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World Hotels - When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age
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List Price: $24.95
Our Price: $24.95
Availability: Usually ships in 1 to 3 months
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 647.94097471
EAN: 9780670037698
ISBN: 0670037699
Label: Viking Adult
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: 2006-06-01
Publisher: Viking Adult
Studio: Viking Adult
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Editorial Reviews:
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This newest book by Pulitzer Prize winner Justin Kaplan is a sparkling combination of biography, social history, architectural appreciation, and pure pleasure Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, two heirs of arch-capitalist John Jacob Astor battled with each other for social primacy. William Waldorf Astor (born 1848) and his cousin John Jacob Astor IV (born 1864) led incomparably privileged lives in the blaze of public attention. Novelist, sportsman, and inventor, John Jacob went down with the Titanic, after turbulent marital adventures and service in the Spanish-American War. Collector of art, antiquities, and stately homes, William Waldorf became a British subject and acquired the title of Viscount Astor. In New York during the 1890s and after, the two feuding Astors built monumental grand hotels, chief among them the original Waldorf-Astoria on lower Fifth Avenue. The Astor hotels transformed social behavior. Home of the chafing dish and the velvet rope, the Waldorf-Astoria drew the rich, famous, and fashionable. It was the setting for the most notorious society event of the era—a costume extravaganza put on by its hosts during a time of widespread need and unemployment. The celebrity-packed lobbies, public rooms, lavish suites, and exclusive restaurants of the grand hotels became distinctive theaters of modern life.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Bookseller for When the Astors Owned NY
Comment: This bookseller is very good. I received my book promptly and in perfect condition as promised.. I would do business with them again.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Writers versus historians
Comment: The author of this book, Justin Kaplan, is clearly more a writer than a historian. Personally I felt that this relatively short book (180 pages) was quite readable and got through it in one sitting. However, at the end, I was left scratching my head as to what was the purpose of the book. Essentially the author has read a number of Astor biographies and simply did a non-academic rewrite. I suppose its like a trashy Hollywood biography based on movie magazine articles but written by someone far more articulate. Unfortunately the book doesn't really have any focus. The principal figures in this book, the third generation cousins William and John Jacob Astor, led interesting and diverse lives. Unfortunately the book is not a biography, several of which exist and are sources, but is presented as centering on the hotel interests of the Astors. I doubt that even a quarter of the book, short as it is, has anything to do with the hotels. There are multiple chapters on William's immigration to England, the Bradley-Martin party (only connection being that it was held in an Astor hotel) etc. What is presented regarding the hotels is largely factual and is devoid of a historian' s analysis or intellectual curiosity. We are told little about the hotel industry in New York at that time, the economics of the industry or the impact on land development. One aspect that I was unaware of was that the Astors leased out the hotel buildings to operators who actually ran the hotels on a day to day basis. However the author has no interest on what those relations were, what the commercial terms were, which party was actually responsible for any innovations made at the Astor hotels etc. I guess this book illustrates the differences between writers and historians. While the book is quite readable I personally prefer the more rigorous approach of a historian.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Boring!
Comment: My, this is a dull book! Justin Kaplan may be one of the darlings of an elder generation of the literary-academic set, but he doesn't have the least idea how to write prose that will grab and keep the attention of an ordinary reader. While the book is full of details of the era he's writing about (New York in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries), those details are invariably presented as a catalogue rather than in a way that brings pictures to the reader's mind. Kaplan's paragraphs are laden with quotations from other writers, in the manner of an undergraduate term paper; and worst of all, for a book that is so heavily researched, there is not a single endnote--a reader searching for the source of any one of those quotations is doomed to frustration. Don't waste your time on this one.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An entertaining history of the Astors and New York's elite
Comment: Justin Kaplan, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of "Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain" has recently published a work of entertaining history. "When the Astors Owned New York" offers readers a voyeuristic look into the lives of New York City's high society during the Gilded Age, a society in which the Astor family remained at the pinnacle for many decades. It begins with an account of the life of the founding father of this American dynasty, John Jacob Astor (1763-1848), and progresses through five generations of the Astor male line, with a lengthy interruption to elaborate on the life of Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, wife of William Backhouse Astor, Jr., who successfully positioned herself as grande dame of New York society. The main focus of the book, however, is the rivalry between cousins William Waldorf and John Jacob Astor IV and their competition to build New York City's largest and grandest hotel.
