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Looking
northeast from the observatory of The Empire State Building.
Photo: JH.
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JH
and I wear two hats professionally – the
NYSD and as editors at Quest Magazine which is published monthly
here in New York. Last month’s issue featured the annual Quest 400 list of prominent New Yorkers or New York related individuals.
The list was first published ten or eleven years ago in the magazine.
I was originally inspired by the original “400” list
put together more than a century ago by Ward McAllister for
his social lioness, Mrs. William B. Astor, known
hereabouts at the time as the Mrs. Astor (she wasn’t the only
one, much to the annoyance of the others). The number 400 was said
to be the capacity of her
ballroom (first located in the Astor brownstone mansion on 34th Street
and Fifth Avenue where the Empire State Building stands today, and
later at the Astor limestone double-mansion on Fifth Avenue and 63rd
Street where Temple Eman-uel is located today).
The McAllister/Astor 400 number turned out to be an
arbitrary one – a
press agent’s concoction (McAllister being the original society
press agent). Mrs. Astor’s original list contained something
like 369 names and no doubt there was room in the house for more
if she’d wanted them. The Quest 400 list is similarly arbitrary
but different (no specific ballroom involved) contains several hundred
more names than that and selection is with a keen (if by no means
infallible) eye on the scene.
The original Quest list was compiled in a loosely “social
scientific” way
from of party lists and party pictures. Those names which appeared
most frequently on the lists and in the pictures made up the list.
The 21st-century list is broader and the science used to compile
is non-existent. Suffice to say it is made up of many, although not
all, of those individuals who congregate on the social scene in this
big town.
Lists are always interesting edit in the magazine business, because
even people who rarely read will read a list. To me, the editor,
the matter at hand with a new year’s list is creating something
interesting to go along with what is basically just a bunch of names
and nothing else.
This year I came up with the idea of photographing some New Yorkers
whose ancestry can be traced to the world of Mrs. Astor and her kind.
There are eight families represented. All, among their ancestors,
knew each other and in many of their families intermarried: |
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Laura and Harry Cushing. Mr.
Cushing’s
father Harry Cushing IV, was the grandson of Reginald
Vanderbilt,
and great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, who built the
mansion that spanned the block between 57th and 58th Streets
and Fifth Avenue, where Bergdorf Goodman stands today, as well
as the Breakers in Newport. Reginald Vanderbilt also had a
famous second daughter by a second married, Gloria
Vanderbilt.
The Cushings were an earlier American family than the Vanderbilts,
having arrived at the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the late
1600s. They founded Hingham, Mass., named after the English
village whence they came. |
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Jackie
and Nick Drexel. Jacqueline Astor and John
R. Drexel IV are the most direct ancestors of the original “Four
Hundred.” Jackie’s great-grandmother was the Mrs. Astor. Her grandfather Col. J. J. Astor is now part
of American folklore: He went down on the Titanic in 1912
after making sure his young wife, who was carrying their
unborn son (later Jackie’s father John Jacob
Astor VI), was safely in a lifeboat.
The first Drexels emigrated from Austria and settled in Philadelphia, where
they went into banking. In 1871, A.J. Drexel admitted to his firm a young
banker named J. Pierpont Morgan, creating Drexel, Morgan. Mr. Drexel died
in 1893, and the firm became known as JP Morgan & Company or the House
of Morgan. |
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| Sonja and John Morgan. John Morgan
is one of five sons of Henry Sturgis Morgan,
a great-grandson of J.
Pierpont Morgan, the greatest American financier of
the Gilded Age, and Catherine Adams, a great-great-granddaughter
of John
Adams,
the second President of the United States. JP Morgan personally
saved the American banking system during the Panic of 1907,
and created the first billion-dollar corporation, U.S. Steel.
His greatest legacy to the world was his vast collection of
paintings, sculpture, objets and manuscripts, many of which
are in his own Morgan Library. |
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Peter Duchin’s maternal
ancestors, the
Oelrichs, were a major shipping family (the
American agents for North German Lloyd). A great-aunt was Blanche
Oelrichs who wrote plays under
the name of Michael
Strange and married
John Barrymore with whom she had a daughter,
the famously infamous
Diana Barrymore. A century ago, the Oelrichs’ social
standing attracted a very rich and ambitious young woman from
San Francisco, Tessie Fair, whose rough-hewn
father, James
Graham Fair, was one of the partners in the discovery
of the Comstock Lode. Miss Fair married Duchin’s great-great-uncle
Herman Oelrichs, and built Rosecliff, the
newport mansion that was
featured in the film version of The Great Gatsby with
Robert Redford. Tessie Oelrichs’ sister Birdie married
Willie K. Vanderbilt Jr. (she was his first wife).
Peter’s father, Eddy Duchin was one of the most famous
American bandleaders of the 30s and 40s. His mother, Marjorie
Oelrichs died five days after giving
birth to Peter. Their story was portrayed in the 1956 classic film The Eddy
Duchin
story, starring Tyrone Power and Kim Novak. |
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Stephanie
Stokes’s grandfather William
Earl Dodge Stokes, invested the fortune he inherited
from Phelps Dodge Mining in Arizona into New York real estate.
The house
of her great-grandfather James Stokes, still
on Madison Avenue on 35th Street, now serves as the entry to
the Morgan Library.
Her great-uncle, Anson Phelps Stokes, built
Shadowbrook, the largest “cottage” in Stockbridge,
Mass. (now the Kripalu Yoga Center). A. P. Stokes had several
children, including
Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, who designed St.
Paul’s
chapel at Columbia University. |
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Bill and Kitty McKnight. Wiliam
McKnight is the son of LeBrun (Brunie) Rhinelander.
His great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather Philip
Jacob Rhinelander arrived in New York in
1686 from Germany, settling in New Rochelle. Philip’s
son William started a bakeshop on William Street and established
the family precedent of investing in city realty. He lived
in a house on Spruce Street that was still in the family at
the beginning of the 20th Century. The most famous Rhinelander
property in New York today is the present Ralph Lauren store
at 72nd and Madison Avenue. The building, built in 1898 by
Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo (who never moved in), was occupied
by her sister and nephew, who lived there into the 1920s. |
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Topsy
Taylor. Topsy Taylor is
the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Moses
Taylor,
born in 1805, the son of John Jacob Astor’s
business manager. By his early 20s, Moses Taylor was a major
importer of Cuban sugar, an important investor in the Manhattan
Gas Light Company, and the director of City Bank of New York.
Later, as chair of the Loan Committee of the new York Clearing
House, he was credited by some for saving the Union financially
during the Civil War. He was regarded as instrumental in making
New York the center of international business that it is today. |
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