Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City by Neal Bascomb

Author:Neal Bascomb
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780385506601
Publisher: Broadway
Published: 2003-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

“John Jakob Raskob, capitalist”—so he signed one of the many documents in the purchase of the two-acre plot west of Fifth Avenue between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets. Of the many who had won fortunes from the explosion of share prices on Wall Street, few had profited as handsomely as Raskob. His claim on the land underneath the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel signaled a sea change. Gone now were the blue-blood families from their mansions along Fifth Avenue, once deemed “the most elegant street in the city” where all the “great people” live. Gone were Mrs. Astor, her black wig, diamond brooches, rope of fake pearls, and her social yardstick, Ward McAllister, who explained, “There are only about four hundred people in fashionable New York society, don’t you know. If you go outside the number, don’t you see, you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease. See the point.”

It was doubtful that Raskob, a former stenographer for the Worthington Pump Company in upstate New York, the great-grandson of an Alsatian immigrant, the son of a cigar-man, measured up to McAllister’s grade. He often talked of business and as a young man he used to scribble notes on the cuffs of his shirt when he ran short of paper.

Raskob came from squalor, born in the industrial town of Lockport, New York, in 1879. His mother was Irish and a devout Catholic. His parents had little money to spare on their four children. There were no private schools and summers in Europe. A roof overhead and a warm meal at night were luxury enough. After his father died when Raskob was nineteen, he needed to care for his mother, younger brother, and two sisters. Running his newspaper route and taking on boarders was not enough. It was once said by a distinguished judge that “the best education you can give a boy of fifteen to twenty is to put his widowed mother on his hands to support. If there is anything in that boy, it will come out, and education consists in bringing things out, not pouring them in.” This burden brought out in Raskob an intense, sometimes Machiavellian drive, but one bolstered by good intentions.

Only days after his father passed away, he went to his mother and asked her to tally up the family’s assets and liabilities. A week later she came back to her son and said that once they paid off their debts, they would have only twenty-five dollars left in the bank. Raskob gathered the family together, told them the situation, and then made one promise: “We are never going to be in this position again.”

He made true on his word, starting with a $7.50-a-week position as a stenographer for the chief engineer of a Worthington Pump Company subsidiary. After his boss denied Raskob a raise, he wrote a friend in Lorain, Ohio, to see if he knew of any better jobs. His friend told him about Pierre Samuel du Pont, who was serving as the president of a street railway company, and needed a secretary.

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