ex-Empress Eugénie (yes, that same Eugénie, now ousted), consisting of 222 diamonds in four rows, was seen at a ball gracing the neck and shoulders of Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer, the consort of the renowned newspaper publisher. 

     Not that Charles Lewis Tiffany was infallible.  In 1872 word of a discovery of diamonds in a mine in Arizona reached New York, and a clutch of speculators, eager to buy stock in the mine, consulted him.  Shown the diamonds in the rough, he announced, “They are worth at least $150,000.”  The speculators then invested four times that in the mine, but subsequently a government geologist went to the site, which was in fact in Utah, and discovered that it had been “salted” with poor-quality stones from South Africa.  Informed of the fraud, Tiffany confessed, “I had never seen a rough diamond before.”  And he lost $80,000 in the swindle himself.   

     As the city spread northward and the affluent middle class migrated uptown to more fashionable districts, Tiffany & Co. migrated with them.  By the 1860s the firm was at 552 Broadway, occupying an ornate five-story building with round-arched windows and, over the main entrance, a nine-foot carved-wood Atlas shouldering a huge clock that was said to have stopped at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865, the exact moment of Abraham Lincoln’s death.  (Painted to look bronze, Atlas would accompany the firm on its migrations thereafter and overlooks the Tiffany entrance on Fifth Avenue today.)

     And what did one see in Tiffany’s window in those days?  A mishmash of cluttered objects, some made by Tiffany and some imported: bronze figurines, vases and cups and goblets, fancy lace fans, jeweled clocks and caskets, ornate silver picture frames, and draped over everything in profusion, strings of pearls.  Such was the bric-a-brac that the Victorians used to clutter up themselves and their parlors; one can well imagine the smaller items clustered on the shelves of a whatnot, next to a daguerreotype of young Danny in his Civil War uniform and, in a fancy frame, a lock of Aunt Millie’s hair.

Tiffany's, circa 1887.

     Probably not on display was the famous Tiffany Diamond, weighing 287.42 carats, discovered in South Africa in 1877 and purchased by the firm for $18,000.  The young gemologist whom Tiffany entrusted with cutting it down studied the diamond for a year before starting work.  He then carefully cut it down to 128.54 carats, adding 32 facets for a total of 90, and thus created a dazzling multifaceted gem that, never sold, has highlighted Tiffany exhibits throughout the world ever since.  Only two women have ever worn it: Mrs. Sheldon Whitehouse at a Tiffany ball in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1957, and Audrey Hepburn in 1961 publicity photographs for the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  The film helped refurbish Tiffany’s then sagging reputation, and for years afterward visitors coming to the store would ask where breakfast was served.  Today the diamond is displayed on the main floor of Tiffany’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue at 57th Street.

The Tiffany diamond, topped by a bird.
Shipguy

     But Charles Lewis Tiffany marketed any rarity that he thought might sell.  In 1858, when the Atlantic cable at last reached Ireland and established a transatlantic telegraph link, he acquired 20 miles of the cable salvaged from unsuccessful earlier attempts to lay it, and sold four-inch snippets for fifty cents apiece, as well cable-adorned canes, umbrellas, paperweights, watch fobs, and lapel pins that the public snapped up eagerly – so eagerly that the police had to restrain the crowds.

     In the late nineteenth century Tiffany’s produced fine silverware that won international prizes, and in 1894 built a huge factory in Newark to make such luxury items as the silver plate favored by Delmonico’s, as well as exotic leather goods and engraved stationary.  By now, obviously, the firm was catering to the rich and famous.

Tiffany no. 2, circa 1908.

     When Charles Lewis Tiffany died in 1902, his son, Louis Comfort Tiffany, became vice-president, but Tiffany no. 2 was more of a painter than a merchant.  The major contribution of his Tiffany Studios was the Tiffany lamp, a costly handcrafted item marketed to the wealthy.  Recent scholarship has revealed that it was not no. 2  but an artist named Clara Driscoll who designed many of the most famous lamps, which were turned out by her team of “Tiffany Girls.” Introduced to the public at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the lamps became very popular on both sides of the Atlantic.  The New York Historical Society’s collection of 132 Tiffany Lamps was the gift in 1984 of a single collector, Dr. Egon Neustadt, an Austrian-born New York City orthodontist and real estate developer who had been collecting them since 1935, when he and his wife bought their first lamp in a Greenwich Village antique store.

