Robert, Ogden, Robert and Robert, Sorting out the Gilded Age Goelets 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. 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. It also includes blocks upon blocks filled with residences and aristocratic mansions. This they could easily do for two reasons. 3 At this very time his wealth, judged by the standard of the times, was prodigious.
Robert G. Goelet, 96, of Gardiner's Island - The East Hampton Star 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. His grandfather, Jacobus Goelet, was, as a boy and young man, brought up by Frederick Phillips, with whose career as a . 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. His only sister, Beatrice Goelet, who died of pneumonia at age 17 in 1902, was painted as a child by John Singer Sargent.
Robert Goelet, New York Grandee and Naturalist, Dies at 96 1 Some of this land and these water grants and piers were obtained by Peter Goelet during the corrupt administration of City Controller Romaine. Some of the lots cost him but ten dollars each. Since the full and itemized details of these transactions have been elaborated upon in previous chapters, it is hardly necessary to repeat them. At least $55,000,000 of it was represented at the time that the executors made their inventory, by a multitude of bonds and stocks in a wide range of diverse industrial, transportation, utility and mining corporations. But as to his methods in obtaining land, there exists little obscurity. 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. Outstanding Business Executive Was One of Largest Property Owners in New York City", "OPERA STAIRCASE TO HONOR GOELET; Family Donates $500,000 for Metropolitan House at Lincoln Sq. 8 Eighth Annual Report, Illinois Labor Bureau: 104-253. It is an indulgence which, however great the superficial consequential money cost may be, is, in reality, inexpensive. Many are. An extensive vineyard, which he laid out in Ohio, added to his wealth. The founder, Peter Schermerhorn, was a ship chandler during the Revolution. 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. Graduate of Columbia and Its Law School, but Never Had Practiced. The story of how Longworth became a landowner is given by Houghton as follows : His first client was a man accused of horse stealing. Napoleon had the same experience with French contractors, and the testimony of all wars is to the same effect. Little research is necessary to shatter this error. 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. As time passes a gradual transformation takes place.
The Astors are directors in a large array of corporations, and likewise virtually all of the other big landlords. 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. . 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. It is now covered with stores, buildings and densely populated tenement houses. 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. 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. A surfeit of money brings power, but it does not carry with it a recognized position among a titled aristocracy. 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. By October, he had cast a smaller plaster figure for Goelet, McKim, the Trustees, and the university's various committees to review. He was dry and caustic in his remarks, says Houghton, and very rarely spared the object of his satire. [1], Robert Walton Goelet, nicknamed Bertie to avoid confusion with his cousin Robert Wilson Goelet (whom he strongly resembled),[2] was born on March 19, 1880 in New York.
Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes, vol I, part 2, ch 8 [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. For respectability in any form he had no use ; he scouted and scoffed at it and pulverized it with biting and grinding sarcasm. It also includes blocks upon blocks filled with residences and aristocratic mansions. 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. Little research is necessary to shatter this error. The largest landowners that developed in Chicago were Marshall Field and Levi Z. Leiter. 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. Land acquired by political or commercial fraud has been made the lever for the commission of other frauds. On several occasions he was found in his office at the Chemical Bank industriously absorbed in sewing his coat. In turn these rents have incessantly gone toward buying up railroads, factories, utility plants and always more and more land.
Research Guides: Salve's Seven Estates: The People: Ochre Court Goelet family - Social Networks and Archival Context - SNAC 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. THE GOELET FORTUNE. [19] The 32-story building was open in 1957 with National Biscuit Company,[18] Kaye Scholer, Chemical Corn Exchange Bank as major tenants. By this manipulation, private individuals not only got this immensely valuable railroad for practically nothing, but they received, or rather the laws (which they caused to be made) awarded them, a present of nearly four millions for their dexterity in plundering the railroad from the people. [1] Francois Goelet, a widower with a ten-year-old son, Jacobus, arrived in New York in 1676. Its mate followed. RELATIVES HERE NOT TOLD Rich Bachelor Spends Much of His Time at His Sandricourt Estate in France", "Anne-Marie Goelet, Legion of Honor Officer", "ROBERT W. GOELET WEDS MLLE. 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. No term of reproach was more invested with cutting contempt and cruel hatred than that of a horse thief. 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. Between them, he and his brother Ogden possessed a fortune of at least $150,000,000. While the Astors, the Goelets, the Rhinelanders and others, or rather the entire number of inhabitants, were transmuting their land into vast and increasing wealth expressed in terms of hundreds of millions in money, Nicholas Longworth was aggrandizing himself likewise in Cincinnati. 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. The Government and the public were forced to pay the highest sums for the poorest material. The same process of reaping gigantic fortunes from land went on in every large city. 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. These stills Longworth took and traded them off to Joel Williams, a tavern-keeper who was setting up a distillery. When fraud was necessary they, like the bulk of their class, unhesitatingly used it. At first the fringe of New York City, then part of its suburbs, this tract lay in a region which from 1850 on began to take on great values, and which was in great demand for the homes of the rich. Ogden Goelet was born on September 29, 1851 in Manhattan, New York .
