Behind the Scenes Minis: Impossibles and Astors

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio, Hello, and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This week we had a six impossible episodes installment on just some stuff that's listener requested and too short. Uh. It's fairly frequently that we will get an email from someone who has a link to an article and says, hey, I think this would be a fascinating episode, and really that article contains everything everything or almost everything we know, and I'm like, that does sound like it would be a great episode, but that's all. That's it. Yeah, that's what we've got to go on. Yeah. Those are always really tricky, and sometimes it's heartbreaking because it does sound amazing and it gets exciting and then I'm not gonna work. Yeah. And sometimes sometimes there is some person who has similarly found like a random mention of a person in a newspaper and then just makes it there next two years of work to go write a book on that person, and then maybe that could become the foundation for an episode at some point later, maybe even with the author on the show. But a lot of times it's just like there's no we don't have a really good place to start here, right. Well, and then there are cases right where it's something like um, for how where there's a lot of guesswork in even the information we have have UM, where it's like, well, we see it might be whatever. But if you go much further than that, you really are embellishing some things with speculation. Yeah, yeah, which you know, I'm for it for great TV. Yes, I love a TV presentation of you know, something that's clearly fictional but based on something factual. I'm I'm here for it. Um. One of the things that I uh sort of thought about as I was writing this episode but then did not go into, uh, into more detail, is um Jeneida Shribakova's art like reminds me so much of artwork from other people that we have talked about on the show in full length episode. So, like Barrett, Marissa also became really prominent in her uh you know, circle of artists and also did a lot of work that focused on other women in her life and children and just having a simple beauty in things like watering the plants out on the balcony and that kind of stuff. But there's been a lot more historical and biographical focus on some of these other artists, then on her, which I didn't get mentioned in passing, but like not into a lot of detail. I had a great time looking at a lot of her artwork. I don't think we mentioned specifically there are a lot of nudes, so just be just be aware. You know, I am not saying that nudes as artwork are bad, but I can see if you were, like, let's look at this just in front of my classroom full of third graders, that might be a little bit of a surprise to suddenly have a scream full of artistic nudes. Yeah. I One of the things I love about her work is that she very clearly is able to mimic a whole lot of different schools and styles. Um. And I really really love she has a self portrait of herself as Piero that I have always thought was really strikingly beautiful. Um. It's it's another you know, the key in my heart is like light and shadow, so and that one is very heavy on it. I love it. I love it. Um. I did not realize immediately in the picture that we talked about of the House of Cards picture, the painting of her children Like. When I first looked at it, I was struck by how sad and pensive, like expectantly sad, these children's faces look. It took me a moment to realize that, like this was a year after their father died, was when their mother would have been painting this picture of them. And I was like, that adds context I hadn't immediately thought about. See, it's so funny to me because I did not know that before you prepped this episode. And I have always read that as kids looking very bored on like a dat trapped inside, like because they are just all kind of like fiddling with cards. The what looks like probably her oldest son is like leaning in across the table with his head on his hand, And I've always been like, oh, these look like bored kids. But now that I know the context, I'm like, oh, I was reading that probably completely wrong. They probably are also bored. They were stuck inside a lot during that whole period. I enjoy doing these six Impossible episodes from time to time, and there is another podcast that I like called ninety Invisible, and usually over the holidays, they do many stories and I'm not able to keep up with every episode of that show. But every time I go to say, okay, what I want to listen to you right now, if there's a mini stories of Invisible, I get very excited because I don't know, I just I like I like their deep dives into something that takes a half an hour, and I also like the thing that takes a couple of minutes per per topic. Super fun. I Um, I couldn't help but think of Katie Sandwina when we talked about Ella. Yeah, I hadn't until just now, but that's a great comparison. Well, it's one of those things I wonder about because like the case of Katie Sandwina, who, in case anybody doesn't remember, was like a strong woman. One of the things that people always commented on was how she was stronger than like any man they knew, but she was like hyper feminine in her style and behavior. And I've always wondered some of that is that, like, are you just like doubling down on all of your