Astor by Anderson Cooper

Author:Anderson Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

9

Blackwell’s Island

1910

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels1

When newspapers all over the world reported John Jacob Astor’s death on the Titanic, it was not the first time in the twentieth century that John Jacob Astor had died.

Nearly two years earlier, on August 20, 1910, New York City newspapers trumpeted the death of John Jacob Astor at the age of seventy-four. But it wasn’t the multimillionaire John Jacob Astor whom everyone had heard of. This John Jacob Astor was an indigent resident of the City Home for the elderly, an almshouse on Blackwell’s Island. Also known as Welfare Island, it was the thin strip of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens now called Roosevelt Island.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, Blackwell’s hosted a penitentiary, with the first of what would become many hospitals and sanitariums on the island erected to care for the prison inmates. After 1839, Blackwell’s was also home to the New York City Lunatic Asylum, made notorious as the subject of Nellie Bly’s undercover exposé from 1887, Ten Days in a Mad-House.2 The combination of convenience to Manhattan and isolation from it made the island perfect for housing desperate New Yorkers who had nowhere else to go. Blackwell’s soon added a smallpox hospital, a workhouse for minor offenders, and the alms hospital for the indigent. It was here, in the shadow of Manhattan, that the other John Jacob Astor died.

News of the death of this surprisingly named man flooded the wire services, as hungry then as the media are now for eye-catching stories. Information about John Jacob Astor’s death reached readers as far away as Arizona and Montana. The Boston Herald dressed up the wire service human interest story with details of the “real” Colonel John Jacob “Jack” Astor socializing in Newport that same night. He was preparing to depart on his yacht the Nourmahal with his son, Vincent, for Bar Harbor after attending a dance given in honor of the officers of the Atlantic Fleet. As he sipped champagne, he would also have been eagerly awaiting news that his divorce from Ava had become final.

Two weeks later, the New York Times reported on the glittering summer season at Bar Harbor, noting that “Col. John Jacob Astor, who with his son, Vincent Astor, has been here for some time, has been both host and guest at a number of affairs. . . . On Monday he entertained at dinner, his guests including the Misses Madeline [sic] and Katherine Force, Mrs. W. H. Force, A. E. Gallatin, and Vincent Astor.”3 This mention marks the first time that Jack and Madeleine, who was seventeen years old at the time, were linked in print—one year before their wedding.

The John Jacob Astor who died on Blackwell’s Island shared more than a name with the wealthy and famous colonel. He had been born in Walldorf, in Baden, present-day Germany, the same small town where the first John Jacob Astor, Jack’s great-grandfather, was born 150 years or so before him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.