Peter P. Goulet (1764-1828) - HouseHistree Yet this miser, who denied himself many of the ordinary comforts and conveniences of life, and who would argue and haggle for hours over a trivial sum, allowed himself one expensive indulgence expensive for hint, at least. There he studied law and was admitted to practice. As immigration swarmed West and Cincinnati grew, his land consequently took on enhanced value. CHAPTER VIII a daughter of John Rutgers. Certainly he was a very unique type of millionaire, much akin to Stephen Girard. There is good reason to believe that alongside of his one personality, that of a rapacious miser, there lived another personality, that of a philosopher. 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. Ogden was a noted real estate investor with properties throughout Manhattan. 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. These two brothers not only maintained the family fortune but also were one of the wealthiest landowners in New York City (second only to the Astors). His personal habits were considered repulsive by the conventional and fastidious. A surfeit of money brings power, but it does not carry with it a recognized position among a titled aristocracy. The balance represents the investments of private individuals. 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. After proper periods of mourning, their widows May and Harriet resumed their regal lifestyles with open speculation as to the possibility of one or the other remarrying. 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. For respectability in any form he had no use ; he scouted and scoffed at it and pulverized it with biting and grinding sarcasm. These lots have a present aggregate value of perhaps $15,000,000 or more, although they are assessed at much less. He was the largest landowner in Cincinnati, and one of the largest in the cities of the United States. 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. 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.
Ogden Goelet (1851-1897) - Find a Grave Memorial It is usually set forth, in the plenitude of eulogistic biographies, that their thrift and ability were the foundation of the familys immense fortune. Minutes of the [New York City] Common Council, 1807, xvi:286. 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. The foundations of the Goelet family fortune were established before the Revolutionary War. The founder, Peter Schermerhorn, was a ship chandler during the Revolution. 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 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. 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. His grandfather, Jacobus Goelet, was, as a boy and young man, brought up by Frederick Phillips, with whose career as a promoter and backer of pirates and piracies, and as a briber of royal officials under British rule, we have dealt in previous chapters. The drunkard, the thief, the prostitute, the veriest wrecks of humanity could always tell their stories to him and get relief. For a Western city this was a very considerable population for the period. 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. 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 price they paid was $600 a lot. The enormities brazenly committed during the Spanish-American War of 1898 are sufficiently remembered. And progressively their rentals from this land increased. Yet this miser, who denied himself many of the ordinary comforts and conveniences of life, and who would argue and haggle for hours over a trivial sum, allowed himself one expensive indulgence expensive for hint, at least. He was 68 years old. 2 Prominent Families of New York: 231. 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. 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. The progenitor of this family, Peter Goelet (1727-1811), was an ironmonger during and after the Revolution. He was. [20] It too was torn down and replaced by a new tower at 425 Park designed by architect Lord Norman Foster, still on land owned by the Goelet family. Of Peter Goelet, a grandson of the original Peter, many stories were current illustrating his close-fistedness. The largest landowners that developed in Chicago were Marshall Field and Levi Z. Leiter. He was dry and caustic in his remarks, says Houghton, and very rarely spared the object of his satire. John Goelet, who married Henrietta Fanner, daughter of William Rogers Fanner, This page was last edited on 16 July 2021, at 15:31. 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. They also built ships and did a large commission business. 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. Longworth kicked off one of his own untied shoes and told the beggar to try it on. 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. The founder of the Goelet fortune was Peter Goelet, an ironmonger during and succeeding the Revolution. 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. 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.
