• WHEN THE Titanic went down in the North Atlantic on the night of April 14–15, 1912, she took with her John Jacob Astor IV. He was forty-seven years old and coheir, with his first cousin, William Waldorf Astor, to a historic American fortune. Colonel Astor, as he preferred to be known, had been traveling with his nineteen-year-old bride, the former Madeleine Talmage Force, who was five months pregnant.

• “What would you have me do?” Astor asked. “Would you have me stay at home and weep for what I cannot help?”

• The population of Manhattan jumped from about twenty-five thousand in 1780, when Astor arrived there, to about five hundred thousand in 1848, the year he died.

• Standing on the snow-covered Broadway pavement on a January day, the young Walt Whitman watched the great man being readied for an outing. “Swathed in rich furs, with a great ermine cap on his head,” Astor was “led and assisted, almost carried, down the steps of his high front stoop…and then lifted and tuck’d in a gorgeous sleigh, envelop’d in other furs…. The sleigh was drawn by as fine a team of horses as I ever saw.”

• “The roll-book of his possessions was his Bible. He scanned it fondly, and saw with quiet but deep delight the catalogue of his property lengthening from month to month. The love of accumulation grew with his years until it ruled him like a tyrant.”

• “A man who has a million dollars is as well off as if he were rich.”

• Astor determined to put up a hotel without equal anywhere in the world for luxury and architectural grandeur: “A New York palais royal,” Philip Hone wrote, “which will cost him five or six hundred thousand dollars…and will serve, as it was probably intended to, as a monument to its wealthy proprietor.”

• As model for his venture, Astor had cast a covetous and admiring eye on the Tremont House in Boston, the nation’s first hotel built on grandiose lines for the specific purpose of being a hotel, in every modern sense of the word. For the most part, American hotels of the time had barely evolved from roadside inns and taverns in nondescript houses. Their patrons, mainly commercial travelers, had few expectations beyond basic food, drink, and shelter and a bed for the night, preferably one not shared with strangers.