Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [359]
Astor’s successes at Richmond Hill and Greenwich would be duplicated a mile or so to the east, where in 1804 he had purchased a large garden farm near what is now Astor Place. A Frenchman named Delacroix then leased the site from Astor to build Vauxhall Gardens, a resort for fashionable New Yorkers that offered leafy walks, pavilions serving juleps and ice cream, bands, theatrical entertainments, and fireworks. By 1809 the city had extended and paved Broadway all the way up to Vauxhall, and by 1820 streets just to the south—Bleecker, Bond, and Great Jones—were rapidly filling up with genteel residents. In 1825, when the Vauxhall lease expired, Astor cut a broad street through the gardens that he named Lafayette Place, in honor of the Revolutionary War hero (who had just paid a return visit to the city.) Lots along both sides of Lafayette Place sold briskly, earning Astor many times what he had paid for the property twenty-one years before.
By 1830, now in his late sixties, Astor had become the richest man in the United States—almost as rich, according to certain estimates, as European magnates like the duke of Bedford, Sir Francis Baring, and Nathan Rothschild. He had also created something akin to a perpetual moneymaking machine. Between 1800 and 1820 he invested $715,000 in Manhattan real estate, roughly two-thirds of which had come out of the profits of his fur and tea businesses. Between 1820 and 1835 he purchased another $445,000 worth of land on the island, but most of this sum derived from the sale, lease, or rental of property he already owned. By 1830 he had pulled out of the China trade entirely, sold his interest in the American Fur Company, and was running a real estate operation that employed a sizable staff of rental agents, contractors, accountants, bookkeepers, and lawyers—all overseen by his son, the colorless but meticulous William Backhouse Astor, who could recite the family’s rent rolls by heart. Between 1835 and his death in 1848, Astor and his son would put another $832,000 into New York real estate, a sum generated entirely from rents on existing properties. Small wonder that he is supposed to have said, just before he died: “Could I begin life again, knowing what I now know, and had money to invest, I would buy every foot of land on the Island of Manhattan.”
ON THE HEIGHTS OF BROOKLYN
Across the East River, another speculative drama was unfolding on Brooklyn Heights. Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont, grandson of a minister-founder of Yale, had come south from New England, made good money speculating in the national debt, founded a mercantile firm in 1793 that exported provisions to Paris, and in 1802 married Anna Marie Constable, whose father, William Constable, one of the largest landowners in the state, gave the couple half a million acres as a wedding present. Abandoning commerce for manufacturing, Pierrepont bought Philip Livingston’s gin distillery at the foot of modern Joralemon Street and added a large wharf, a windmill, and storehouses. His Anchor Gin proved successful, but in 1819, after competitors diluted his profits, he abandoned the business. By then he had discovered his true calling, land development.
Pierrepont began purchasing property on Clover Hill, the bluff overlooking Brooklyn Village, eventually amassing sixty acres, including an eight-hundred-foot stretch overlooking the harbor. His plan was to subdivide the property into large plots on which wealthy merchants and professionals could build substantial houses. But Pierrepont knew that (unlike Astor) he couldn’t expect the right kinds of buyer to appear unless they were pulled in from across the river. His realtor rivals John and Jacob Hicks, descendants of a Dutch artisanal family, faced no such problem. They too had been acquiring property on Brooklyn