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By Root 902 0

shop. There were Rockefellers on Fifth Avenue, and Flaglers and Guggenheims, and Russell Sage, a grocer-turned-financier, and Hetty’s archenemy, Collis P. Huntington, who got his start peddling hardware to miners during the California gold rush. The Vanderbilts erected a section of fabulous homes on a ten-block section of Fifth Avenue below Central Park that became known as Vanderbilt Row. In 1879, Henry Vanderbilt commissioned not one but two houses. A few months later, William Kissam Vanderbilt settled on plans for a grand home on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-second Street, to be designed by noted architect to the rich Richard Morris Hunt. Fawning critics pronounced the home a triumphant combination of the Palais de Justice, the Hôtel du Bourgtheroulde at Rouen, the Hôtel Cluny at Paris, and the Château de Blois. When it was completed, Alva Vanderbilt, William’s wife, christened the house with a costume ball at which each guest dressed as a member of European royalty.

This great fat feast was the New York that Hetty found when she arrived after the Cisco failure. But when she left Bellows Falls with her two children in tow, she did not erect a mansion next to the Vanderbilts, although she could have afforded a home as fine as the finest on Millionaire’s Row. She chose instead the teeming, dense borough of Brooklyn, populated by immigrants and, laborers, where nobody dressed up as royalty, European or otherwise. With the exception of short stretches in low-rent quarters in lower Manhattan, Hetty would call Brooklyn home for the next decade. She rented apartments in hotels and rooming houses, usually paying by the month. A large house, beyond the price to buy or build it, would mean an endless stream of payments for upkeep, not to mention a staff of servants to keep the place running. And there was another reason. In order to collect personal property taxes, collectors first had to establish proof of residency. By paying monthly rent and moving frequently, Hetty preserved the ability to deny that she lived in any given city or state whose tax collectors became too persistent. During the course of her life she would be a resident of Bellows Falls, New Bedford, New York, and New Jersey, all of them and none of them at the same time.

Hetty, Sylvia, and Ned moved first into a modest apartment house on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights. No childhood with Hetty Green as the mother could ever be called normal, but with their move to Brooklyn Ned and Sylvia entered a new, surreal phase of their lives. While they were among America’s richest children, Ned and Sylvia’s lifestyle was more akin to those constantly struggling for the next meal. Hetty never failed to tell them how rich they would be one day, and she meant it, for her goal was to leave them as the richest people in America.

Ned, despite the severe limp that made walking awkward, and despite the rigors of life with his mother, was developing into a tall, gregarious young man with an easy laugh. At seventeen, he was already six feet tall, built like his father. Sylvia, on the other hand, seemed to retreat inside of herself. Tall and not pretty, she was a painfully, shy, self-conscious girl. People who spent time with her were often unable to detect any trace of a personality. To acquaintances, she seemed to go through the motions of life without ever taking a part. She was Hetty’s constant companion, and did chores around the apartment.

This odd little family naturally aroused the curiosity of fellow Brooklynites. As Hetty’s financial prowess became more celebrated, her reputation as an oddball preceded her. A reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle noted: “Nobody ever saw her with a dress which was not severely plain, and seldom has she been noticed when she did not carry an old style and well worn black satchel. Her appearance would never cause the uninitiated to think that she was anything more extraordinary than an old fashioned woman of moderate means and simple tastes, who was on her way to the corner grocery or the bakery on the block below. Yet, if money is power, this