The same process of reaping gigantic fortunes from land went on in every large city. Their policy was much the same as that of the Astors constantly increasing their land possessions. It embraced a long section of Broadway a section now covered with huge hotels, business buildings, stores and theaters. History [ edit] The Goelets are descended from a family of Huguenots from La Rochelle in France, who escaped to Amsterdam. They allowed themselves a glittering effusion of luxuries which were popularly considered extravagances but which were in nowise so, inasmuch as the cost of them did not represent a tithe of merely the interest on the principal. Little research is necessary to shatter this error. These wielders of a fortune so great that they could not keep track of it, so fast did it grow, abandoned somewhat the rigid parsimony of the previous generations. Thus, like the Astors and other rich landholders, partly by investments made in trade, and largely by fraud, the Goelets finally became not only great landlords but sharers in the centralized ownership of the countrys transportation systems and industries. The cost of the road as reported by the company in 1873 was $48,331 a mile. He was born in Conway, Mass., in 1835. Subsequently the firm became Field, Leiter & Co., and, finally in 1887, Marshall Field & Co.10 The firm conducted both a wholesale and retail business on what is called in commercial slang a cash basis: that is, it sold goods on immediate payment and not on credit. Another notable example of this glorifying was Nicholas Biddle, long president of the United States Bank. On the other hand, the feminine possessors of American millions, aided and abetted doubtless by the men of the family, who generally crave a blooded connection, lust for the superior social status insured by a title. 10 So valuable was a partnership in this firm that a writer says that Field paid Leiter an unknown number of millions when he bought out Leiters interest. When twenty-one he went to Chicago and worked in a wholesale dry goods house. This estimate did not include $8,000,000 worth of land which the executors reported that he owned in New York City, nor the millions of dollars of his land possessions elsewhere. The result was that when their father died, they not only inherited a large business and a very considerable stretch of real estate, but, by means of their money and marriage, were powerful dignitaries in the directing of some of the richest and most despotic banks. He was plain and careless in his dress, looking more a beggar than a millionaire.. As immigration swarmed West and Cincinnati grew, his land consequently took on enhanced value. His house at Nineteenth street, corner of Broadway, was a curiosity shop. In imitation of the Astors the Goelets steadily adhered, as they have since, to the policy of seldom or never selling any of their land. Brothers Robert Goelet (1841-1899) and Ogden Goelet (1846-1897) were the scions of a wealthy New York family that had made vast investments in real estate over several generations. The price they paid was $600 a lot. 8 Eighth Annual Report, Illinois Labor Bureau: 104-253. In those frontier days, a horse represented one of the most valuable forms of property ; and, as under a system wherein human life was inconsequential compared to the preservation of property, the penalty for stealing a horse was usually death. Yet now that this bank is one of the richest and most powerful institutions in the United States, and especially as the criminal nature of its origin is unknown except to the historic delver, the Goelets mention the connection of their ancestors with it as a matter of great and just pride. This extortion formed one of the saddest and most sordid chapters of the Civil War (as it does of all wars,) but conventional history is silent on the subject, and one is compelled to look elsewhere for the facts of how the commercial houses imposed at high prices shoddy material and semi-putrid food upon the very army and navy that fought for their interests.9 In the words of one of Fields laudatory biographers, the firm coined money a phrase which for the volumes of significant meaning embodied in it, is an epitome of the whole profit system. The amount of $319,000,000 was calculated as being solely the value of the land, not counting improvements, which were valued at as much more. The grant consisted of what are now many blocks along Broadway north of Lispenard street. 