When The Astors Owned New York (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
L. Godkin, editor and founder of the Nation, recalled that American hotels had long been among the wonders of the New World. Impressed by their size and lavishness, some travelers from abroad came near to assuming that the natives lived in hotels and that “home life in a house was almost unknown on this side of the Atlantic.” Putting up such hotels, and becoming, in effect, innkeepers, was far from maverick behavior for John Jacob Astor’s breed of American capitalist and for his great-grandsons three generations later.A Scots newspaper editor named John Leng, visiting the United States in 1876, the centennial of the Republic, noted what he called “a peculiar propensity,” not found among Europeans, “of men who have become rich in the States to build hotels” on a scale that reflected “the largeness of American ideas” and of the North American continent. Looking back, Leng cited the founding Astor along with Astor’s near contemporary, New York merchant prince Alexander Turney Stewart.
What do You think about When The Astors Owned New York (2006)?