The author acquaints the reader with America's Gilded Age aristocracy known as the New York Four Hundred, of which Caroline Astor (referred to as "the" Mrs. Astor) positioned herself as matriarch. It reveals the inner workings of this society, the snobbery between "old" and "new" money, and the requirements for being accepted into Mrs. Astor's inner circle.
The book's description of the rivalry between cousins William and John Jacob IV and their success in building several of the world's finest hotels gives the reader insight into how the grand hotels became the center of New York social life and provided both the media and the masses a means of getting close to and observing the lives of the elite. Because the elaborate parties of these socialites were now being held at the grand hotels rather than in the privacy of their homes, the public could live vicariously through what they witnessed firsthand or read in the newspapers about the elite. Kaplan suggests that the hotel "provided a means for the public to glimpse into the lives of the rich and maybe learn from them." What the public was to "learn" is unclear.
Kaplan's vivid depiction of the Astor's "castles of capitalism" not only offers an entertaining view of Gilded Age history, but also educates us as to how New York society and its grand hotels helped to shape this era of America's history. His inclusion of the Astor family tree was extremely helpful in keeping the book's characters straight, as the Astor family had a penchant for recycling family names again and again. Of interest also, was Kaplan's inclusion of facts about items in use today that have origins in the grand hotels like the Waldorf-Astoria. The chafing dish, the use of the velvet rope to allow/prevent entry, and the Waldorf salad are but a few that are mentioned in the book.
Kaplan does tend to overuse foreign terms with which the average reader is sure to be unfamiliar, and his writing sometimes emits an air of sarcasm in describing the elite. Overall, however, the book is a very enjoyable and entertaining read and is highly recommended to those interested in America's Gilded Age.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent introduction to "the 400", the Astors, and the rise of the grand hotels
Comment: This book is an excellent introduction to the history of "the 400" (or "the Four Hundred") and the Astor family for the many people who seek such information. Many people ask me for more information about "the 400" because my novel, "Chasing the 400", deals with the African American community's social interpretation of "the 400" during the 1950's. At that time, "the 400" was a term that was used to characterize the Black Bourgeoisie, the same as the term was used to characterize the New York Gilded Age social elite.
I disagree with Kaplan that people largely seemed to not care about "the 400" after Carolyn Astor's death or disappearance from prominence in New York society. "The 400" as the social elite lived on long after Carolyn Astor's grand entertaining, and many groups of people patterned their social groups after Mrs. Astor's exclusivity. In my novel, I explain "the 400" in New York society and in 1950s Philadelphia's Black Bourgeoisie this way: "The women displayed as colored society were the ladies of 'the 400', an exclusive, informal collection of Philadelphia's black bourgeoise, the talented tenth, the doctors, lawyers and other successful colored businessmen and their wives. This exclusive group patterned themselves after "the Four Hundred", the phrase coined in the late 1800's by New York socialite Mrs. William Astor and her friends to symbolize upper crust society--the truly worthy 400 people who could fit into the ballroom of Mrs. Astor's New York home. Like Mrs. Astor's Four Hundred, Philadelphia's colored 400 attended a seemingly endless round of balls, lunches, fashion shows and cocktail soirees. Mrs. Donald Butcher, given name Harriet, ruled the colored 400 which, in reality, had only about 50 people who were truly worthy. Donald Butcher made a fortune operating the largest colored funeral home in Philadelphia, and Harriet made a life running colored society."
More information about groups that might be considered to be the modern day "Four Hundred" in the African American community, such as The Links, Jack & Jill and Sigma Pi Phi--the Boule, and "Chasing the 400" can be found on my Amazon page. Malcom X, in "The Autobiography of Malcom X", also talks about "the 400" in Boston's African American community.
Kaplan's discussion of how and why the Astor's concieved and built New York's grandest hotels is also fascinating. We take the grand hotel for granted today, but Kaplan explains how such hotels were truly revolutionary and transformed society at that time. Modern day real estate investors might find inspiration in Kaplan's detailed discussions of how the Astors used real estate to build their great wealth, working on one deal after another, not satisfied with more wealth than most of us could even imagine.
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