John Jacob Astor of the fourth generation repeats this performance in aligning himself, as does Goelet, with that masterhand Harriman, against whom the most specific charges of colossal looting have been brought.5 But it would be both idle and prejudicial in the highest degree to single out for condemnation a brace of capitalists for following out a line of action so strikingly characteristic of the entire capitalist class a class which, in the pursuit of profits, dismisses nicety of ethics and morals, and which ordains its own laws. 4 The Railways, the Trusts and the People: 104. 2 Prominent Families of New York: 231. This bank, as we have brought out previously, was chartered after a sufficient number of members of the Legislature had been bribed with $50,000 in stock and a large sum of money. In getting their charter for the notorious Chemical Bank, they bribed members of the Legislature with the same phlegmatic serenity that they would put through an ordinary business transaction. . He foreclosed mortgages with pitiless promptitude, and his adroit knowledge of the law, approaching if not reaching, that of an unscrupulous pettifogger, enabled him to get the upper hand in every transaction. But as to his methods in obtaining land, there exists little obscurity. Little research is necessary to shatter this error. This land was once a farm and extended from about what is now Union Square to Forty-seventh street and Fifth avenue. 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. It seems quite superfluous to enlarge further upon the origin of the great landed fortunes of New York City ; the typical examples given doubtless serve as expositions of how, in various and similar ways, others were acquired. When twenty-one he went to Chicago and worked in a wholesale dry goods house. This estimate was made at a time when the country was slowly recovering, as the set phrase goes, from the panic of 1892-94, and when land values were not in a state of inflation or rise. Doubling the sums credited to Field and Leiter (that is to say, adding the value of the improvements to the value of the land), this brought Fields real estate in that one section to a value of $22,000,000, and Leiters to nearly the same. The progenitor of this family, Peter Goelet (1727-1811), was an ironmonger during and after the Revolution. And progressively their rentals from this land increased. The Goelets were three brothers descended from Peter Goelet, an ultra-wealthy 19th century ironmonger who used profits from the Revolutionary War to buy up Manhattan real estate. Upon the death of his mother in 1915, he inherited a fortune estimated to be $40 million (equivalent to $780 million in 2021), . Field left a fortune of about $100,000,000 (as estimated by the executors) which he bequeathed principally to two grandsons, both of which heirs were in boyhood. It embraced a long section of Broadway a section now covered with huge hotels, business buildings, stores and theaters. It was estimated that the 266 acres of land, constituting what was owned by individuals and private corporations in one section alone the South Side, were worth $319,000,000. His grandfather, Jacobus Goelet, was, as a boy and young man, brought up by Frederick Phillips, with whose career as a . These wielders of a fortune so great that they could not keep track of it, so fast did it grow, abandoned somewhat the rigid parsimony of the previous generations. This remarkable man lived to the age of eighty-one ; when he died in 1863 in a splendid mansion which he had built in the heart of his vineyard, his estate was valued at $15,000,000. The titled descendants of the predatory barons of the feudal ages having, generation after generation, squandered and mortgaged the estates gotten centuries ago by force and robbery, stand in need of funds. Between them, he and his brother Ogden possessed a fortune of at least $150,000,000. The landed property of the Goelet family on Manhattan Island alone is estimated at fully $200,000,000. On one occasion a beggar called at Longworths office and pointed eloquently at his gaping shoes. He foreclosed mortgages with pitiless promptitude, and his adroit knowledge of the law, approaching if not reaching, that of an unscrupulous pettifogger, enabled him to get the upper hand in every transaction. He never tired of doing this, and was petulantly impatient when houses enough were not added to his inventory. One was that almost consecutively they, along with other landholders, corrupted city governments to give them successive grants, and the other was their enormous surplus revenue which kept piling up. The unsold land grant, says Professor Frank Parsons, amounted to 344,368 acres, worth probably over $5,000,000, so that those to whom the securities of the company were issued, had obtained the road at a bonus of nearly $2,000,000 above all they paid in.4. A Battle over Frogs", "DUCHESS INHERITS FORTUNE; Former Miss Goelet Receives $3,000,000 From Mother's Estate", "George H. Warren A Founder of Concern That Once Owned Metropolitan Opera's Home, Dies at 87. In the last ten years the value of the Goelet land holdings has enormously increased, until now it is almost too conservative an estimate to place the collective fortune at $200,000,000. Thus, an entry, on January 26, 1807, in the municipal records, reads : On receiving the report of the Street Commissioner, Ordered that warrants issue to Messrs. Anderson and Allen for the three installments due to them from Mr. Goelet for the Whitehall and Exchange Piers.MSS. Likewise the third generation. The great impetus to the sudden increase of their fortune came in the period 1850-1870, through a tract of land which they owned in what had formerly been the outskirts of the city. Parts of his land and other possessions he bought with the profits from his business ; other portions, as has been brought out, he obtained from corrupt city administrations. Of Peter Goelets business methods and personality no account is extant. His personal habits were considered repulsive by the conventional and fastidious. In the early 1880s, they constructed such buildings