     The successors of the Tiffany family abhorred publicity, and under their direction the firm produced staid and predictable merchandise.  By the 1950s sales had shrunk to half the level of the generation before, and the firm risked bankruptcy.  Whether the general public was aware of this is uncertain, since when I came to New York in the 1950s the name “Tiffany’s” still had cachet, suggesting fine products for the elite who were willing to pay accordingly.  Things changed for the better with the coming of Walter Hoving, the Swedish-born American businessman who became president of Tiffany & Co. in 1955 and held that post until 1980. 

     A tall and distinguished-looking man, impeccably tailored, Hoving began by getting rid of everything in the store that did not meet his standards, marking down silver matchbook covers to $6.75 and emerald brooches to a mere $29,700.  Hoving has been called a snob, but under his guidance the quality of the merchandise improved and customers flocked.  Among the shoppers on several occasions was President John F. Kennedy, whom Hoving dealt with personally in private, and who bought items for his wife.  When Kennedy asked if the President got a discount, Hoving pointed to a portrait of Mary Lincoln wearing a strand of Tiffany pearls and replied, “Well, President Lincoln didn’t receive one.”  So Kennedy paid full price.

The Trump Tower (the tall one, of course).
InSapphoWeTrust

     Hoving was a shrewd businessman, but Donald Trump was shrewder.  Wanting the Bonwit Teller site at 727 Fifth Avenue, next door to Tiffany’s, to build his Trump Tower, The Donald also coveted Tiffany’s air rights, which would let him build a structure that would otherwise exceed regulations.  So he presented to Hoving a sketch of a hideous building that he knew the fastidious Hoving would abhor, so that Trump could then offer to build a far more attractive building if Hoving sold him the air rights.  Dreading the prospect of an ugly building right next door that would devalue his beloved Tiffany’s, Hoving agreed, and Trump got the air rights.  The Bonwit Teller store was then carefully demolished – in this exclusive neighborhood, no wrecking balls or explosives allowed – and the 62-story Trump Tower went up.

     Hoving left in 1980 because Tiffany’s had been acquired by Avon Products in 1979.  A buyout by management followed, and in 1987 Tiffany’s became a public company and raised $103 million through the sale of its common stock.  During the 1990-1991 recession it turned to mass merchandising, presented itself as affordable to all, and advertised diamond engagement rings starting at $850.  A brochure entitled “How to Buy a Diamond” went out to 40,000 people who had dialed a toll-free number.  The founder, Charles Lewis Tiffany, was adept at publicizing his wares, but what he would have thought of these modern expedients I leave to the viewers’ imagination.

     One thing is clear today: genuine Tiffany lamps are still prized items that sell for tens of thousands.  But plenty of imitations are on the market, since they are advertised online for as little as $64.78.  So how does one tell the authentic lamp from the knockoffs?  Some clues are very technical; here are several simpler things to look for:

·      A bronze base.  Not wood, plastic, brass, or zinc.

·      The color of the glass changes when the lamp is lit.

·      A Tiffany Studios stamp and a number on the base.

·      Signs of age; it won’t look brand new.  (But some fakes mimic age on the base.)

·      A ring of grayish lead in the hollow base.

·      The glass shade, if knocked gently, should rattle.

Also, a buyer should ask for a money-back guarantee and beware of any  shop that won’t give one.  Not that there’s anything wrong with cheapie Tiffany lamps that don’t claim to be authentic; they have their place in the market.  It’s the ones that are deliberately made to look like and sell as authentic ones that cause trouble.

     One almost final note: in 2013 a former Tiffany vice-president was arrested and charged with stealing more than $1.3 million in jewelry.  This development, for sure, would make founder Charles Lewis Tiffany turn over in his Green-Wood Cemetery grave in Brooklyn.

Tiffany's today.
David Shankbone

     Since 1940 Tiffany & Co. has occupied a granite and limestone building on Fifth Avenue at 57^th Street, with a grandiose stainless-steel entrance overlooked by the nine-foot near-naked Atlas that has been shouldering a clock for Tiffany’s since 1853.  And what does Tiffany’s offer today?  Their website promises free shipping on orders of $150 or more, and advertises gifts under $500.  Clearly, they want to appeal, if not to the masses, at least to the modestly affluent.  But modest they themselves aren’t, claiming to be “the world’s premier jeweler and America’s house of design since 1837.”  Among their offerings is an item labeled “quintessential Tiffany,” a dazzling sixteen-stone ring in 18-karat gold with diamonds from Parisian designer Jean Schlumberger, a marvel whose “timeless perfection … deserves a place of honor in every stylish woman’s jewelry box.”  The price?  $9,000, which is reasonable indeed when compared to Schlumberger’s Croisillon bracelet in 18-karat gold for $30,000.  And remember, no haggling.

