City Readers Digital Historic Collections at the New York Society Library

John Jacob Astor, a fur trader, financier, real estate investor, and landlord, was born Johann Jakob Astor on July 17, 1763, in Walldorf, Germany (Madsen 9). He left Germany at seventeen for London where he worked with his brother in a musical instrument house founded by their uncle (Williams; Burrows and Wallace 273). At the end of the American Revolution, Astor left London for New York,arriving a few months after British troops departed from the city in 1784. He had an early association with merchant and fur dealer Robert Bowne, and by 1786 he started a business selling imported musical instruments on Queen Street (Madsen 17; Burrows and Wallace 273; Youngman 348-349). He bought furs in Manhattan and during trips to Albany and shipped them to London, earning enough to own a warehouse in Montreal, a center of the trade (Burrows and Wallace 273). By the early 1790s Astor was the leading American fur trader, and with the Jay Treaty in 1794, in which the British relinquished trading posts in the United States, Astor expanded into new territory in the west (Williams). By the mid-1790s he began to trade with China, and by the early 1800s he was building his own ships (Burrows and Wallace 337). When the state legislature chartered his American Fur Company in 1808, Astor was the city's first and only millionaire (Burrows and Wallace 337). He financed an expedition to the mouth of the Columbia River to open the Pacific Northwest to fur trading; he alsoestablished the settlement Astoria in Oregon, which was taken by the British in the War of 1812, and later memorialized in a book by Astor's friend Washington Irving (Williams). 

Beginning in 1789, he invested his profits in New York City real estate, buying land and property by the waterfront and in the northern limits of the city including Richmond Hill, where he purchased land from Aaron Burr, and in the village of Greenwich (Burrows and Wallace 337-338, 447). In 1836 he opened the Park Hotel, later the Astor House, and owned or invested in the Park Theater, Vauxhall Gardens, and the City Hotel (Burrows and Wallace 600).

He was a director of the Second Bank of the United States and the first president of its Manhattan branch, a director of the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad Company, a member of the Holland Lodge (Burrows and Wallace 380, 444). 

Astor's parents were Jacob Astor, a butcher, and Maria Magdalena Vorfelder. He married Sarah Todd in 1785; they had eight children (Williams).

Astor left money in his will for the establishment of a reference library in New York City and in 1849 the Astor Library opened. In 1895 the library combined with the Lenox Library and the Tilden Trust to form the New York Public Library ("History of the New York Public Library"). 

Astor died on March 28, 1848. He was buried in St. Thomas Episcopal Church, and re-interred at Trinity Cemetery on June 20, 1851 ("Myth #3").