in Manhattan as the Gorham Building, the Judge Building, The Goelet Building, and the Metropolitan Club. His two sons continued the business of ship chandlers ; one of them Peter the Younger was especially active in extending his real estate possessions, both by corrupt favors of the city officials and by purchase. The stock of the Chemical Bank, quoted at a fabulous sum, so to speak, is still held by a small, compact group in which the Goelets are conspicuous. In later years, the family's main residence was at 591 Fifth Avenue in New York. Robert Walton Goelet (March 19, 1880 May 2, 1941) was a financier and real estate developer in New York City. The same combination of economic influences and pressure which so vastly increased the value of the Astors land, operated to turn this quondam farm into city lots worth enormous sums. This extortion formed one of the saddest and most sordid chapters of the Civil War (as it does of all wars,) but conventional history is silent on the subject, and one is compelled to look elsewhere for the facts of how the commercial houses imposed at high prices shoddy material and semi-putrid food upon the very army and navy that fought for their interests.9 In the words of one of Fields laudatory biographers, the firm coined money a phrase which for the volumes of significant meaning embodied in it, is an epitome of the whole profit system. When twenty-one he went to Chicago and worked in a wholesale dry goods house. The brothers admired Kendall's work-within four years he would design . Cincinnati, with its population of 325,902,7 pays incessant tribute in the form of a vast rent roll to the scions of the man whose main occupation was to hold on to the land he had got for almost nothing. The growth of the city kept on increasingly. We shall advert to some of the great fortunes in the West based wholly or largely upon city real estate. These two brothers not only maintained the family fortune but also were one of the wealthiest landowners in New York City (second only to the Astors). Business Magnate. [21][22], In 1909, Goelet was reportedly engaged to Mary Harriman, daughter of railroad executive E. H. Harriman. Sportsman, a Leader in Social Circles in Newport and New York, Kin of Early Settlers", "MISS BEATRICE GOELET DEAD. A surfeit of money brings power, but it does not carry with it a recognized position among a titled aristocracy. The factors constituting this fortune are various. There were certain other conventional respects in which he was woefully deficient, and he had certain singularities which severely taxed the comprehension of routine minds. His passion for economy was carried to such an abnormal stage that he refused even to engage a tailor to mend his garments.3 He was unmarried, and generally attended to his own wants. Created BeauxArts Institute", "Death Claims Robert Goelet Financier, 61. The amount of $319,000,000 was calculated as being solely the value of the land, not counting improvements, which were valued at as much more. Now Forbes has compiled the first comprehensive ranking of the richest families in America: 185 dynasties with fortunes of at least $1 billion. By 1830 the population was 24,831 ; twenty years later it had reached 118,761, and in 1860, 171,293 inhabitants. In the last ten years the value of the Goelet land holdings has enormously increased, until now it is almost too conservative an estimate to place the collective fortune at $200,000,000. Built in the Beaux-Arts style, Goelet spent an estimated $4.5 million on the estate between 1888 and 1892. With true aristocratic aspirations, they have not been satisfied with mere plebeian American mansions, gorgeous palaces though they be ; they set out to find a European palace with warranted royal associations, and found one in the famous castle of Schonberg, on the Rhine, near Oberwesel, which they bought and where they have ensconced themselves. There he studied law and was admitted to practice. [27] Anne Marie was the daughter of Daniel Guestier, a director of the Orleans Railroad "who at one time was said to have been the wealthiest wine merchant of France and the owner of vast estates. W.GOELET MAY WED MLLE. Sept. 28, 1923 - Oct. 08, 2019 October 17, 2019 Robert G. Goelet, a business and civic leader, naturalist, and philanthropist, who with his wife, Alexandra Creel Goelet, had been steward of. Chancing in upon him one could see him intently pouring over a list of his properties. Certainly he was a very unique type of millionaire, much akin to Stephen Girard. It embraced a long section of Broadway a section now covered with huge hotels, business buildings, stores and theaters. Long after Longworth had become a multimillionaire he took a savage, perhaps a malicious, delight in doing things which shocked all current conceptions of how a millionaire should act. Nearly a century and a half ago William and Frederick Rhinelander kept a bakeshop on William street, New York City, and during the Revolution operated a sugar factory. No term of reproach was more invested with cutting contempt and cruel hatred than that of a horse thief. This explanation is found partly in the fraudulent means by which, decade after decade, they secured land and water grants from venal city administrations, and in the singularly dubious arrangement by which they obtained an extremely large landed property, now having a value of tens upon tens of millions, from Trinity Church. The invariable rule, it might be said, has been to utilize the surplus revenues in the form of rents, in buying up controlling power in a great number and variety of corporations. There he studied law and was admitted to practice. The enormities brazenly committed during the Spanish-American War of 1898 are sufficiently remembered. CHAPTER VIII 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. The rent-racked people of the City of New York, where rents are higher proportionately than in any other city, have sweated and labored and fiercely struggled, as have the people of other cities, only to deliver up a great share of their earnings to the lords of the soil, merely for a foothold.