New York - The Novel

“that it’s fated.” So that was that. They’d moved to Gramercy Park.
    If Frank was determined to interview this Irish girl, he didn’t press the point at once. It was better, he’d learned, to play for time. So he changed the subject.
    “Look at these maps, Hetty,” he said, “and tell me what you think.” The reason why he needed the whole table was that the maps covered a territory that ran all the way up the Hudson, from New York to Albany. “The Hudson River Railroad,” he said with satisfaction. “The northern sections are all complete. Before long it’ll reach us here.”
    Hetty obligingly gazed at the maps, and smiled. “That’ll teach the damn Yankees,” she remarked.
    George Washington might have called John Master a Yankee, but in the last generation a distinction had grown up. One might speak of Connecticut Yankees, and Boston was certainly Yankee, but the New York men liked to think of themselves as different. Taking the name of the fictitious author of Washington Irving’s delightful mock history of the city, they’d started calling themselves Knickerbockers. Of course, there were plenty of Connecticut Yankees, and Boston men too, among the merchants of New York, but the genial distinction was still made. And when it came to any rivalry between New York and Boston, then the Boston men, sure as hell, were damn Yankees.
    It wasn’t too often that the Boston Yankees got the better of New York. The Knickerbocker merchants had managed to bring most of the Southern cotton trade through their port; more of the swift China trade clippersleft from New York than anywhere else, many of them built on the East River too. So maybe a touch of arrogance had blinded the Knickerbockers to the fact that the Boston men, seeing all the trade coming across from the Midwest by the Erie Canal, had built a rail line across to Albany, to carry goods swiftly to Boston instead of down the Hudson to New York.
    Well, that oversight was going to be remedied. When it was completed, the Hudson railway line should pull those goods back to New York again. But that wasn’t the only reason why Frank Master wanted to look at the map today.
    “So what is your plan, Frank?” his wife asked.
    “To be as rich as John Jacob Astor,” he said with a grin. Perhaps that was a little ambitious—yet not impossible. After all, the Masters were already rich, whereas everyone knew Astor’s story. A poor German immigrant from the little town of Waldorf, Astor had come from his brother’s London musical instrument workshop to seek his fortune in the New World, and somehow landed up in the good old fur trade. Before long he’d entered the China trade too.
    The richest China trade, of course, was in drugs. British merchants, supported by their government, ran huge quantities of illegal opium into China. Recently, when the Chinese emperor had protested at what this was doing to his people, the righteous British government had sent warships to attack him, forced the Chinese to buy the drugs, and taken Hong Kong for themselves as well.
    But Astor was no drug dealer. He’d sold the Chinese furs. Importing silks and spices in return, he’d multiplied his profits. And with those profits, he’d made the simplest investment in the world: he’d bought Manhattan land. He didn’t develop it, usually—he just bought it, leased it, or sold it on. As the city was rapidly expanding, the land values shot up. He’d quietly continued the process, become a revered city elder, the patron of Audubon, of Edgar Allen Poe, and even founded the Astor library. Last year, he had died worth twenty million dollars, the richest man in America.
    “You think the railroad business could be that big?” Hetty asked.
    “I do,” said Frank. “When I was a boy, my father took me to the opening of the Erie Canal. That canal alone transformed the shipping of grain and caused a huge expansion of places like Albany. Given time, the new railroads will far exceed what the canals accomplished—they’ll change thewhole continent. Unlike canals, they’re easy to build, and the speed at which freight, and people, can travel is going to increase by leaps and bounds. Land prices are going to rise all the way along the new railway lines, if you can just figure out the right places. There’ll be opportunities to invest in the railroads themselves, as well.”
    “Let’s look at the maps, then,” said his wife, with a smile.
    She’d always been his partner,