Atlas still holds the clock today.
Meg Lessard

     A bulletin from the health-care front.  My eye doctor, a very no-nonsense type who wastes no time on small talk, wanted me to get an eye-drop refill immediately from the pharmacy on the ground-floor of the clinic.  One of her assistants phoned the clinic to order the refill, then informed me, “The pharmacy needs a twenty-four notice to –”  Hearing this, my doctor seized the phone, jabbered fiercely, then hung up and announced, “You can pick it up downstairs now.”  Her two assistants who witnessed this were smiling already.  “We all know where the power is,” I said softly to them, and they grinned from ear to ear.

     End of story?  No way.  When I went down to the pharmacy, the pharmacist informed me that if I got the refill now, my insurance wouldn’t cover it, so it would cost $120.  But if I waited two days, the refill would be covered and cost only $35.  So I chose to wait.  Moral of the story:  In the health-care universe doctors are gods, but insurance companies are super gods.  So it goes.

     Coming soon:  The rich of today, who make those rags-to-riches nineteenth-century types look absolutely quaint.  We’ll get with it with hedge fund managers, corporate raiders, and the like.  And guess who is the richest New Yorker?  You may – or may not – be surprised.  (Clue: it isn’t Donald Trump.)

     ©  2015  Clifford Browder

205. The Rich

1845

They are always there and we acknowledge the fact with our envy or our resentment.  And they’ve always been especially conspicuous in New York City.  So let’s have a look at who they are – or were – and how they got their money, starting in 1845.  Why 1845?  Because that year saw publication of the sixth edition of Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City, offering an alphabetical list of all persons in the city believed to be worth $100,000 or more, with the sums appended to their name, along with, as the preface states, “interesting biographical and historical matter, as derived from the consultation of books and living authorities.” 

     All of which suggests a compendium of The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and People magazine, a formality worthy of Barron’s spiced up with some juicy tidbits like those featured in the gossip magazines prominently displayed in supermarket check-out lanes.  But remember, this was 1845, not 2015.  And the publication was answering a need, since in those days there was no official agency offering credit ratings of individuals or businesses, and this lack became obvious during the Panic of 1837 and its aftermath, when bankruptcies multiplied throughout the city and the nation.  People wanted to know who was financial sound and who was not.  So Moses Y. Beach, publisher of The Sun, a prominent New York daily, got busy and produced this publication.  And if $100,000 sounds like a low entry level for admission to its pages, it’s worth remembering that an 1845 dollar would be worth $31.25 today, so multiply all the figures accordingly.

     So who had the biggest fortunes in 1845?  There’s no doubt about #1, John Jacob Astor, whose $25 million made in the fur trade and New York real estate established him as the richest man in the entire country and earned him two full columns of comment in tiny print, more than anyone else in the publication.  He is hailed as a truly great man, a German immigrant who arrived on these shores as a common steerage passenger, a poor uneducated boy who didn’t speak English, but who through his own industry accumulated a fortune “scarcely second to that of any individual on the globe, and has executed projects that have become identified with the history of this country, and which will perpetuate his name to the latest age.”  His princely house on Lower Broadway, furnished with “richest plate” and works of art, and staffed with an army of servants, including “some from the Empire of the Celestials,” is viewed with admiration and awe.  Moses Beach estimates his income at $2 million a year ($62 million in today’s dollars), which for 1845 was an unprecedented sum.  Also noted is Astor’s gift of $350,000 for the creation of a library in New York City that would bear his name, and that in time merged with two other libraries to create the New York Public Library of today.  All in all, the career of John Jacob is presented to the reader as a classic but exceptional example of rags to riches, a theme that Beach's preface promised to celebrate.  But his portraits  suggest only riches and dignity, no hint of rags or steerage.

John Jacob Astor, an 1825 portrait.  Dignity,
plus a neck cloth (no ties as yet).

     Sadly, the subject of this encomium, now 82 years old, was suffering from ill health.  White-haired and portly, with an iron jaw under folds of loose flesh, he walked only with the help of attendants, took short carriage rides, struck others as dignified but tired.  Yet he was still alert when it came to moneymaking and tight with his pennies, for in his mind he was still the penniless youth who came to this country in steerage.  While dining with a friend once in a new hotel, he eyed the proprietor and announced to his friend, “This man will never succeed.”  “Why not?” asked the friend.  “Don’t you see what large lumps of sugar he puts in the sugar bowl?” 

