When the Astors Owned New York by Justin Kaplan Page B

Native.”
    Like other visitors from abroad, James was overwhelmed by the rush and vehemence of turn-of-the-century American life, and, on one level, its immense wealth, extravagance, and ostentation. Nowhere was this display more flagrant than in New York, the nation’s social, cultural, and financial capital. During the 1890s and a few years after, old John Jacob Astor’s city of the future, where every square foot of land doubled in value year after year, had been the setting for social events that were Roman carnivals of gluttony, sottishness, and vulgar display: imitations of the royal courts of Europe, for example, and banquets that honored dogs, horses, and chimpanzees.
    Mining, oil, steel, and railroad Golcondas had created a breed of sudden millionaires eager to enjoy and flaunt their wealth. They built French and Italian Renaissance palaces along Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue and seasonal counterparts in the marble and granite “cottages” of Newport—tangible evidences, as James described them, of “witlessness” and “affronted proportion.” For H. G. Wells, Newport’s “triumphs of villa architecture in thatch and bathing bungalows in marble” sounded “the same note of magnificent irresponsibility” as the Manhattan residences of steel masters Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, the Astors, Vanderbilts, Havemeyers, and Huntingtons. The owners of these palaces, Wells thought, were like children scattering toys on the playroom floor and leaving them there. A newly moneyed leisure class, although secure in its sense of self as commanding deference and privilege, nevertheless aspired to higher membership in a small, established nucleus, “society,” founded on relatively “old” money.
    Recognizing tectonic shifts in New York’s social and physical landscape, Henry James felt dispossessed, uprooted, his past amputated, leaving him with a chill in his heart. His birthplace off Washington Square had vanished, torn down to make way for a nearby factory building that in March 1911 was to be the site of a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory that took the lives of 146 workers, mostly Jewish immigrants. Trinity Church, long a commanding ornament of lower Broadway, cringed in the shadow of a steel-framed, elevator-served, twenty-story office building. Immigration and trade had transformed the town James remembered from his childhood as small, warm, and ingenuous, with some of the feel of a family party. His New York was now the largest Irish, Italian, and Jewish city in the world. Surface and elevated lines and a new subway system that ran through 134 miles of tunnels webbed the city’s sprawl.
    The brick-and-limestone federal immigration center on Ellis Island served as the main portal through which a nation of 80 million admitted a million newcomers each year. The vast caravansary was a monument to the open-door policy, the nation’s hunger for cheap labor, and its genius for assembly-line, rational organization on a heroic scale. Some days as many as 21,000 immigrants passed through Ellis Island’s reception halls, refectories, dormitories with banks of steel beds, examination rooms, baths, chutes, and holding pens, its hospital, dental clinic, registries, currency exchange, and, at the end of the process, ticket office selling transportation to the sweatshops, mills, and wheat fields of the golden land. The overall impression, James wrote after touring Ellis Island as a guest of the commissioner, was that of a scientific feeding of the mill. “It is a drama that goes on, without pause, day by day and year by year, this visible act of ingurgitation on the part of our body politic and social, and constituting really an appeal to amazement beyond that of any sword-swallowing or fire-swallowing of the circus.”
    About five miles north of Ellis Island, on Fifth Avenue between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth streets, stood