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Updated: May 17, 2025
As population increased and the downtown sections were converted into business sections, the fashionables shifted their quarters from time to time, always pushing uptown, until the Goelet lands became a long sweep of ostentatious mansions. In imitation of the Astors the Goelets steadily adhered, as they have since, to the policy of seldom or never selling any of their land.
The pamphlet showed that there were at that time perhaps twenty-five men in New York City who were ranked as millionaires. The most prominent of these were Peter Cooper with an accredited fortune of $1,000,000; the Goelets, $2,000,000; the Lorillards, $1,000,000; Moses Taylor, $1,000,000; A. T. Stewart, $2,000,000; Cornelius Vanderbilt, $1,500,000, and William B. Crosby, $1,500,000.
Yet now that this bank is one of the richest and most powerful institutions in the United States, and especially as the criminal nature of its origin is unknown except to the historic delver, the Goelets mention the connection of their ancestors with it as a matter of great and just pride.
The Schermerhorns were powerful New York City landholders; and if not quite on the same pinnacle in point of wealth as the Astors, were at any rate very rich. The immensely valuable areas of land then held by the Schermerhorns, and still in their possession, were largely obtained by precisely the same means that the Astors, Goelets, Rhinelanders and other conspicuous land families had used.
Yet apart from the proceeds of his great frauds, the amounts out of which he had cheated the city and State in taxation were alone much more than enough to have paid for his splendor of living. Like the Astors, the Goelets, Marshall Field and every other millionaire without exception, he continuously defrauded in taxes.
Such an avalanche of riches tumbled in upon him that, perforce, like the Astors, the Goelets and other multimillionaires, he was put constantly to the terrible extremity of seeking new fields for investment. Luxuriously live, as he did, it would have required a superior inventive capacity to have dissipated his full income.
The Lorillards, the Goelets, William F. Havemeyer, Cornelius Vanderbilt, W. H. Webb, W. H. Kissam, Robert Lenox, Schermerhorn, James Roosevelt, William E. Dodge, Jr. all of these and many others not omitting Astor's American Fur Company at various times down to, and including the period of, the monumentally corrupt Tweed "ring," got grants from corrupt city administrations.
A little farther to the north were the country-seats of the Goelets, Gracies, and the elder John Jacob Astor. With all these people, who were practically the commercial founders of our city, my father had an acquaintance.
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.
In a voluminous biography giving the genealogies of the rich families of New York material which was supplied and perhaps written by the families themselves this boast occurs in the chapter devoted to the Goelets: "They were also numbered among the founders of that famous New York financial institution, the Chemical Bank."
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