traditionally feminine traits because there's this weird disparity of what women people expect of women and how they are normally supposed to be frail and you are not. But it was interesting to note in Ella's case too, that when she took pictures, she was always dressed really well. And there's also a secondary level, right of someone who has been born into poverty and from a family that was enslaved, Like, there's a whole other level to that sort of presentation of personhood, of being you know, very refined and elegant, almost in some cases as a form of rebellion um. But it's just it made me think of the two of them, and then I was like, wouldn't it be great if they admit? That would be great. That's the That's the fictional play I want to write, is like them at tea together. Oh, that would be fun. There are two different pictures that I found that of her with are of her with one arm extended straight out at the shoulder and someone else appearing to stand under and both of them, I was like, these two pictures, I'm not saying they were staged, but they were less convincing to me than other pictures where there's one where somebody is standing next to her and like adjusting her dress, and the disparity in their height is the same. So it's like I almost feel like the ones where her arm is extended out from the shoulder, because it's so easy to do that perspective trick in that posture, like lead your mind to that conclusion. While there's like ones of her just candidly walking down the street in a crowd, and she's head and shoulders taller than everyone in the crowd, Like those struck me as immediately believable, But my mind kept questioning the ones with the arms straight out, even though the height difference is the same there, And I was like, am I just jaded now from having seen too many obviously altered photos? What's happening? Maybe? Maybe, but also you know, it's always good to question that stuff. Um, I have noticed I was looking at some pictures of her that in some there is a very clear to me, it seems like a very clear and deliberate way of arranging the people so that the person under her arm is also partially behind and partially in front of her right, so like their hip is slightly behind hers, but like they're gesturing in front of her or something, which is an interesting way to kind of say like, no, no, I'm really standing next to this person. I am interacting with her body from many sides. Yeah, it's just an interesting I wonder if they started deliberately doing that or if I am overreading. Yeah, I don't know. I wish we knew more about her. Um, I would like to know did she start that dressmaker shop? Like right, what happened? And it's totally possible that there's more on that in you know, some unexamined primary sources in South Carolina or many of the places that she toured. I don't have them at this point. Now. We talked about John jacob Astor, who I have a very filthy nickname for that I can't say on the podcast this week. It amused me. Also, UM, I had a number points in the in the episode or I said we'll talk about on Friday, and we will. When I wanted to talk about was his son, William and tenements. William actually had the nickname the Landlord of New York City, even though he didn't own any tenements, he wasn't administering any of them, etcetera. But he was really kind of like above all of that on the the food chain and enabling it to the point that, like when there was discussion of an income tax on landholders to cover you know, all of the things that income taxes cover. He wanted to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court is unconstitutional, and had the money to make that a thing that took a very long time to enact. UM. The other thing that came up was in eighteen sixty seven, so this would have been after John Jacob aster Uh. The first was dead was that UM. In the eighteen sixties, there was a lot of recognition that New York City had grown so fast and was getting so tightly packed in some places that it was a health crisis, and that there were half a million people living in tenements that were in horrible, upsetting conditions. The mortality rate for infants was very high for a number of reasons, some of which we talked about on the show. And one of the things that the New York legislature tried to do was to say, hey, if you have a lot of this allotment size that by a hundred that was how lots were initially portioned out, you have to leave forty percent of it for like green space or usable space. I mean those were initially intended for like a family to put up a home and tie out a cow, that was it. And so to have suddenly dozens and dozens of families living in that space. Not great. William fought it and fought it and fought it and got that number two reduced, I think to something like five percent, and it's like great. So you have a little strip of green next to the sidewalk. You can thank William Master for that. Um I wanted to quickly note that, like in other contexts, a tenement is basically an apartment, and like higher density housing is something we critically need from the world, but like tenements as they were built, especially in like the nineteenth and early twentieth century, were horribly overcrowded, and a lot of them just like very shoddy construction, not hygienic, not hygienic at all. And but then the fact that people were living in these tenements was like used, it