4 The Railways, the Trusts and the People: 104. Longworth had been born in Newark, N.J., in 1782, and at the age of twenty-one had migrated to Cincinnati, then a mere outpost, with a population of eight hundred sundry adventurers. During the Civil War this firm, as did the entire commercial world, proceeded to hold up the nation for exorbitant prices in its con- Although the State of Illinois formally retains a nominal say in its management, yet it is really owned and ruled by eight men, among whom are John Jacob Astor, and Robert Walton Goelet, associated with E.H. Harriman, Cornelius Vanderbilt and four others. Some of the personnel of the firm changed several times : in 1865 Field, Leiter and Potter Palmer (who had also become a multimillionaire) associated under the firm name of Field, Leiter & Palmer. The progenitor of this family, Peter Goelet (1727-1811), was an ironmonger during and after the Revolution. This was his grim way of striking back at a commercial society whose lies and shams and hypocrisies he hated ; he knew them all ; he had practiced them himself. The factors constituting this fortune are various. The executors of Fields will placed the value of his real estate in Chicago at $30,000,000. The man so the story further runs had no money to pay Longworths fee and no property except two second-hand copper stills. There were certain other conventional respects in which he was woefully deficient, and he had certain singularities which severely taxed the comprehension of routine minds. That they conducted their business in the accepted methods of the day and exercised great astuteness and frugality, is true enough, but so did a host of other merchants whose descendants are even now living in poverty. Some other explanation must be found to account for the phenomenal increase of the original small fortune and its unshaken retention. In 1819 he gave up law, and thenceforth gave his entire attention to managing his property. Chancing in upon him one could see him intently pouring over a list of his properties. The arrangement becomes easy. They reduced miserliness to a supreme art. So long as Vanderbilt produced the profits, Astor and his fellow-directors did not care what means he used, however criminal in law and whatever their turpitude in morals. Goelet, it seems, was allowed to pay in installments. Another large tract of New York City real estate came into their possession through the marriage of William C. Rhinelander, of the third generation, to Peter had two sons ; Peter P., and Robert R. Goelet. [17] He also owned sixteen four-story townhouses on Park Avenue built by his father in 1871. The Rhinelanders, also, employ their great surplus revenues in constantly buying more land. An extensive vineyard, which he laid out in Ohio, added to his wealth. Far from it. His two sons continued the business of ship chandlers ; one of them Peter the Younger was especially active in extending his real estate possessions, both by corrupt favors of the city officials and by purchase. With his wife, he built Ochre Court in Newport, Rhode Island, his son built Glenmere mansion, and his daughter, Mary Goelet, married Henry Innes-Ker, 8th Duke of Roxburghe. Madison StanleyDr. On one occasion they bought eighty lots in the block from Fifth to Sixth avenues, Forty-second to Forty-third streets. [5][6] His maternal grandparents were George Henry Warren, a prominent lawyer, and Mary (ne Phoenix) Warren (herself the daughter of U.S. Representative Jonas P. Phoenix and granddaughter of Stephen Whitney). John Jacob Astor of the fourth generation repeats this performance in aligning himself, as does Goelet, with that masterhand Harriman, against whom the most specific charges of colossal looting have been brought.5 But it would be both idle and prejudicial in the highest degree to single out for condemnation a brace of capitalists for following out a line of action so strikingly characteristic of the entire capitalist class a class which, in the pursuit of profits, dismisses nicety of ethics and morals, and which ordains its own laws. This bank, as we have brought out previously, was chartered after a sufficient number of members of the Legislature had been bribed with $50,000 in stock and a large sum of money. On several occasions he was found in his office at the Chemical Bank industriously absorbed in sewing his coat. He was a lover of fancy fowls and of animals. The balance represents the investments of private individuals. Little by little, scarcely known to the people, laws are altered ; the States and the Government, representing the interests of the vested class, surrender the peoples rights, often even the empty forms of those rights, and great railroad systems pass into the hands of a small cabal of multimillionaires. Current Status: #59 on Forbes' s 2015 list. [16], After Goelet's death in 1941, his estate leased the land on which the sixteen townhouses were built, which were torn down and replaced by 425 Park Avenue,[18] which, at the time of the construction, it was one of the tallest buildings that utilized the bolted connections. Parts of his land and other possessions he bought with the profits from his business ; other portions, as has been brought out, he obtained from corrupt city administrations. The landed property of the Goelet family on Manhattan Island alone is estimated at fully $200,000,000. But this, there is excellent reason to believe, is an absurdly low approximation. Shortly after Robert