When the Astors Owned New York - Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

In this marvellous anecdotal history, Justin Kaplan vividly brings to life a grand story from the glittering Gilded Age. Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, cousins John Jacob Astor IV and William Waldorf Astor vied for primacy in New York society, producing the grandest hotels ever seen in a marriage of ostentation and efficiency that transformed American social behaviour. Kaplan exposes it all in exquisite detail, taking readers from the 1890s to the Roaring Twenties in a combination of biography, history, architectural appreciation, and pure reading pleasure...