Astor family, wealthy American family whose fortune, rooted in the fur trade, came to be centred on real estate investments in New York City.

John Jacob Astor (1763–1848) was the founder of the family fortune. His son, William Backhouse Astor (1792–1875), who inherited the major portion of the estate, continued his father’s program of investing in Manhattan real estate and greatly expanded the Astor Library. Stung by accusations that he was a slum landlord, he attempted to renovate some of the older tenements owned by the Astors. At the same time, he more than doubled the family fortune, leaving an estate valued at nearly $50 million.

John Jacob Astor (1822–90), son of William Backhouse Astor, increased the fortune to between $75 million and $100 million. He was a more active philanthropist than his predecessors, making substantial gifts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Trinity Church as well as to the Astor Library.

His son, William Waldorf Astor (1848–1919), was politically ambitious, but, after a stint in the New York state legislature and three years as U.S. minister to Italy, he moved permanently to England in 1890. He became a British subject in 1899, and in 1917 he became 1st Viscount Astor of Hever Castle. He used much of his wealth—aside from that spent building the Waldorf section of what eventually became the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel—restoring Hever Castle and funding conservative political causes in England.

John Jacob Astor (1864–1912) was a cousin of William Waldorf Astor and a great-grandson of the fur trader who had founded the family fortune. An inventor and a science fiction novelist, he was also responsible for building several great New York City hotels: the Astoria (later combined with the Waldorf), the Knickerbocker, and the St. Regis. He served as a director on the boards of several major U.S. corporations, but his career was cut short when he perished in the mid-Atlantic after the Titanic sank in 1912. His pregnant second wife, Madeleine, was also aboard the passenger liner, but she survived.

Waldorf Astor (1879–1952) served in the British Parliament (1910–19), and his Cliveden home was a meeting place during the late 1930s for Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and supporters of his policy of “appeasement” toward Adolf Hitler. Astor’s wife, Nancy (1879–1964), was the first woman to sit in the House of Commons.

Vincent Astor (1891–1959), son of the John Jacob Astor who built the well-known hotels, departed markedly from Astor family conservatism. He sold some Astor-owned properties to New York City under generous terms so that they might be converted into housing projects. In addition, he backed the New Deal, though temporarily, and supported other social reforms. He took an active role in managing the family real estate holdings, and during the last two decades of his life he headed the corporation that published Newsweek magazine.

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John Jacob Astor (1886–1971), younger brother of Waldorf Astor, was the chief proprietor of the London newspaper The Times (1922–66).

This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen.

New York City

New York, United States
Also known as: New Amsterdam, New Orange, New York, The City of New York, The Mayor, Alderman, and Commonality of the City of New York, the Big Apple
Officially:
the City of New York
Historically:
New Amsterdam, the Mayor, Alderman, and Commonality of the City of New York, and New Orange
Byname:
the Big Apple
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New York City, city and port located at the mouth of the Hudson River, southeastern New York state, northeastern U.S. It is the largest and most influential American metropolis, encompassing Manhattan and Staten islands, the western sections of Long Island, and a small portion of the New York state mainland to the north of Manhattan. New York City is in reality a collection of many neighbourhoods scattered among the city’s five boroughs—Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island—each exhibiting its own lifestyle. Moving from one city neighbourhood to the next may be like passing from one country to another. New York is the most populous and the most international city in the country. Its urban area extends into adjoining parts of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Located where the Hudson and East rivers empty into one of the world’s premier harbours, New York is both the gateway to the North American continent and its preferred exit to the oceans of the globe. Area 305 square miles (790 square km). Pop. (2010) 8,175,133; New York–White Plains–Wayne Metro Division, 11,576,251; New York–Northern New Jersey–Long Island Metro Area, 18,897,109; (2020) 8,804,190; New York–Jersey City–White Plains Metro Division, 12,449,348; New York–Newark–Jersey City Metro Area, 20,140,470.

Did You Know?

Since the first U.S. census was held in 1790, New York has been the largest city in the United States. How do other cities rank? Find out in our list of the 25 largest U.S. cities.