married Henrietta (Harriet) Louise Warren in 1879, he commissioned architect Edward H. Kendall to design a Fifth Avenue mansion worthy of his social standing. His grandfather, Jacobus Goelet, was, as a boy and young man, brought up by Frederick Phillips, with whose career as a . This estimate was made at a time when the country was slowly recovering, as the set phrase goes, from the panic of 1892-94, and when land values were not in a state of inflation or rise. The landed property of the Goelet family on Manhattan Island alone is estimated at fully $200,000,000. Storks, pheasants and peacocks could be seen in the grounds about his house, and also numbers of guinea pigs. How great the wealth of this family is may be judged from the fact that one of the Rhinelanders William left an estate valued at $50,000,000 at his death in December, 1907. He is the developer of the Cond Nast Building as well as One World Trade Center, or the "Freedom Tower," the tallest structure in the Western hemisphere. Doubling the sums credited to Field and Leiter (that is to say, adding the value of the improvements to the value of the land), this brought Fields real estate in that one section to a value of $22,000,000, and Leiters to nearly the same. He foreclosed mortgages with pitiless promptitude, and his adroit knowledge of the law, approaching if not reaching, that of an unscrupulous pettifogger, enabled him to get the upper hand in every transaction. [1] Francois Goelet, a widower with a ten-year-old son, Jacobus, arrived in New York in 1676. He was dry and caustic in his remarks, says Houghton, and very rarely spared the object of his satire. The railroads now controlled by a few men, among whom the large landowners are conspicuous, were surveyed and built to a great extent by public funds, not private money. [3] His maternal uncles were stockbroker George Henry Warren II[7][8] and prominent architects Whitney Warren[9] and Lloyd Warren. From the frauds of this bank the Goelets reaped large profits which systematically were invested in New York City real estate. There he studied law and was admitted to practice. The Astors are directors in a large array of corporations, and likewise virtually all of the other big landlords. As fast as millions are dissipated they are far more than replaced in these private coffers by the collective labor of the American people through the tributary media of rent, interest and profit. The fortunes of the brothers descended to Roberts two sons, Robert, born in 1841, and Ogden, born in 1846. On one occasion a beggar called at Longworths office and pointed eloquently at his gaping shoes. The family was descended from Peter Goelet, a wealthy New York merchant in the 18th century. From Trinity Church they got a ninety-nine year lease of a large tract in what is now the very nub of the business section of New York City which tract they subsequently bought in fee simple. It is an indulgence which, however great the superficial consequential money cost may be, is, in reality, inexpensive. Thus, an entry, on January 26, 1807, in the municipal records, reads : On receiving the report of the Street Commissioner, Ordered that warrants issue to Messrs. Anderson and Allen for the three installments due to them from Mr. Goelet for the Whitehall and Exchange Piers.MSS. All available accounts agree in describing him as merciless. He was a director of the Bank of New York from 1814 until his death in 1852. In that day, although but thirty years since, when none but the dazzlingly rich could afford to keep a sumptuous steam yacht in commission the year round, Robert Goelet had a costly yacht, 300 feet long, equipped with all the splendors and comforts which up to that time had been devised for ocean craft. Sept. 28, 1923 - Oct. 08, 2019 October 17, 2019 Robert G. Goelet, a business and civic leader, naturalist, and philanthropist, who with his wife, Alexandra Creel Goelet, had been steward of. Their policy was much the same as that of the Astors constantly increasing their land possessions. He was a director of the Bank of New York from 1814 until his death in 1852. This large fortune, as is that of the Astors and of other extensive landlords, is not, as has been pointed out, purely one of land possessions. He was the only son born to Henrietta Louise (ne Warren) Goelet and Robert Goelet (18411899), a prominent landlord in New York. Created BeauxArts Institute", "Death Claims Robert Goelet Financier, 61. Nearly a century and a half ago William and Frederick Rhinelander kept a bakeshop on William street, New York City, and during the Revolution operated a sugar factory. Growing up, Kip lived with his parents, his sister Margaret (who died young), and the family's servants in a house overlooking Washington Square in Manhattan. [16] Among his other New York holdings were the southeast corner of 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, 14 Sutton Place South, 1400 Broadway, 53 Broadway, and the building