     The second richest man in the city, with $10 million according to Moses Beach, was Stephen Whitney, another rags-to-riches story, who started out poor as a retail liquor merchant, went into the wholesale liquor business, speculated with great success in cotton, and also invested in real estate.  Liquor, cotton, and real estate – three sure ways for a shrewd New Yorker to make money, and Beach assures us that Whitney was very shrewd, and also “very close in his dealings.”  Is he remembered today?  Hardly.  Unlike old John Jay and his descendants, Whitney had little time for philanthropy.

Stephen van Rensselaer no. 3

     The third largest New York City fortune, matching Whitney’s at $10 million, was not a living person but the estate of Stephen van Rensellaer (d. 1839) of Albany, who qualified for inclusion by virtue of his ownership of hundreds of lots in New York City.  But city real estate, however substantial, was simply a shrewd side investment, since Stephen van Rensellaer (the third of that name) had been the fifth in a long line of Dutch patroons, lords of the huge semi-feudal estate of Rensellaerswyck, comprising vast lands on either side of the Hudson River both above and below Albany.  Whether a vast feudal estate where a Rensellaer lorded it, however benevolently, over 3,000 tenants was appropriate in a modern, democratic age, Moses Beach never questions, though the tenants were beginning to do so in what would become the anti-rent movement and put an end to the anachronistic patroonship.

     Other multimillionaires of 1845 include William B. Astor ($5 million), John Jacob’s son, another shrewd investor in Manhattan real estate; Peter G. Stuyvesant (($4 million), a descendant of the one-legged last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, from whom Peter G., Beach informs us, has inherited and kept the silver spoon; and James Lenox ($3 million), who inherited from his father and, so Beach assures us, “devotes himself chiefly to pious objects.”  Actually, he was acquiring rare manuscripts and books, including Bibles, and paintings, busts, engravings, and other art works for what would become the most valuable such collection in the hemisphere and be housed in the Lenox Library, which in time would be consolidated with two other libraries to create the New York Public Library.  If with the Astors, father and son, one sees money-getting finding time for philanthropy, James Lenox shows inherited wealth devoting itself almost exclusively to cultural activities from which the whole community will benefit in time.  Sooner or later, money begets culture.

A Gutenberg Bible, circa 1455, in the Rare Books Division of the New York Public Library.  
From the Lenox Library.  One of James Lenox's "pious objects."
NYC Wanderer

     Of the eleven other millionaires, three names stand out, albeit for very different reasons.  Peter Harmony is said to have come to the city as a poor cabin boy born in the West Indies, and to have lately retired from the shipping business with a princely fortune ($1.5 million).  (He was in fact an immigrant from Spain.)  “Some of his ships to Africa, it is said, have brought out cargoes that have paid a profit equal to the difference in price between negroes in Africa and Cuba.”  Which is a pretty clear reference to the illegal but lucrative and still flourishing slave trade that brought Africans to the Spanish colony of Cuba, where sugar plantations still provided a market, and officials looked the other way.

     Jonathan Thorne is described as “the very pink and glass of fashion in the Parisian circles,” and this despite his descent from old Quaker ancestors who would wonder at his “gorgeous private chapel at his imperial mansion in the French capital.”  “What changes in the wheel of fortune,” Beach adds, “from an humble purser in the navy?”  How a humble purser achieves a fortune of $1 million and a mansion in Paris, Beach fails to explain.  But he is clearly on the side of hard work and business, and not on the side of fashion.

     Cornelius Vanderbilt, credited with $1.2 million, rates only a short paragraph, since Moses Beach could not anticipate the future railroad king and titan of finance.  But Beach recognizes energy when he sees it:  “Of an old Dutch root.  Cornelius has evinced more energy and ‘go aheadativeness’ in building and driving steamboats and other projects than ever one single Dutchman possessed.”  It takes the American hot sun, he adds, to clear off the fogs of the Zuyder Zee and wake up the phlegm of a descendant of old Holland.

