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The second generation of the Goelets counting from the founder of the fortune were incorrigibly parsimonious. They reduced miserliness to a supreme art. Likewise the third generation. Of Peter Goelet, a grandson of the original Peter, many stories were current illustrating his close-fistedness.
Thus, like the Astors and other rich landholders, partly by investments made in trade, and largely by fraud, the Goelets finally became not only great landlords but sharers in the centralized ownership of the country's transportation systems and industries.
As for New York City, we have seen how the Astors, the Schermerhorns, the Goelets the whole aggregate of the propertied class systematically defrauded in taxes for many decades. It is estimated that in New York City, at present, not less than five billion dollars of property, real and personal, entirely escapes taxation. This estimate is a conservative one.
It is entirely needless to iterate the narrative of how the city officials corruptly gave over to these men land and water grants before that time municipally owned grants now having a present incalculable value. As was the case with John Jacob Astor, the fortune of the Goelets was derived from a mixture of commerce, banking and ownership of land.
Crimmins: "In the immediate vicinity were the country-seats of other prominent New Yorkers, such as the Buchanans, who were the forebears of the Goelets, the Adriance, Jones, and Beekman families, the Schermerhorns, Hulls, Setons, Towles, Willets, Lenoxes, Delafields, Primes, Rhinelanders, Lefferts, Hobbs, Rikers, Lawrences, and others.
It was in these identical years that the Astors, the Goelets, the Rhinelanders and many other landholders and merchants were getting more water grants by collusion with the various corrupt city administrations.
The Astors, the Goelets, the Rhinelanders, the Beekmans, the Brevoorts, and practically all the mighty families that ruled the old Knickerbocker aristocracy in New York were huge land proprietors. Their fortunes thus had precisely the same foundation as that of the Prussian Junkers today. But their accumulations compared only faintly with the fortunes that are commonplace now.
"A friend of mine he says to me: 'If any one could tell you about real estate, Mosha Kronberg could. There's a man, he says, 'which his opinion you could trust in it anything what he says is so. If the Astors and the Goelets would know about East Side real estate what that feller knows understand me instead of their hundreds of millions they would have thousands of millions already."
His brother, Robert, was the grandfather of the present Goelets. Peter was the elder and a bachelor. They accompanied each other on walks, Peter, the more active of the two, in front, and Robert a pace behind. They dealt directly with their tenants and those whom they employed in taking care of their properties. I can recall them coming on foot to my father to have him repair a sidewalk or fence.
John Jacob Astor is one of the directors of the Western Union Telegraph monopoly, with its annual receipts of $29,000,000 and its net profits of $8,000,000 yearly; and as for the many other corporations in which he and his family, the Goelets and the other commanding landlords hold stock, they would, if enumerated, make a formidable list.
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