on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 37th Street (which he bought in 1909). In 1952 Lerner borrowed $250 from his wife to start a real estate company, selling homes for developers. The great impetus to the sudden increase of their fortune came in the period 1850-1870, through a tract of land which they owned in what had formerly been the outskirts of the city. Net worth: $10.7 billion Source of wealth: E & J Gallo Winery The Gallo family fortune is. The great impetus to the sudden increase of their fortune came in the period 1850-1870, through a tract of land which they owned in what had formerly been the outskirts of the city. The next step is marriage with title. He was one of the largest property owners in the city by the time of his death. In turn these rents have incessantly gone toward buying up railroads, factories, utility plants and always more and more land. Minutes of the [New York City] Common Council, 1807, xvi:286. This remarkable man lived to the age of eighty-one ; when he died in 1863 in a splendid mansion which he had built in the heart of his vineyard, his estate was valued at $15,000,000. Minutes of the [New York City] Common Council, 1807, xvi:286. CHAPTER VIII The factors entering into the building up of the Schermerhorn fortune were almost identical with those of the Astor, the Goelet and the Rhinelander fortunes. These two sons, with an eye for the advantageous, married daughters of Thomas Buchanan, a rich Scotch merchant of New York City, and for a time a director of the United States Bank. His personal habits were considered repulsive by the conventional and fastidious. These brothers had set out with an iron determination to build up the largest fortune they could, and they allowed no obstacles to hinder them. This bank, as we have brought out previously, was chartered after a sufficient number of members of the Legislature had been bribed with $50,000 in stock and a large sum of money. Long after Longworth had become a multimillionaire he took a savage, perhaps a malicious, delight in doing things which shocked all current conceptions of how a millionaire should act. But as to his methods in obtaining land, there exists little obscurity. His grandfather, Jacobus Goelet, was, as a boy and young man, brought up by Frederick Phillips, with whose career as a . Ogden Goelet was an American heir, businessman and yachtsman from New York City during the Gilded Age. It is an indulgence which, however great the superficial consequential money cost may be, is, in reality, inexpensive. John Jacob Astor is one of the directors of the Western Union Telegraph monopoly, with its annual receipts of $29,000,000 and its net profits of $8,000,000 yearly ; and as for the many other corporations in which he and his family, the Goelets and the other commanding landlords hold stock, they would, if enumerated, make a formidable list. His family is the majority owner of the Washington Nationals. In 1884 it reached an aggregate of $30,000,000 a year ; in 1901 it was estimated at fully $50,000,000 a year. Of this amount all that private individuals contributed was $4,930 a mile above their receipts ; these latter were sums which the private owners gathered in from selling the land given to them by the State, amounting to $35,211 per mile, and the sums that they pocketed from stock waterings amounting to $8,189 a mile. He was one of the largest property owners in the city by the time of his death. Here the growth of large private fortunes was marked by much greater celerity than in the East, although these fortunes are not as large as those based upon land in the Eastern cities. The titled descendants of the predatory barons of the feudal ages having, generation after generation, squandered and mortgaged the estates gotten centuries ago by force and robbery, stand in need of funds. This explanation is found partly in the fraudulent means by which, decade after decade, they secured land and water grants from venal city administrations, and in the singularly dubious arrangement by which they obtained an extremely large landed property, now having a value of tens upon tens of millions, from Trinity Church. The variety of Fields possessions and his numerous forms of ownership were such that we shall have pertinent occasion to deal more relevantly with his career in subsequent parts of this work. But Longworth somehow contrived to get the accused off with acquittal. The rent-racked people of the City of New York, where rents are higher proportionately than in any other city, have sweated and labored and fiercely struggled, as have the people of other cities, only to deliver up a great share of their earnings to the lords of the soil, merely for a foothold. The Astors are directors in a large array of corporations, and likewise virtually all of the other big landlords. Napoleon had the same experience with French contractors, and the testimony of all wars is to the same effect. Yet now that this bank is one