goelet family fortune goelet family fortune

Goelet, it seems, was allowed to pay in installments. The man so the story further runs had no money to pay Longworths fee and no property except two second-hand copper stills. 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. He died in 1879 aged seventy-nine years ; and within a few months, his brother Robert, who was as much of an eccentric and miser in his way, passed away in his seventieth year. The second generation of the Goelets counting from the founder of the fortune were incorrigibly parsimonious. 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 ! 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 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. Some of the lots cost him but ten dollars each. 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. Some of the lots cost him but ten dollars each. 3 At this very time his wealth, judged by the standard of the times, was prodigious. Corporation Director, Owner of Large Realty Holdings Here, Succumbs to Heart Attack. He was one of the largest property owners in the city by the time of his death. 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. This eccentric was very melancholy and, apart from his queer collection of pets, cared for nothing except land and houses. 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. As time passes a gradual transformation takes place. Chancing in upon him one could see him intently pouring over a list of his properties. He was plain and careless in his dress, looking more a beggar than a millionaire.. To give one of many instances : The Illinois Central Railroad, passing through an industrial and rich farming country, is one of the most profitable railroads in the United States. Napoleon had the same experience with French contractors, and the testimony of all wars is to the same effect. Ogden Goelet was an American heir, businessman and yachtsman from New York City during the Gilded Age. Ogden was a noted real estate investor with properties throughout Manhattan. 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. 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. Longworth kicked off one of his own untied shoes and told the beggar to try it on. Along 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. For respectability in any form he had no use ; he scouted and scoffed at it and pulverized it with biting and grinding sarcasm. At this time, Newport was a place where some of the most elite New York families resided during the summer months. 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 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. A surfeit of money brings power, but it does not carry with it a recognized position among a titled aristocracy. For a Western city this was a very considerable population for the period. Next to the Astors estate the Goelet landed possessions are perhaps the largest urban estates in the United States in value. [26], In 1958, in Goelet's honor, his widow and four children donated $500,000 toward the construction of the Metropolitan Opera's new home at Lincoln Center, where the grand staircase bears a plaque with his name. But this, there is excellent reason to believe, is an absurdly low approximation. 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. When fraud was necessary they, like the bulk of their class, unhesitatingly used it. The Goelet fortune was estimated to be around $50 million and it was principally maintained by brother Ogden and Robert Goelet. 4 The Railways, the Trusts and the People: 104. Younger brother Ogden married Mary R. Wilson [Mary R. Goelet] in 1878 and had two children, Mary "May" Wilson Goelet [Mary W. Goelet] (1879?-1937) and Robert Goelet (1880-1966). They reduced miserliness to a supreme art. None who had the appearance of respectable charity seekers could get anything else from him than contemptuous rebuffs. 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. tracts at a time of distress. 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 next step is marriage with title. 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. 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. He was a member of socially prominent New York family. It embraced a long section of Broadway a section now covered with huge hotels, business buildings, stores and theaters. He Inherited $60,000,000. On one occasion they bought eighty lots in the block from Fifth to Sixth avenues, Forty-second to Forty-third streets. Father of Robert Goelet. 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. He was dry and caustic in his remarks, says Houghton, and very rarely spared the object of his satire. 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. From the frauds of this bank the Goelets reaped large profits which systematically were invested in New York City real estate. 9 In those parts of this work relating to great fortunes from railroads and from industries, this phase of commercial life is specifically dealt with. 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. It will be recalled that, as important personages in Tammany Hall, the dominant political party in New York City, the Rhinelanders used the powers of city government to get grant after grant for virtually nothing. 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. The balance represents the investments of private individuals. The brothers admired Kendall's work-within four years he would design . 1 Some of this land and these water grants and piers were obtained by Peter Goelet during the corrupt administration of City Controller Romaine. Built in the Beaux-Arts style, Goelet spent an estimated $4.5 million on the estate between 1888 and 1892. He was a director of the Bank of New York from 1814 until his death in 1852. 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. [13], Goelet served as a director of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company for many years. Chancing in upon him one could see him intently pouring over a list of his properties. 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. On the other hand, they bought constantly. The founding and aggrandizement of other great private fortunes from land were accompanied by methods closely resembling, or identical with, those that the Astors employed. 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 His only sister, Beatrice Goelet, who died of pneumonia at age 17 in 1902, was painted as a child by John Singer Sargent. 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. 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. It is an indulgence which, however great the superficial consequential money cost may be, is, in reality, inexpensive. [17] He also owned sixteen four-story townhouses on Park Avenue built by his father in 1871. Little research is necessary to shatter this error. W.GOELET MAY WED MLLE. Peter had two sons ; Peter P., and Robert R. Goelet. 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. In exchange, Longworth received thirty-three acres of what was then considered unpromising land in the town.6 From time to time he bought more land with the money made in law ; this land lay on what were then the outskirts of the place. Goelet family. All available accounts agree in describing him as merciless. In Chicago, with its phenomenally speedy growth of population and its vast array of workers, immense fortunes were amassed within an astonishingly short period. Gina Gallo and her husband Jean-Charles Boisset. But as to his methods in obtaining land, there exists little obscurity. But this, there is excellent reason to believe, is an absurdly low approximation. The founder of the Goelet fortune was Peter Goelet, an ironmonger during and succeeding the Revolution. 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. He was the only son born to Henrietta Louise (ne Warren) Goelet and Robert Goelet (18411899), a prominent landlord in New York. 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.