reflected back on them in a pejorative way, and so there was just a whole like the existence of these tenements that were built by you know, extraordinarily rich people to cram as many poorer people into a small space to make as much money as possible became like a scare point for attempts to try to build more livable high density housing. That we really do need. Like that became the specter of the tenement to undermine attempts to build like actual robust, higher density housing that people could live in in a safe and clean way. Yeah, these were not not that they were part of the reason that New York was struggling with dirt and whatnot in the street because a lot of them had one bathroom which then just got dumped into the street. I am a very spoiled human. I live in a situation where my husband and I each have our own bathrooms. If we have a house guest, I lose my mind because I have so I cannot imagine sharing a bathroom with multiple other families I know will still do it. Please know I'm recognizing what a spoiled human I am and what privileges this comes from. But if you then keep upping that number to three dozen families worth of people sharing one bathroom, you can see how that's not livable. Like that is too much, Um William, I have feelings. UM. I did mention that I was going to talk about Astor arriving in New York when there were twenty three thousand residents, and how I came to wrap my head around that number, and it made me laugh and laugh at myself. I do not know what the current number is for what's considered full capacity in Magic Kingdom, but at one point it was okay, or at least that is what a cast member once told me. And so I was like, if all of the people in Magic Kingdom were spread out around the island of Manhattan, it would feel empty. Yeah, And that became like how I thought about um, like on its busiest day, like in a July, you know, when everybody's off of school and and there are lots of families there. Um. That just made me go like, oh, and now, of course I don't even know the current population of Manhattan. It's in the millions, I think, right, it's a lot. And so uh yeah, that was just an interesting thing. The other thing, right, we talked about how Astor was ruthlessly astute about buying out foreclosures, essentially people that were like trying to get a mortgage on their existing property so that they could survive long enough to try to make money to pay that mortgage off. And he did that so much, particularly in seven when there was a big economic crisis that the Court of Chancery got involved and was like, what what are you doing here? What is this all legal? Um? And because he and William were so careful about how they structure deals, they got away with a lot of stuff that probably would not fly today. Um, it's it's wild. It wasn't until several generations later that descendants started going, we have all the money. That seems weird. Maybe we should give some of it back to some people. Maybe we shouldn't have all this money. Yeah, I mean both uh, John Jacob the first and his son William are typically characterized as being very, very greedy and just being so obsessed with kind of the rat race of accumulating more and more and more that like they just had tunnel vision about the impacts that was having on anyone else. I mean, it's interesting to me that somebody in four there was a report, which is the same year that Astor sold out his his FURST interests. There was a report of like, hey, this isn't gonna work for much longer, you guys, we are running out of buffalo and beavers. And he didn't say, hey, you know what, we should change this industry. He said, Okay, I'm gonna cash out, goodbye. And even knowing that the people that he was selling to we're going to be struggling through an industry that was not gonna sustain long term and was going to come crashing down, which it did. Um didn't there's no mention of that, just like, yeah, can I have can I have the money? Please? Thank you, enjoy your new companies, goodbye. Fascinating. I'm very fascinated by this phase of history in the US lately because there are so many things we kind of take for granted about, like, oh, yes, the Asters are of very wealthy, Well, how did they get all that wealth? Like, yeah, we should really examine that. Certainly, if you're wondering why we didn't mention the Waldorf astoria that did not get built until later, it is a reference to wald Or, where he was born, and to the Asters. It was built by one of his descendants, but not John Jacob the first. Later later, maybe we'll talk more about them. Maybe we could do a series on the Asters. Um, there are Asters living today who do a lot of charitable works with their money, which is great. I haven't researched them beyond that because that's an invasion of privacy. And that's this week um, how rich families became a thing in the United States. If you are heading into your weekend, we hope that it is time off and that it's delightful and then you relax and do nice things for yourself. If it is not time off, I still hope it's delightful and that you can maybe squeak out a little time for yourself here and there, do something fun, eat something delicious, maybe have a laugh. That was really all you can ask for in life. Um. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic and then on Monday brand new episodes. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H