His uncle, Ogden Goelet, was the builder of Ochre Court and his two first cousins were Robert Wilson Goelet, the original owner of Glenmere mansion,[4] and Mary Goelet, the wife of Henry Innes-Ker, 8th Duke of Roxburghe. Some other explanation must be found to account for the phenomenal increase of the original small fortune and its unshaken retention. 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 GOELET FORTUNE. 5 See Part III, Great Fortunes From Railroads.. Francis Goelet (19261998), a noted philanthropist and patron of the arts who died unmarried. At least $55,000,000 of it was represented at the time that the executors made their inventory, by a multitude of bonds and stocks in a wide range of diverse industrial, transportation, utility and mining corporations. Current Status: #59 on Forbes' s 2015 list. He was the largest landowner in Cincinnati, and one of the largest in the cities of the United States. The family was descended from Peter Goelet, a wealthy New York merchant in the 18th century. Indeed, so rapidly did its value grow soon after he got it, that it was no longer necessary for him to practice law or in any wise crook to others. Along Created BeauxArts Institute", "Death Claims Robert Goelet Financier, 61. [3] His maternal uncles were stockbroker George Henry Warren II[7][8] and prominent architects Whitney Warren[9] and Lloyd Warren. Father of Robert Goelet. The Goelet fortune was estimated to be around $50 million and it was principally maintained by brother Ogden and Robert Goelet. Robert and Ogden jointly controlled the family fortune of tens of millions of dollars and, beginning in the early 1880's, embarked on an ambitious construction campaign that included the 1883 . Field was the son of a farmer. It is an indulgence which, however great the superficial consequential money cost may be, is, in reality, inexpensive. 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. At this time, Newport was a place where some of the most elite New York families resided during the summer months. We shall advert to some of the great fortunes in the West based wholly or largely upon city real estate. 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. The same process of reaping gigantic fortunes from land went on in every large city. 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. 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. In 1884 it reached an aggregate of $30,000,000 a year ; in 1901 it was estimated at fully $50,000,000 a year. Goelet and his brother Robert controlled the family fortune, worth tens of millions. His family is the majority owner of the Washington Nationals. 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. 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. He was a member of socially prominent New York family. 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.
How Are the Great-Grandkids of the Richest Gilded Age - The Atlantic Net worth: $10.7 billion Source of wealth: E & J Gallo Winery The Gallo family fortune is. The case looked black. Storks, pheasants and peacocks could be seen in the grounds about his house, and also numbers of guinea pigs. 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. Formerly Broker", "WHITNEY WARREN, ARCHITECT, 78, DIES; Designer of the Grand Central Terminal and Rebuilding of Louvain Library, Belgium HAD PRACTICAL APPROACH Specialized With His Partner, C. D. Wetrnore. 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. 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. This land was once a farm and extended from about what is now Union Square to Forty-seventh street and Fifth avenue. Some of the lots cost him but ten dollars each. 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. 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. Throughout the fall and the winter of 1900-1901, various university figures dropped by French's New York studio to judge the mock-up of Alma . 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. The Goelet family is an influential family from New York, of Huguenot origins, that owned significant real estate in New York City . From the frauds of this bank the Goelets reaped large profits which systematically were invested in New York City real estate. 5 See Part III, Great Fortunes From Railroads.. For stationery he used blank backs of letters and envelopes which he carefully and systematically saved and put away. 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. 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. He was born in Conway, Mass., in 1835. The fortunes of the brothers descended to Roberts two sons, Robert, born in 1841, and Ogden, born in 1846. 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. Likewise the third generation. 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. It was established that Government officials were in collusion with the contractors. In the early 1880s, they constructed such buildings in Manhattan as the Gorham Building, the Judge Building, The Goelet Building, and the Metropolitan Club. [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 his stable he kept a cow to supply him with fresh milk ; he often milked it himself. 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. There were only a few millionaires in the United States, and still fewer multimillionaires. The landed property of the Goelet family on Manhattan Island alone is estimated at fully $200,000,000. 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 What the circumstances were that attended this grant are not now known. By this manipulation, private individuals not only got this immensely valuable railroad for practically nothing, but they received, or rather the laws (which they caused to be made) awarded them, a present of nearly four millions for their dexterity in plundering the railroad from the people. In a voluminous biography giving the genealogies of the rich families of New York material which was supplied and perhaps written by the families themselves this boast occurs in the chapter devoted to the Goelets : They were also numbered among the founders of that famous New York financial institution, the Chemical Bank.2 Thus do the crimes of one generation become transformed into the glories of another ! He Inherited $60,000,000. They had 4-children and their grandchildren included Elbridge T. Gerry, Ogden and Robert Goelet. He was the son of Elbert Samuel Kip (1799-1876) and Elizabeth ( ne Goelet) Kip (1808-1882). 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.