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manager of the Astor Estate, turned over a new leaf and put the Astor Estate into the business of repairing and renovating. I think it was really on the heels of the Committee on Safety that they did that. I can remember going to see Mr. Yates once with Jim Sheldon of Lee Higginson, and Jerome Green, who had at one time had something to do with Mr. John D. Rockefeller. He had been the almoner for the Rockefellers, split with them and then became the general adviser to the President of Harvard College.

I remember going to see Mr. Yates with these men. The Astor Estate owned very little of this declining factory, warehouse and loft building property, but they did agree to make some changes. I remember thinking what a very modern man Yates was, because he felt that they must make the necessary repairs and bring it back into circulation as useful property for larger occupancy than it had then. It would bring a bigger rent by spending more money on it. He laid out to us that day a kind of a half-dream that he had. He had just come recently into the management of the Astor properties and he wanted to do that to all the Astor properties. He wanted to improve them, bring them up, make them more useful and more productive and get what value there was out of them. Of course, they had enormous capital to work with. They could afford to reinvest in the improvement of their own properties.