     Though full of admiration for many, Moses Beach was at times ready to pronounce a moral judgment as well.  Just hear him, no doubt with memories of the Panic of 1837 and its aftermath, praise a team of mechanics who became celebrated engravers of bank notes.  By contrast, he asks, what utility is to be seen in “swindling stock operations … deemed more reputable than the walks of mechanic life.”  No longer, he insists, can dreaming speculators and fancy operators sneer at the “brawny arms” and “russet palms” of the honest laborer.  The false system of credit that once prevailed has been eliminated, he declares, “breaking up the nests of lounging, idle upstarts, that like mushrooms on a dung-hill sprouted up out of the masses of rag-paper and spurious capital.”  And what would Mr. Beach say today, in the wake of our own recent financial convulsion, when such novel phenomena as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps appeared, and still appear, to the bafflement of many and the enrichment of a few?

     The first half of the nineteenth century in New York was the age of the merchants, when success in trade brought wealth.  Most of Beach’s subjects dealt in things you could see, touch, taste, or smell: silks, cotton, tea, furs, chinaware, brandy, ships, and real estate.  And in a few cases, slaves.  Not that rich marriages and inherited wealth didn’t help.

     Among the names that had yet to achieve their greatest success was Phineas T. Barnum, proprietor of the American Museum and guardian of the celebrated midget Tom Thumb.  Reported to be currently in Europe exhibiting said Thumb, “by whom he is coining money,” the master of showmanship and humbug is said to be worth $150,000.  Yet his sensational promotion of Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, lay five years in the future, and his traveling circuses had yet to be organized.

     Another New Yorker just at the start of his career is Irish-born Alexander T. Stewart, worth $800,000, already a “celebrated Dry Good Merchant of Broadway whose shop is the grand resort of the fashionables.”  Yet he rates only a mere six lines.  Rest assured, we will hear of him again.

     For an unusual name no one can match Preserved Fish, a sea captain turned shipping merchant worth $150,000, and president of the Tradesmen’s Bank.  Beach presents him as “an example of an uneducated man, of strong mind, exercising great influence in his sphere.”  But how he got his outlandish name Beach does not explain.  Other sources state that Fish was of Huguenot stock, and that his father and grandfather bore the same first name, which they pronounced in three syllables, pre-SER-ved, meaning “preserved from sin” or “preserved in grace.”

Catharine Sedgwick, an illustration 

probably dating from the early 1800s.

     Women are far and few in Moses Beach’s compilation, and then almost always as widows or heirs of males.  The one exception is Catharine Sedgewick, a “distinguished novelist” famous for her “New England Tales,” a “religious satire published some 20 years since.”  Though she received a “snug” fortune by inheritance, she “has reaped a large income from her books, the circulation of which exceeded those of any American author.”  Though she seems to have resided in Massachusetts, she gets a princely seventeen lines and is credited with $100,000.  Here, then, is an early  example of the “scribbling females” that Nathaniel Hawthorne would acknowledge with scorn, writers whose novels, not rated highly today, were widely read in their time, often bringing in income that the less pecunious male writers of the day envied and resented bitterly.

1863

No other source that I know of gives as comprehensive and colorful an account of New York’s wealthy as does Beach, but the income tax imposed by the federal government during the Civil War lets us know who then were the wealthiest citizens of New York, for in January 1865 the enterprising but often controversial New York Herald published the names of prominent citizens paying the tax, prompting protests at this invasion of privacy, and a New York Times editorial observing that “the most glaring and shameless frauds are practiced in the return of incomes, and in the assessment of taxes upon them.”  Men living at the rate of anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000 a year, it insisted, were put down as having no income at all, an assertion that the New York Tribune echoed.

     And that wasn’t the end of it, for later in that same year of 1865 the American News Company published The Income Record: A List Giving the Taxable Income for the Year 1863, of Every Resident of New York.  The publisher’s stated goal was “to satisfy an imperious public curiosity, which thus far has been only partially gratified by the public journals”; to let citizens decide whether their neighbors had been honest in stating their income; and to provide trustworthy statistics to future legislators for revisions of the tax laws.  Many a moneyed gentleman, one suspects, trembled in his ruffled shirtfront and shiny boots at the prospect of having his income revealed yet again, and so authoritatively, to the public.

     So who, according to this tabulation, were the wealthiest citizens of 1863?  The top three:

A.T. Stewart             $1,843,637

William B. Astor         $838,525

Cornelius Vanderbilt   $680,728

All three appeared in Moses Beach’s tabulation of 1845, but times have changed and they now eclipse all others in wealth.

Alexander T. Stewart, circa 1860.  Beards and
neckties are in, neck cloths are out.