Character of the city

New York is the most ethnically diverse, religiously varied, commercially driven, famously congested, and, in the eyes of many, the most attractive urban centre in the country. No other city has contributed more images to the collective consciousness of Americans: Wall Street means finance, Broadway is synonymous with theatre, Fifth Avenue is automatically paired with shopping, Madison Avenue means the advertising industry, Greenwich Village connotes bohemian lifestyles, Seventh Avenue signifies fashion, Tammany Hall defines machine politics, and Harlem evokes images of the Jazz Age, African American aspirations, and slums. The word tenement brings to mind both the miseries of urban life and the upward mobility of striving immigrant masses. New York has more Jews than Tel Aviv, more Irish than Dublin, more Italians than Naples, and more Puerto Ricans than San Juan. Its symbol is the Statue of Liberty, but the metropolis is itself an icon, the arena in which Emma Lazarus’s “tempest-tost” people of every nation are transformed into Americans—and if they remain in the city, they become New Yorkers.

For the past two centuries, New York has been the largest and wealthiest American city. More than half the people and goods that ever entered the United States came through its port, and that stream of commerce has made change a constant presence in city life. New York always meant possibility, for it was an urban centre on its way to something better, a metropolis too busy to be solicitous of those who stood in the way of progress. New York—while the most American of all the country’s cities—thus also achieved a reputation as both foreign and fearsome, a place where turmoil, arrogance, incivility, and cruelty tested the stamina of everyone who entered it. The city was inhabited by strangers, but they were, as James Fenimore Cooper explained, “essentially national in interest, position, pursuits. No one thinks of the place as belonging to a particular state but to the United States.” Once the capital of both its state and the country, New York surpassed such status to become a world city in both commerce and outlook, with the most famous skyline on earth. It also became a target for international terrorism—most notably the destruction in 2001 of the World Trade Center, which for three decades had been the most prominent symbol of the city’s global prowess. However, New York remains for its residents a conglomeration of local neighbourhoods that provide them with familiar cuisines, languages, and experiences. A city of stark contrasts and deep contradictions, New York is perhaps the most fitting representative of a diverse and powerful nation.

Tower Bridge over the Thames River in London, England. Opened in 1894. Remains an Important Traffic Route with 40,000 Crossings Every Day.
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The landscape

The city site

Sections of the granite bedrock of New York date to about 100 million years ago, but the topography of the present city is largely the product of the glacial recession that marked the end of the Wisconsin Glacial Stage about 10,000 years ago. Great erratic boulders in Manhattan’s Central Park, deep kettle depressions in Brooklyn and Queens, and the glacial moraine that remains in parts of the metropolitan area provide silent testimony to the enormous power of the ice. Glacial retreat also carved out the waterways around the city. The Hudson and East rivers, Spuyten Duyvil Creek, and Arthur Kill are, in reality, estuaries of the Atlantic Ocean, and the Hudson is tidal as far north as Troy. The approximately 600 miles (1,000 km) of New York shoreline are locked in constant combat with the ocean, as it erodes the land and adds new sediments elsewhere. Although the harbour is constantly dredged, ship channels are continually filled with river silt and are too shallow for more modern deep-sea vessels.

South of the rockbound terrain of Manhattan stretches a sheltered deepwater anchorage offering easy access to the Atlantic Ocean. In 1524 the Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano was the first European to enter the harbour, which he named Santa Margarita, and he reported that the hills surrounding the vast expanse of New York Bay appeared to be rich in minerals; more than 90 species of precious stone and 170 of the world’s minerals have actually been found in New York. Verrazzano’s daring expedition was commemorated in 1964, when what was then the world’s longest suspension bridge was dedicated to span the Narrows at the entrance to Upper New York Bay.

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Only the third largest American port at the time of the American Revolution, New York gradually achieved trade domination and by the mid-1800s handled more than half of the country’s oceangoing travelers and commercial trade. After 1900 New York was the world’s busiest port, a distinction it held until the 1950s. Cargo containerization, the obsolescence of its waterfront piers, and soaring labour costs shifted business to the New Jersey side of the river after the 1960s, but at the beginning of the 21st century the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey still dominated the water trade of the northeastern United States.