of the richest and most powerful institutions in the United States, and especially as the criminal nature of its origin is unknown except to the historic delver, the Goelets mention the connection of their ancestors with it as a matter of great and just pride. In getting their charter for the notorious Chemical Bank, they bribed members of the Legislature with the same phlegmatic serenity that they would put through an ordinary business transaction. The wealth of the Rhinelander family is commonly placed at about $100,000,000. They reduced miserliness to a supreme art. [14], As of 2012, the Goelet's Newport estate at Narragansett Avenue and the corner of Ochre Point Avenue, remained in the Goelet family. By 1830 the population was 24,831 ; twenty years later it had reached 118,761, and in 1860, 171,293 inhabitants. The landed property of the Goelet family on Manhattan Island alone is estimated at fully $200,000,000. Of Peter Goelet, a grandson of the original Peter, many stories were current illustrating his close-fistedness. The story of how Longworth became a landowner is given by Houghton as follows : His first client was a man accused of horse stealing. Doubling the sums credited to Field and Leiter (that is to say, adding the value of the improvements to the value of the land), this brought Fields real estate in that one section to a value of $22,000,000, and Leiters to nearly the same. In his stable he kept a cow to supply him with fresh milk ; he often milked it himself. 3 At this very time his wealth, judged by the standard of the times, was prodigious. These stills Longworth took and traded them off to Joel Williams, a tavern-keeper who was setting up a distillery. Since the full and itemized details of these transactions have been elaborated upon in previous chapters, it is hardly necessary to repeat them. When William B. Astor inherited in 1846 the greater part of his fathers fortune, the Goelet brothers had attained what was then the exalted rank of being millionaires, although their fortune was only a fraction of that of Astor. Gina Gallo and her husband Jean-Charles Boisset. 1 Some of this land and these water grants and piers were obtained by Peter Goelet during the corrupt administration of City Controller Romaine. The same combination of economic influences and pressure which so vastly increased the value of the Astors land, operated to turn this quondam farm into city lots worth enormous sums. Of Peter Goelets business methods and personality no account is extant. He was born in Conway, Mass., in 1835. These lots have a present aggregate value of perhaps $15,000,000 or more, although they are assessed at much less. The story of how Longworth became a landowner is given by Houghton as follows : His first client was a man accused of horse stealing. The founder of the Goelet fortune was Peter Goelet, an ironmonger during and succeeding the Revolution. [16], He inherited vast real estate holdings in New York, sometimes known as the Goelet Realty Company, which included the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and the property between 52nd and 53rd Streets on Park Avenue which the Racquet and Tennis Club leased. In 1895 the Illinois Labor Bureau, in that year happening to be under the direction of able and conscientious officials, made a painstaking investigation of land values in Chicago. This Rutgers was a lineal descendant of Anthony Rutgers, who, in 1731, obtained from the royal Governor Cosby the gift of what was then called the Fresh Water Pond and Swamp a stretch of seventy acres of little value at the time, but which is now covered with busy streets and large commercial and office buildings. Longworth kicked off one of his own untied shoes and told the beggar to try it on. In the course of this work it has already been shown in specific detail how Peter Goelet in conjunction with John Jacob Astor, the Rhinelander brothers, the Schermerhorns, the Lorillards and other founders of multimillionaire dynasties, fraudulently secured great tracts of land, during the early and middle parts of the last century, in either what was then, or what is now, in the heart of New York City. One was that almost consecutively they, along with other landholders, corrupted city governments to give them successive grants, and the other was their enormous surplus revenue which kept piling up. This railroad was built in the proportion of twelve parts to one by public funds, raised by taxation of the people of that State, and by prodigal gifts of public land grants. His wealth is vastnot less than five or six millions, wrote Barrett in 1862The Old Merchants of New York City, I: 349. It is now covered with stores, buildings and densely populated tenement houses. In turn these rents have incessantly gone toward buying up railroads, factories, utility plants and always more and more land. These also were high in the appraisement of property values, for they could be used to make whisky, and whisky could be