Minutes of the [New York City] Common Council, 1807, xvi:286. It fitted. 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. He was dry and caustic in his remarks, says Houghton, and very rarely spared the object of his satire. 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. The man so the story further runs had no money to pay Longworths fee and no property except two second-hand copper stills. 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. As immigration swarmed West and Cincinnati grew, his land consequently took on enhanced value. 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. As population increased and the downtown sections were converted into business sections, the fashionables shifted their quarters from time to time, always pushing uptown, until the Goelet lands became a long sweep of ostentatious mansions. Some other explanation must be found to account for the phenomenal increase of the original small fortune and its unshaken retention. On the other hand, they bought constantly. The wealth of the Rhinelander family is commonly placed at about $100,000,000. The Goelet family is an influential family from New York, of Huguenot origins, that owned significant real estate in New York City . It was estimated that the 266 acres of land, constituting what was owned by individuals and private corporations in one section alone the South Side, were worth $319,000,000. The grant consisted of what are now many blocks along Broadway north of Lispenard street. 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. The case looked black. Unlike the founder of the fortune the present Longworth generation never strays from the set formulas of respectability ; it has intermarried with other rich families : and Nicholas, a namesake and grandson of the original, and a representative in Congress, married in circumstances of great and lavish pomp a daughter of President Roosevelt, thus linking a large fortune, based upon vested interests, with the ruling executive of the day and strategetically combining wealth with direct political power. The progenitor of this family, Peter Goelet (1727-1811), was an ironmonger during and after the Revolution. Victim Had Suffered From Somnambulism. One tract of land, extending from Third avenue to the East River and from Sixty-fourth to Seventy-fifth street, which he secured in the early part of the nineteenth century, became worth a colossal fortune in itself. During the Civil War this firm, as did the entire commercial world, proceeded to hold up the nation for exorbitant prices in its con- In 1860 he was made a partner. Profits from trade went toward buying more land, and in providing part of corrupt funds with which the Legislature of New York was bribed into granting banking charters, exemptions and other special laws. But as to his methods in obtaining land, there exists little obscurity. 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. The enormities brazenly committed during the Spanish-American War of 1898 are sufficiently remembered. Little research is necessary to shatter this error. "[28] She received the French Legion of Honor for aiding French-American wives during World War II and for providing medical services to inhabitants in the vicinity of Sandricourt, the Goelet family estate outside Paris, after it was liberated in August 1944. The volume of its business rose to enormous proportions. 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. John Goelet, who married Henrietta Fanner, daughter of William Rogers Fanner, This page was last edited on 16 July 2021, at 15:31. As time passes a gradual transformation takes place. His personal habits were considered repulsive by the conventional and fastidious. 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 cost of the road as reported by the company in 1873 was $48,331 a mile. It is usually set forth, in the plenitude of eulogistic biographies, that their thrift and ability were the foundation of the familys immense fortune. In 1884 it reached an aggregate of $30,000,000 a year ; in 1901 it was estimated at fully $50,000,000 a year. His passion for economy was carried to such an abnormal stage that he refused even to engage a tailor to mend his garments.3 He was unmarried, and generally attended to his own wants. Ogden was a noted real estate investor with properties throughout Manhattan. Sportsman, a Leader in Social Circles in Newport and New York, Kin of Early Settlers", "MISS BEATRICE GOELET DEAD. 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. But the singular continuity does not end here. 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. 4 The Railways, the Trusts and the People: 104. 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. The drunkard, the thief, the prostitute, the veriest wrecks of humanity could always tell their stories to him and get relief. 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. Likewise the third generation. This estimate was confirmed to a surprising degree by the inventory of Fields executors reported to the court early in 1907. It embraced a long section of Broadway a section now covered with huge hotels, business buildings, stores and theaters. [16] His widow lived almost another 47 years until her death in 1988. 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. 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. The story of how Longworth became a landowner is given by Houghton as follows : His first client was a man accused of horse stealing. His house at Nineteenth street, corner of Broadway, was a curiosity shop. In the last ten years the value of the Goelet land holdings has enormously increased, until now it is almost too conservative an estimate to place the collective fortune at $200,000,000. Upon the death of his mother in 1915, he inherited a fortune estimated to be $40 million (equivalent to $780 million in 2021), . The value of the land that he beqeuathed has increased continuously ; in the hands of his various descendants to-day it is many times more valuable than the huge fortune which he left. The value of the land that he beqeuathed has increased continuously ; in the hands of his various descendants to-day it is many times more valuable than the huge fortune which he left. But as to his methods in obtaining land, there exists little obscurity. [36], Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company, The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, "ROBERT W. GOELET DIES IN HOME AT 61. He had a clear notion (for he was endowed with a highly analytical and penetrating mind) that in giving a few coins to the abased and the wretched he was merely returning in infinitesimal proportion what the prevailing system, of which he was so conspicuous an exemplar, took from the whole people for the benefit of a few ; and that this system was unceasingly turning out more and more wretches. As time passes a gradual transformation takes place. We shall advert to some of the great fortunes in the West based wholly or largely upon city real estate. [2] In his will, he left the Ritz-Carlton Hotel to Harvard University. The invariable rule, it might be said, has been to utilize the surplus revenues in the form of rents, in buying up controlling power in a great number and variety of corporations. Of Peter Goelet, a grandson of the original Peter, many stories were current illustrating his close-fistedness. 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. As was the case with John Jacob Astor, the fortune of the Goelets was derived from a mixture of commerce, banking and ownership of land. As population increased and the downtown sections were converted into business sections, the fashionables shifted their quarters from time to time, always pushing uptown, until the Goelet lands became a long sweep of ostentatious mansions. To understand the intense scandal caused by what were considered his vagaries, it is only necessary to bear in mind the ultra-lofty position of a multimillionaire at a period when a man worth $250,000 was thought very rich. But Longworth somehow contrived to get the accused off with acquittal. 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. But this, there is excellent reason to believe, is an absurdly low approximation. It fitted. [19] The 32-story building was open in 1957 with National Biscuit Company,[18] Kaye Scholer, Chemical Corn Exchange Bank as major tenants. 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. 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.