We are a city of families, functional and dys-. Tolstoy would have been stumped here: The happy families bear no more resemblance to each other than the unhappy ones. We are the city of the Roosevelts, the Vanderbilts, the Tisches, the Sarnoffs, the Wagners, the Hearsts, the Mortimers, the Rockefellers, the Sulzbergers. They each have their sagas, the usual heartbreaks and triumphs. But they all share one other thing: They have used the passion and strength of family life to perpetuate themselves in the life in this city.

We are a city of paters, maters and brats. This continues to be a city where the big families make money—and more delightful, nutty, well-dressed progeny. The unhappy families make the news. The happy families make a nice Sunday dinner.

We have our fictional families: the Sycamores; Mia Farrow’s family in Hannah and Her Sisters; the Corleones. And the Glass family-J.D. Salinger’s New York bunch of screwball mystics were the inner life of a city that loved the inner life. By the time Wes Anderson made his jolly ceramic reproductions of them in The Royal Tenenbaums, they were a distant memory of a city that was.

Then there were our great nonfiction families. And of all of them, there was none greater than the Astors, and no saga greater than Brooke Astor’s. The story of Brooke Astor and her son, Anthony Marshall, isn’t a Christmas story—not this year—but it’s a New York story. It doesn’t have a happy ending, but rather a family continuation.

The Astors churned up through German fur traders and New York slumlords, low-circulation newspapermen and British barons, hotel magnates and Titanic victims. John Jacob, William Backhouse, William Waldorf, just plain Waldorf, and Vincent. Emperors in the guilty age of Lily Barts and Diamond Jims, schemers and tyrannical dreamers, sipping Rob Roys in drawing rooms.

Then came Brooke—a lady, not a lily—who embodied in her tiny frame everything that it meant to be a real New Yorker. Beautiful, delightful, classy, triumphant over adversity and scoundrels, responsive to delight and wit, bridger of centuries, a breath of fresh air who knew what to do with money and life. She was the mom of the city. As Vincent Astor’s third wife, she funneled her husband’s $60 million toward Library lions, Metropolitan paintings, leopards in the Zoo. She had manners and acknowledged doormen. She told wonderful stories and entranced everybody.

She was mother to a city. Men sat at her feet, laughed at her jokes. She famously engaged a mugger in polite conversation and held court with a beloved gravity that the head of a family is given. She published poetry in The New Yorker magazine and threw swell parties. One minute she was a miraculously lucid 90, the next she was 104 years old, with all the weight of time beating upon her.

So when her grandson and house staff started whispering the tales that Mrs. Astor’s beloved Boysie and Girlsie had been locked away, that she’d been forced to use Vaseline rather than Estée Lauder, that she hadn’t seen the sidewalk on Park Avenue since 102, the city reacted for the Mommy of us all.

What man wants to be defined as a rotten son at 82? Anthony D. Marshall was accused of elder abuse. Henry Kissinger, 83, and David Rockefeller, 91, stepped up, righteous knights to lay into Mr. Marshall, who might have been centrally cast as the rascal scion of a P.G. Wodehouse story: He had invested her money in Broadway theater! Anthony’s very own son, a reclusive academic from Massachusetts, sued his papa. “I love my mother,” said Anthony Marshall. But the city, and the tabloids, rose up and snarled.

Somewhere between the Astors and 2006, it seemed as though the city had lost its class, to put it mildly. But Mrs. Astor—even in her ancient, faded, painted and chipped state, worn down by a century and four years and more of a great life—had saved it once more. She had once more reasserted the importance of life, reminded us that we are a city in which family trumps all. It may have been that the ghosts of Four Hundred society wafted from the vents at Delmonico’s and possessed vengeful Post and Daily News reporters who slashed and whacked at poor Anthony Marshall, who eventually was vindicated by the judge.

But something more important happened, once more, in a city where it has rarely failed to happen: Mother had won. And New York is a town that is defined by families. We have chosen 29 of them, and the power of family defines each, a power that supersedes any other consideration, and that is at once the clearest thing in life, and the most mysterious.

Families

The Abrams Family
The Boies Family
The Clarke Family
The Cuomo Family
The Foer Family
The Gelb Family
The Jong-Fast Family
The Hammerstein Family
The Hearst Family
The Lauren Family
The Leibner Family
The LeRoy Family
The Marden Family
The Mortimer Family
The Newhouse Family and the Sulzberger Family
The Picket Family
The Rivera Family
The Rose Family
The Rubenstein Family
The Schnabel Family
The Steinbrenner Family and the Wilpon Family
The Tisch Family
The Tishman Speyer Family
The Trump Family
The Walentas Family
The Warburg Peters Family
The Zeckendorf Family

Justin Kaplan ably conjures up the world of the “Waldorf Gang” in his slim, readable When the Astors Owned New York. Although his chapters are often muddled because he declines to write chronologically, Mr. Kaplan, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1967), is a companionable writer, and his well-turned sentences are a delight to read.

