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general social-mindendness, although he was a great and very rich real estate operator who had made his money wholly in real estate operations.

As secretary of the Committee on Safety I became very well acquainted with him, naturally, and grew very fond of him and of his wife. I found him certainly a very wily, shrewd real estate operator, but also one who had had a policy of getting rid of declining property before it got to the point of being expensive as declining property - that is, expensive for repair and alterations - and getting his hands on to new property. I think he once explained to me that that was the secret of his general success.

That wasn't what every real estate operator did at that time. I'm not sure that Henry Morgenthau wasn't the fellow who invented that. The Astor Estate sat on the land they owned and just sat. It increased in value and increased in value in the classical way. They just sat on their property and it grew more and more valuable, but it was property that had the elements of scandal in it. People would say, “Those are old Astor Estate tenements.” Old Astor Estate tenements and old Astor Estate property was pretty terrible.

It was long after this period, which I'm now discussing, that the Astor Estate, under John Yates, when he was the