He was the son of Elbert Samuel Kip (1799-1876) and Elizabeth ( ne Goelet) Kip (1808-1882). When twenty-one he went to Chicago and worked in a wholesale dry goods house. "[28] She received the French Legion of Honor for aiding French-American wives during World War II and for providing medical services to inhabitants in the vicinity of Sandricourt, the Goelet family estate outside Paris, after it was liberated in August 1944. The value of the land that he beqeuathed has increased continuously ; in the hands of his various descendants to-day it is many times more valuable than the huge fortune which he left. The balance represents the investments of private individuals. [36], Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company, The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, "ROBERT W. GOELET DIES IN HOME AT 61. Their policy was much the same as that of the Astors constantly increasing their land possessions. Some of the lots cost him but ten dollars each. Little research is necessary to shatter this error. 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. How great the wealth of this family is may be judged from the fact that one of the Rhinelanders William left an estate valued at $50,000,000 at his death in December, 1907. In 1920,[25] he became engaged to Anne Marie Guestier (18991988),[26] and later married her in Bordeaux on January 24, 1921. This remarkable man lived to the age of eighty-one ; when he died in 1863 in a splendid mansion which he had built in the heart of his vineyard, his estate was valued at $15,000,000. But the singular continuity does not end here. None who had the appearance of respectable charity seekers could get anything else from him than contemptuous rebuffs. When his widow died in 1848 her fortune was estimated at $250,000. During the Civil War this firm, as did the entire commercial world, proceeded to hold up the nation for exorbitant prices in its con- [3] His maternal uncles were stockbroker George Henry Warren II[7][8] and prominent architects Whitney Warren[9] and Lloyd Warren. In 1819 he gave up law, and thenceforth gave his entire attention to managing his property. Here he cultivated the Catawba grape and produced about 150,000 bottles a year. His personal habits were considered repulsive by the conventional and fastidious. By 1830 the population was 24,831 ; twenty years later it had reached 118,761, and in 1860, 171,293 inhabitants. Goelet family. Cincinnati, with its population of 325,902,7 pays incessant tribute in the form of a vast rent roll to the scions of the man whose main occupation was to hold on to the land he had got for almost nothing. It is not merely business sections which the Rhinelander family owns, however ; they derive stupendous rentals from a vast number of tenement houses. The Goelet family, originally hardware merchants, were socially prominent for generations and were at the top of the social ladder in Victorian New York. His house at Nineteenth street, corner of Broadway, was a curiosity shop. The landed property of the Goelet family on Manhattan Island alone is estimated at fully $200,000,000. 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 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. In 1884 it reached an aggregate of $30,000,000 a year ; in 1901 it was estimated at fully $50,000,000 a year. 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. He was dry and caustic in his remarks, says Houghton, and very rarely spared the object of his satire. The variety of Fields possessions and his numerous forms of ownership were such that we shall have pertinent occasion to deal more relevantly with his career in subsequent parts of this work. 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. Upon the death of his mother in 1915, he inherited a fortune estimated to be $40 million (equivalent to $780 million in 2021), . In that day, although but thirty years since, when none but the dazzlingly rich could afford to keep a sumptuous steam yacht in commission the year round, Robert Goelet had a costly yacht, 300 feet long, equipped with all the splendors and comforts which up to that time had been devised for ocean craft. His only sister, Beatrice Goelet, who died of pneumonia at age 17 in 1902, was painted as a child by John Singer Sargent. He was a director of the Bank of New York from 1814 until his death in 1852. 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. All available accounts agree in describing him as merciless. 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. In 1860 he was made a partner. One was that almost consecutively they, along with other landholders, corrupted city governments to give them successive grants, and the other was their enormous surplus revenue which kept piling up. The price they paid was $600 a lot. They're collectively worth $1.2 trillion. The next step is marriage with title. Of Peter Goelets business methods and personality no account is extant. 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. In Chicago, with its phenomenally speedy growth of population and its vast array of workers, immense fortunes were amassed within an astonishingly short period. He was the largest landowner in Cincinnati, and one of the largest in the cities of the United States. Corporation Director, Owner of Large Realty Holdings Here, Succumbs to Heart Attack. The railroads now controlled by a few men, among whom the large landowners are conspicuous, were surveyed and built to a great extent by public funds, not private money. 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 At least $55,000,000 of it was represented at the time that the executors made their inventory, by a multitude of bonds and stocks in a wide range of diverse industrial, transportation, utility and mining corporations. This eccentric was very melancholy and, apart from his queer collection of pets, cared for nothing except land and houses. Napoleon had the same experience with French contractors, and the testimony of all wars is to the same effect. One tract of land, extending from Third avenue to the East River and from Sixty-fourth to Seventy-fifth street, which he secured in the early part of the nineteenth century, became worth a colossal fortune in itself. These lots have a present aggregate value of perhaps $15,000,000 or more, although they are assessed at much less. See Goelet family: Robert Walton Goelet (March 19, 1880 - May 2, 1941) was a financier and real estate developer in New York City. John Jacob Astor is one of the directors of the Western Union Telegraph monopoly, with its annual receipts of $29,000,000 and its net profits of $8,000,000 yearly ; and as for the many other corporations in which he and his family, the Goelets and the other commanding landlords hold stock, they would, if enumerated, make a formidable list. Mr. Goelet, who spent much of his life abroad, was a principal in two film-producing companies, Voyagers Inc. and Normandy Productions Inc. In marrying the Duke of Roxburghe in 1903, May Goelet, the daughter of Ogden, was but following the example set by a large number of other American women of multi-millionaire families. He was one of the largest property owners in the city by the time of his death. This estimate did not include $8,000,000 worth of land which the executors reported that he owned in New York City, nor the millions of dollars of his land possessions elsewhere. The landed property of the Goelet family on Manhattan Island alone is estimated at fully $200,000,000. It is an indulgence which, however great the superficial consequential money cost may be, is, in reality, inexpensive. These two brothers not only maintained the family fortune but also were one of the wealthiest landowners in New York City (second only to the Astors). But Longworth somehow contrived to get the accused off with acquittal. He was. Then was witnessed that characteristic so symptomatic of the American money aristocracy. 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. [20] It too was torn down and replaced by a new tower at 425 Park designed by architect Lord Norman Foster, still on land owned by the Goelet family. Kin Of Noted Architect. Some other explanation must be found to account for the phenomenal increase of the original small fortune and its unshaken retention. [17] He also owned sixteen four-story townhouses on Park Avenue built by his father in 1871. None who had the appearance of respectable charity seekers could get anything else from him than contemptuous rebuffs. Ogden was a noted real estate investor with properties throughout Manhattan. 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. He was a director of the Bank of New York from 1814 until his death in 1852. The fortunes of the brothers descended to Roberts two sons, Robert, born in 1841, and Ogden, born in 1846.