The financiers of the Waldorf-Astoria were members of the dynastic Astor family. Their forebear, John Jacob Astor, was born in 1763, the son of a butcher in Waldorf, Germany. He became America’s first millionaire with his fur-trading business and began the tradition of building magnificent hotels as personal tribute in 1834 with his Astor on Broadway, built at a time when “hotels” were mostly “roadside inns” where guests often shared beds as “snuggly” as Ishmael and Queequeg in the opening chapter of Moby-Dick. The Astor’s luxurious guest rooms boasted ornate furnishings; more significantly, it served as a theater of the wealthy for anyone who had a natty enough suit to sit in the lobby.

With characteristic erudition, Mr. Kaplan describes it as “a self-contained, virtually perfected world of luxury and dream-fulfillment, evidence of what money could accomplish when joined with vision, energy, mechanical ingenuity, running water, indoor plumbing, and Mediciean magnificence.” Astor was in his 70’s when this vanity project took shape, but lived to see his hotel established as the finest in the nation, a pied-à-terre for the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson and Charles Dickens.

Astor died in 1848, and his son William Backhouse enlarged his father’s fortune, while transforming the family into American aristocracy with an education in manners and strategic marriages. His sons, John Jacob III and William Backhouse Jr., installed in adjacent brownstones on Fifth Avenue, bickered over their respective positions in the family while their wives engaged in a battle royal over who was the Mrs. Astor. Mr. Kaplan quips that “not since the Middle Ages, when rival popes at Rome and Avignon divided the Roman Catholic Church, had an issue of legitimacy stirred up such a tzimmes.”

The discord was passed onto their sons, William Waldorf and John Jacob IV, two “crown princes in a society without a throne.” The cousins couldn’t have been more different. Jack, the younger, muddled through a peripatetic education and crashed his yacht into anything within reach. Town Topics wrote, “It is very questionable whether, were he put to it, he could ever earn his bread by his brains.” He was referred to as “Jack-ass” by the press and lambasted for a particularly contemptuous stunt of trying to build a stable next to a Jewish temple. He withdrew his plan after six months of the press skewering him for his lack of regard for other people.

Willy, the elder, a highly disciplined student, trained his memory by playing chess blindfolded and used his free time to study art. He married Mary Dahlgren Paul of Philadelphia, a union of genuine warmth and love. (Jack, meanwhile, was locked in a cold and vengeful marriage.) After suffering a humiliating defeat when he ran for public office, Willy served as ambassador to Italy and spent most of his adult life in Europe, eventually settling in England. The press got a kick out of his prosperously fabricated genealogy connecting him to French royalty.

When Willy decided to continue the family tradition of building lavish hotels, he picked the site of his parents’ house, an affront to Jack’s side of the family. Not to be outdone, Jack started planning his own hotel right next-door. His, the Astoria, would be architecturally consistent with the Waldorf but four stories higher. Better business sense prevailed, and a fragile truce was reached so the hotels functioned as one, consolidating rather than competing.

Mr. Kaplan writes that the hotel “brought exuberant high-rise architecture, European glitter, elegance, and detailing. It was an expatriate’s declaration of personal magnificence, blue-blood prize, and superiority in imagination, style and intellect to the members of his class and the nation at large.”

The manager, George C. Boldt, lavished gifts and privileges on favored guests and treated the rest with contempt. His carefully orchestrated opening night set a precedent for celebrity events by combining a benefit with upscale entertainment and a red carpet. A reporter dubbed the main corridor “Peacock’s Alley.”

The most talked-about event at the Waldorf-Astoria was the Bradley-Martin ball of 1897, an extravagant costume party costing half a million dollars—during a recession. While the guests strolled down Peacock’s Alley festooned with diamonds, thousands queued at unemployment offices and soup kitchens. “Half a million dollars gone up in frippery and flowers,” wrote one bitter observer. The waste was such a scandal that the Bradley-Martins fled to England.

After telling the story of the Waldorf-Astoria, Mr. Kaplan turns his attention to less interesting epilogues: Willy absurdly renovating castles in England (the press still mocking his fantasy of royal ancestors); Jack pursuing a military career (at age 47, he was embroiled in scandal after divorcing his wife and marrying an 18-year-old girl).

The Waldorf-Astoria closed in 1929 to make way for the Empire State Building. Among the items auctioned off in advance of the demolition was the hotel’s name, which went for $1 and is now owned by the Hiltons. And those Hilton heiresses, true to the Astor tradition, frolic in the spotlight, the public hungrily scanning the gossip pages for news of scandal, romance and foolish foibles.

Elizabeth Hoover’s reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chicago Tribune.

