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Updated: June 26, 2025
In last year's tax-list he was assessed for $150,000. "Mr. Schermerhorn was a member of both the fashionable clubs on Bellevue avenue, the Newport Casino and the Newport Reading-Room." The founding and aggrandizement of other great private fortunes from land were accompanied by methods closely resembling, or identical with, those that the Astors employed.
Yet, so far as the Law was concerned, the rents collected by the Astors, as well as by other landlords, were honestly made.
Originally owning land in the lower part of Manhattan, they then bought land in Yorkville, then added to their possessions in Harlem, and later in the Bronx, in which part of New York City they now own immense areas. Their estate is growing larger and larger all the time. In rents in New York City alone it is computed that the Astors collect twenty-five or thirty million dollars a year.
While the Astors, the Goelets, the Rhinelanders and others, or rather the entire number of inhabitants, were transmuting their land into vast and increasing wealth expressed in terms of hundreds of millions in money, Nicholas Longworth was aggrandizing himself likewise in Cincinnati.
It is by such a contrast, bringing out how one family alone, the Astors, own more than many millions of workers, that we begin to get an idea of the overreaching, colossal power of a single fortune. The Goelet fortune is likewise vast; it is variously estimated at from $200,000,000 to $225,000,000, although what its exact proportions are is a matter of some obscurity.
In single file this throng of Telephonians would make a living wall from New York to New Haven. Such is the extraordinary city of which Alexander Graham Bell was the only resident in 1875. It has been built up without the backing of any great bank or multi-millionaire. There have been no Vanderbilts in it, no Astors, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Harrimans.
'Look at th' Willum Haitch Vanderbilts, says he, 'an' th' Gools an' th' Astors, says he, 'an' thin look at us, he says, 'groun' down, he says, 'till we cries f'r bread on th' sthreet, he says; 'an' they give us a stone, he says. 'Dooley, he says, 'fetch in a tub iv beer, an' lave th' collar off, he says. "Doolan 'd wake up with a start, an' applaud at that.
So valuable was a partnership in this firm that a writer says that Field paid Leiter "an unknown number of millions" when he bought out Leiter's interest. In close similarity to the start of the Astors and many other founders of great land fortunes, commerce was the original means by which Marshall Field obtained the money which he invested in land.
As the Astors and other rich families were perfectly willing, in 1867, to allow Commodore Vanderbilt to assume the management of the New York Central on the ground that under his bold direction their profits and loot would be greater, so the lackadaisical Vanderbilts of the present generation perhaps likewise looked upon Harriman, who proved his ability to accomplish vast fraudulent stock-watering operations and consolidations, and to oust lesser magnates.
Thus, to recapitulate, the Astors debauched, swindled and murdered the Indians; they defrauded the city of land and of taxes; they assisted in corrupting legislatures; they profited from the ownership of blocks of death-laden tenement houses; they certified to thieving administrations.
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