in turn used to debauch the Indian tribes and swindle them of furs and land. Goelet family 0-9 608 Fifth Avenue 900 Broadway C Clinton Roosevelt Clos Du Val Winery Peter T. Curtenius G Elbridge Thomas Gerry Peter G. Gerry Robert L. Gerry Jr. Robert Livingston Gerry Sr. Thomas Russell Gerry Glenmere mansion Alexandra Creel Goelet Mary Goelet Mary Wilson Goelet Ogden Goelet Peter Goelet Robert Goelet Robert Goelet Sr. When Ogden Goelet died he left a fortune of at least $80,000,000, reckoning all of the complex forms of his property, and his brother, Robert, dying in 1899, left a fortune of about the same amount. Robert Walton Goelet, 61, of New York and Newport, R. I., a financier and one of New York's largest property owners, died today in his old brownstone house at 48th Street and Fifth Avenue, one of the few remaining private residences on the. The basic structure of this was New York City land, but a considerable part was in railroad stocks and bonds, and miscellaneous aggregations of other securities to the purchase of which the surplus revenue had gone. OTHER LAND FORTUNES CONSIDERED. The brothers admired Kendall's work-within four years he would design . This extortion formed one of the saddest and most sordid chapters of the Civil War (as it does of all wars,) but conventional history is silent on the subject, and one is compelled to look elsewhere for the facts of how the commercial houses imposed at high prices shoddy material and semi-putrid food upon the very army and navy that fought for their interests.9 In the words of one of Fields laudatory biographers, the firm coined money a phrase which for the volumes of significant meaning embodied in it, is an epitome of the whole profit system. In imitation of the Astors the Goelets steadily adhered, as they have since, to the policy of seldom or never selling any of their land. 1 Some of this land and these water grants and piers were obtained by Peter Goelet during the corrupt administration of City Controller Romaine. Posts about Goelet Family written by fileandclaw322. The factors constituting this fortune are various. The factors entering into the building up of the Schermerhorn fortune were almost identical with those of the Astor, the Goelet and the Rhinelander fortunes. But once any man or woman passed over the line of respectability into the besmeared realm of sheer disrepute, and that person would find Longworth not only accessible but genuinely sympathetic. [16] His widow was given his personal effects and property along with life use of their home on Narragansett Avenue in Newport and their estate in France. The growth of the city kept on increasingly. Thus, an entry, on January 26, 1807, in the municipal records, reads : On receiving the report of the Street Commissioner, Ordered that warrants issue to Messrs. Anderson and Allen for the three installments due to them from Mr. Goelet for the Whitehall and Exchange Piers.MSS. In the basement he had a forge, and there were tools of all kinds over which he labored, while upstairs he had a law library of 10,000 volumes, for it was a fixed, cynical determination of his never to pay a lawyer for advice that he could himself get for the reading. The Government and the public were forced to pay the highest sums for the poorest material. Although the State of Illinois formally retains a nominal say in its management, yet it is really owned and ruled by eight men, among whom are John Jacob Astor, and Robert Walton Goelet, associated with E.H. Harriman, Cornelius Vanderbilt and four others. It seems quite superfluous to enlarge further upon the origin of the great landed fortunes of New York City ; the typical examples given doubtless serve as expositions of how, in various and similar ways, others were acquired. The stock of the Chemical Bank, quoted at a fabulous sum, so to speak, is still held by a small, compact group in which the Goelets are conspicuous. Field left a fortune of about $100,000,000 (as estimated by the executors) which he bequeathed principally to two grandsons, both of which heirs were in boyhood. The unsold land grant, says Professor Frank Parsons, amounted to 344,368 acres, worth probably over $5,000,000, so that those to whom the securities of the company were issued, had obtained the road at a bonus of nearly $2,000,000 above all they paid in.4. The titled descendants of the predatory barons of the feudal ages having, generation after generation, squandered and mortgaged the estates gotten centuries ago by force and robbery, stand in need of funds. The principal landowner in this one section, not to mention other sections of that immense city, was Marshall Field, with $11,000,000 worth of land ; the next was Leiter, who owned in that section land valued at $10,500,000.8 It appeared from this report that eighteen persons owned $65,000,000 of this $319,000,000 worth of land, and that eighty-eight persons owned $136,000,000 worth or one-half of the entire business center of Chicago.