Justin Kaplan ably conjures up the world of the “Waldorf Gang” in his slim, readable When the Astors Owned New York. Although his chapters are often muddled because he declines to write chronologically, Mr. Kaplan, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1967), is a companionable writer, and his well-turned sentences are a delight to read.

The financiers of the Waldorf-Astoria were members of the dynastic Astor family. Their forebear, John Jacob Astor, was born in 1763, the son of a butcher in Waldorf, Germany. He became America’s first millionaire with his fur-trading business and began the tradition of building magnificent hotels as personal tribute in 1834 with his Astor on Broadway, built at a time when “hotels” were mostly “roadside inns” where guests often shared beds as “snuggly” as Ishmael and Queequeg in the opening chapter of Moby-Dick. The Astor’s luxurious guest rooms boasted ornate furnishings; more significantly, it served as a theater of the wealthy for anyone who had a natty enough suit to sit in the lobby.

With characteristic erudition, Mr. Kaplan describes it as “a self-contained, virtually perfected world of luxury and dream-fulfillment, evidence of what money could accomplish when joined with vision, energy, mechanical ingenuity, running water, indoor plumbing, and Mediciean magnificence.” Astor was in his 70’s when this vanity project took shape, but lived to see his hotel established as the finest in the nation, a pied-à-terre for the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson and Charles Dickens.

Astor died in 1848, and his son William Backhouse enlarged his father’s fortune, while transforming the family into American aristocracy with an education in manners and strategic marriages. His sons, John Jacob III and William Backhouse Jr., installed in adjacent brownstones on Fifth Avenue, bickered over their respective positions in the family while their wives engaged in a battle royal over who was the Mrs. Astor. Mr. Kaplan quips that “not since the Middle Ages, when rival popes at Rome and Avignon divided the Roman Catholic Church, had an issue of legitimacy stirred up such a tzimmes.”

The discord was passed onto their sons, William Waldorf and John Jacob IV, two “crown princes in a society without a throne.” The cousins couldn’t have been more different. Jack, the younger, muddled through a peripatetic education and crashed his yacht into anything within reach. Town Topics wrote, “It is very questionable whether, were he put to it, he could ever earn his bread by his brains.” He was referred to as “Jack-ass” by the press and lambasted for a particularly contemptuous stunt of trying to build a stable next to a Jewish temple. He withdrew his plan after six months of the press skewering him for his lack of regard for other people.

Willy, the elder, a highly disciplined student, trained his memory by playing chess blindfolded and used his free time to study art. He married Mary Dahlgren Paul of Philadelphia, a union of genuine warmth and love. (Jack, meanwhile, was locked in a cold and vengeful marriage.) After suffering a humiliating defeat when he ran for public office, Willy served as ambassador to Italy and spent most of his adult life in Europe, eventually settling in England. The press got a kick out of his prosperously fabricated genealogy connecting him to French royalty.

When Willy decided to continue the family tradition of building lavish hotels, he picked the site of his parents’ house, an affront to Jack’s side of the family. Not to be outdone, Jack started planning his own hotel right next-door. His, the Astoria, would be architecturally consistent with the Waldorf but four stories higher. Better business sense prevailed, and a fragile truce was reached so the hotels functioned as one, consolidating rather than competing.

Mr. Kaplan writes that the hotel “brought exuberant high-rise architecture, European glitter, elegance, and detailing. It was an expatriate’s declaration of personal magnificence, blue-blood prize, and superiority in imagination, style and intellect to the members of his class and the nation at large.”

The manager, George C. Boldt, lavished gifts and privileges on favored guests and treated the rest with contempt. His carefully orchestrated opening night set a precedent for celebrity events by combining a benefit with upscale entertainment and a red carpet. A reporter dubbed the main corridor “Peacock’s Alley.”

The most talked-about event at the Waldorf-Astoria was the Bradley-Martin ball of 1897, an extravagant costume party costing half a million dollars—during a recession. While the guests strolled down Peacock’s Alley festooned with diamonds, thousands queued at unemployment offices and soup kitchens. “Half a million dollars gone up in frippery and flowers,” wrote one bitter observer. The waste was such a scandal that the Bradley-Martins fled to England.

After telling the story of the Waldorf-Astoria, Mr. Kaplan turns his attention to less interesting epilogues: Willy absurdly renovating castles in England (the press still mocking his fantasy of royal ancestors); Jack pursuing a military career (at age 47, he was embroiled in scandal after divorcing his wife and marrying an 18-year-old girl).

The Waldorf-Astoria closed in 1929 to make way for the Empire State Building. Among the items auctioned off in advance of the demolition was the hotel’s name, which went for $1 and is now owned by the Hiltons. And those Hilton heiresses, true to the Astor tradition, frolic in the spotlight, the public hungrily scanning the gossip pages for news of scandal, romance and foolish foibles.

Elizabeth Hoover’s reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chicago Tribune.