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, and it was in such times that he stepped in and possessed himself, at comparatively small expense, of large additional tracts of land. It was this way that he became the owner of what was then the Cosine farm, extending on Broadway from Fifty-third to Fifty-seventh streets and westward to the Hudson River. This property, which he got for $23,000 by foreclosing a mortgage, is now in the very heart of the city, filled with many business, and every variety of residential, buildings, and is rated as worth $6,000,000. By much the same means he acquired ownership of the Eden farm in the same vicinity, coursing along Broadway north from Forty-second street and slanting over to the Hudson River. This farm lay under pledges for debt and attachments for loans. Suddenly Astor turned up with a third interest in an outstanding mortgage, foreclosed, and for a total payment of $25,000 obtained a sweep of property now covered densely with huge hotels, theaters, office buildings, stores and long vistas of residences and tenements--a property worth at the very least $25,000,000. Any one with sufficient security in land who sought to borrow money would find Astor extremely accommodating. But woe betide the hapless borrower, whoever he was, if he failed in his obligations to the extent of even a fraction of the requirements covered by law! Neither personal friendship, religious considerations nor the slightest feelings of sympathy availed. But where law was insufficient or non-existent, new laws were created either to aggrandize the powers of landlordship, or to seize hold of land or enchance its value, or to get extraordinary special privileges in the form of banking charters. And here it is necessary to digress from the narrative of Astor's land transactions and advert to his banking activities, for it was by reason of these subordinately, as well as by his greater trade revenues, that he was enabled so successfully to pursue his career of wealth-gathering. The circumstances as to the origin of certain powerful banks in which he and other landholders and traders were large stockholders, the methods and powers of those banks, and their effect upon the great body of the people, are component parts of the analytic account of his operations. Not a single one of Astor's biographers has mentioned his banking connections. Yet it is of the greatest importance to describe them, inasmuch as they were closely intertwined with his trade, on the
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