CRANES (MACHINE HISTORY) 

LOCATION AND HISTORY OF THE SITE OF THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING

The present site of the Empire State Building was first developed as the John Thomson Farm in the late 18th century.  At the time, a stream ran across the site, emptying into Sunfish Pond, located a block away. The history of the site dates back to 1799 when the City of New York sold a virgin tract (now bounded by Broadway and Sixth Avenue on the west, Madison Avenue on the east, 33rd Street on the south and 36th Street on the north) to John Thompson for $2,600. He put the land to farm use.    In 1825 Thompson sold the farm to Charles Lawton for $10,000. In 1827 William Backhouse Astor, the second son of John Jacob Astor, purchased the farm for $20,500 as an investment.

THE ASTOR FAMILY

JOHN JACOB ASTOR

John Jacob Astor (July 17, 1763 – March 29, 1848) was born in Walldorf near Heidelberg, Germany. His ancestors were Waldensian refugees from Savoy. John came from humble origins and his father was a butcher by trade. He and his brother George were flute makers.

The two brothers emigrated to London where they continued their flute making business. John Jacob sailed to America in 1783, following the American Revolutionary War. Arriving in Baltimore he became active first as a dealer in woodwind instruments then in New York as a merchant in "Furs & pianos" and later in real estate where he amassed a legendary fortune.

John Jacob Astor was the first prominent member of the Astor family and the first multi-millionaire in the United States. He was the creator of the first trust in America, from which he made his fortune in fur trading, real estate, and opium.  He built a fur trading empire that extended to the Great Lakes region and Canada, and later expanded into the American West and Pacific coast.

In the 1830s, John Jacob Astor foresaw that the next big boom would be the development of New York, which would soon emerge as one of the world’s greatest cities. Astor withdrew from the American Fur Company, as well as all his other ventures, and used the money to buy and develop large tracts of Manhattan real estate. Predicting the rapid growth northward on Manhattan Island, Astor purchased more and more land beyond the current city limits. Astor rarely built on his land, and instead let others pay rent to use it.

At the time of his death in 1848, Astor was the wealthiest person in the United States, leaving an estate estimated to be worth at least $20 million; according to Forbes rankings, he would have had an estimated net worth of $110.1 billion U.S. dollars in 2006, making him the fourth wealthiest person in American history.   Astor left the bulk of his fortune to his second son, William Backhouse Astor. His eldest son, John Jacob II, had a mental disability and Astor left enough money to care for him for the rest of his life.

John Jacob Astor's other brother, Henry Astor also emigrated to America. He was a horse racing enthusiast, and purchased a thoroughbred named "Messenger" who had been brought from England in 1788. The horse became the founding sire of all Standard-bred horses in the United States today.

When the first John Jacob Astor lay dying shortly before his 85th birthday in 1848, so the story goes, someone asked America’s richest man if he would have done things differently if he had it to do all over again. “Yes,” he replied. He would have bought every inch of Manhattan. When his great-grandson John Jacob Astor IV went down on the Titanic in 1912, his son William Vincent (always known as Vincent) inherited property all over Manhattan that today would probably be worth a hundred billion. 

The first John Jacob Astor was as parsimonious as he was rich. Charity and philanthropy were concepts far outside his consciousness. The next three generations of his heirs maintained that family tradition impeccably.  The bulk of the first John Jacob Astor’s fortune went to his son William Backhouse Astor. When he died in 1875, the family fortune had multiplied along with the growth of New York City.

John Jacob Astor (1763 –1848)

WILLIAM BACKHOUSE ASTOR

William Backhouse Astor was the second-oldest son of John Jacob Astor and Sarah Todd Astor. Born in New York City, where he attended public schools, when he was sixteen, he was sent to the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he joined the German Student Corps Curonia of the Baltic-German students; later he moved to the University of Heidelberg. In 1815, when he was twenty-three years old, he returned to the United States and entered partnership with his father, who changed the name of his firm to John Jacob Astor & Son. 

Although William Backhouse's fortunes grew with his father's company, he became a truly wealthy man when he inherited the estate of his uncle Henry Astor who died without children. When his father died in 1848 he became the richest man in America; he was the last member of the Astor family to enjoy this distinction.

Under William Backhouse Astor, the Astor fortune grew. Like his father, he was close with a dollar and managed his assets to maximise profits. Real estate values increased as New York became more important. The Civil War helped. He sued the US Government regarding income tax payable by himself during the War stating it to be unconstitutional, thus fending off the Government’s attack on his wealth. He was said to own in 1867 as many as 720 houses, and he was also heavily interested in railroad, coal, and insurance companies. On his death he left an estate worth close to $50 million.