     Stewart’s income astonished the public and probably establishes him as the most honest of the lot.  His new department store on Broadway at 10^th Street, a six-story cast-iron structure with a glass-dome skylight, built in 1862 and occupying most of a whole block, employed some 2,000 people, had hydraulic elevators, and offered fashionable society a wide range of fabrics, scarves, shawls, lamps, carpets, bric-a-brac, and toys.  Hailed today  as the father of the modern department store, this generously bearded gentleman prospered to the point of being considered – for a while – the richest man in the country.

Stewart's department store, the granddaddy of Bloomingdale's,
Macy's, and Marshall Fields.

William B. Astor circa 1850, looking just
as formal, dignified, and (let's face it)
 stodgy as his father.

     William B. Astor, the son of old John J. and his chief heir, was heavily invested in New York City real estate, earning him the name of “the landlord of New York.”  He also gave money to the Astor Library founded by his father.  Upon his father’s death in 1848, William was considered the richest man in America with a fortune of $14 million, which makes his 1863 declaration of annual income of $838,525 perhaps a bit suspect.  Photographs reveal a rather full-faced man, clean-shaven with long sideburns and a hint of jowls, a competent heir who lived a profitable but uneventful life devoid of his father’s eccentricities and flair.

     If Commodore Vanderbilt’s figure of $680,728 likewise seems to err on the side of modesty, it’s worth remembering that in 1863, having sold his ships, he was just beginning to acquire the railroad empire that would increase his fortune vastly and make him the richest man in the country, referred to endearingly in the late 1860s as Old Sixty Millions.  In photographs Vanderbilt appears tall and erect, with a strong nose and a square jaw, his gray hair turning strikingly white.  Beside such a figure the other two top moneybags of the day, Stewart and Astor, seem just a bit bland, but then, anyone compared to the vibrant and often ruthless Commodore would have come off bland indeed.

Cornelius Vanderbilt, dated by my source as "before 1877."  I should think
so, since that's when he died.  But to my eye, he comes across as more forceful
and energetic than the other moneybags pictured in this post.

    This supremely pecunious trio – Stewart, Astor, and Vanderbilt – resembled the wealthy of 1845 in that they dealt in tangibles: a department store, real estate, and railroads.  And if Astor’s making a fortune in real estate and being known as the landlord of New York didn’t necessarily benefit society at large (who loves a landlord anyway?), Vanderbilt’s New York Central line got people from New York to Chicago and back efficiently, and Stewart’s dry goods palace dazzled them with its offerings of this world’s goods.

The Gilded Age

Caroline Schermerhorn Astor -- the Mrs. Astor --
entertaining at one of her balls.  The ladies'
gowns rustle on the floor but are decidedly
low-necked.

The Civil War ended in 1865, following which came the so-called Gilded Age, when the rich dressed rich, paraded about in fancy turnouts, built palatial mansions, raced their yachts, hitched their moneyed daughters to impoverished European noblemen (most of them accomplished debauchees), and generally enjoyed the good life free from such annoyances as an income tax.  On the Upper Fifth Avenue the Vanderbilts and Astors leapfrogged over one another, building ever more palatial mansions that made their rivals’ residences lower down on the avenue look opulently shabby, while Mrs. Astor – the Mrs. Astor, whose mail required no other designation to reach her – welcomed annually to her ballroom, which held just four hundred guests, the select four hundred persons deemed by her to be socially acceptable.  Needless to say, the simplicity of an earlier age, when flaunting your wealth was frowned on, had vanished, and often as not the pampered descendants of those earlier moneymakers felt no need to smirch their hands with toil.

     On this happy note I will end.  The rich of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – a very different species -- will be looked at in a future post.  As well as The Donald, who merits a post all his own.

     The book:  The selection of posts from this blog is available in print version at $14.95 (or cheaper), and as an e-book with Nook, Kindle, etc., for $3.99.  One of the online come-ons describes it in a unique brand of English:  "Stories excluding the Authorization Agitating Metropolitan area in the Copernican universe …  art critic Clifford Browder leaves no wallpaper unturned … a invest that so muchness are worthy to caw home."  One copy of the print version is offered free on a Goodreads giveaway through November 18.

     Coming soon:  Tiffany’s: The magic of their lamps (and how to tell a genuine one from a fake), the tiny lustrous vase in our apartment, a great fraud, and how The Donald bamboozled the Tiffany’s of today.  Plus a mystery: How did Marie Antoinette’s diamonds end up over here?

     ©  2015  Clifford Browder