The bulk of William Backhouse Astor’s estate was divided between his two sons, John Jacob Astor III and his younger (by eight years) brother William Backhouse Astor Jr. John Jacob Astor III, being the eldest, received the largest portion of what was known as The Astor Estate.  

They enjoyed the fruits of their grandfather’s hard work and their father’s devotion to money but the two were very different personalities.  The two brothers had a distant relationship, although they were next door neighbors – their townhouses sharing the block on the west side of Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th Street where the Empire State Building stands today. At the root of the brothers’ distance was the fact that William Backhouse Astor, as the minority partner, was given little to do in the family business. Instead he was relegated to spending the majority of his adult years on his yacht (the largest in the world at the time) or at his estate Ferncliff in Rhinebeck, New York, often in the company of a coterie of friends and available women, and far far from his wife Caroline (known as Lina), the queen of New York society.

William allowed his brother John to manage his business affairs, showing little interest in the over seeing of his fortune. He married Caroline Webster Schermerhorn from a prominent Dutch-American New York family. She would later become the arbiter of New York and Newport society. William supported the abolition of slavery and paid to equip a US Army regiment during the Civil War but much of his efforts were spent on his palatial yacht, horse breeding, and trying to develop an upper class resort on the St. Johns River south of Jacksonville, Florida. His lifestyle was that of the idle rich.

William Astor often spent winters in Jacksonville, Florida aboard his yacht and was responsible for the construction of a number of prominent buildings in the city. Liking the area, in 1874, he purchased a land tract of around 80,000 acres (320 km²) along the St. Johns River north of Orlando in an area now called Lake County, Florida. There, on what had once been a 16th century Huguenot settlement destroyed by the Spanish, he and two partners used 12,000 acres (49 km²) to build an entire town that he named Manhattan but was later changed to Astor in his honor.

His project, which would come to include several hotels, began with the construction of wharves on the river to accommodate steamboats. These steamboats attracted a steamship agency that could bring in the necessary materials and supplies. William Astor enjoyed his development and purchased a railroad that connected the town to the "Great Lakes Region" of Florida. He donated the town's first church and the land for the local non-denominational cemetery, and he also helped build a schoolhouse, both of which are still standing today. In 1875, one of the many nearby lakes was named Lake Schermerhorn after William Astor's wife, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor.

The town of Manhattan, Florida boomed, and William Astor, with an eye on the large New York market, expanded his interests to a grapefruit grove, a fruit that at the time was only available on a very limited basis in other parts of the United States. But William Astor did not live long enough to see the orchard grow to production. Following his death in 1892, the property fell to his son, John Jacob Astor IV. By then though, rapid changes were taking place throughout Florida. New railroads had been built in 1885 through the central and western part of the state, and in the late 1890s, Henry Flagler built a railroad line running down Florida's east coast from Daytona Beach. All this expansion left the town of Astor isolated and it was all but abandoned after train service to Astor was discontinued.  William Backhouse Astor, Jr. died of a heart attack in 1892 in Paris, France.

 Caroline Webster Schermerhorn-Astor  (1830–1908)

JOHN JACOB ASTOR III

His brother, John Jacob Astor III, was not so self indulgent. He went to Columbia College, Göttingen, and Harvard Law. During the Civil War, he was a volunteer aide to General George McClellan. He was brevetted as a brigadier general. His main business was New York real estate but he invested in the Illinois Central and the New York Central Railroads, selling his shares of the latter to Cornelius Vanderbilt. He invested in Western Union as well.

His old holdings plus his management of his brother’s wealth gave him enormous power and influence. As a businessman, he dabbled in railroad investment, but was forced to yield control of the original New York Central Railroad line (from Albany to Buffalo) to Cornelius Vanderbilt. His principal business interest was of course the vast Astor Estate real estate holdings in New York City, which he managed profitably and parsimoniously.

In 1846, he married Charlotte Augusta Gibbes (c. 1825-1887) of South Carolina and in 1859 he built a home at 350 Fifth Avenue, which is today the street address of the Empire State Building. Later, he added an imposing vacation home, Beaulieu, in Newport, Rhode Island.

John Jacob Astor III had little inclination to do much in the way of charitable works beyond continuing gifts made by his ancestors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Trinity Church, and the Astor Library. However, his deeply religious wife had quite a different attitude. Charlotte Astor supported the newly formed Children's Aid Society and sat on the board of the Women's Hospital of New York, an institution that to her dismay refused to accept cancer patients. Deciding to do something about it, she persuaded her husband to donate the money to erect the New York Cancer Hospital's first wing, the "Astor Pavilion."

Aristocratic by inclination, he increasingly visited London in his later years, and his only child, William Waldorf Astor, would move there permanently with his family in 1891. The Astor brothers did not like each other but it was their sons that openly feuded.

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