Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor
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Image:SchimerhornAstor.JPG Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor (September 22, 1830–October 30, 1908) was a prominent American socialite. She preferred to be known simply as Mrs. Astor, which was all she had printed on her visiting cards after 1887. She was the wife of real estate heir William Backhouse Astor Jr.
Her desire to be the unchallenged grande dame of New York society was aided by the social arbiter Ward McAllister, whose life work was the codifcation and maintenance of the rules of social intercourse. McAllister once stated that, amongst the vastly wealthy families of Gilded Age New York, there were only four hundred people who could be counted as members of Fashionable Society. He did not, as is commonly written, arrive at this number based on the limitations of Mrs. Astor's New York City ballroom. (McAllister, her distant cousin, referred to her as the "Mystic Rose".)
Her husband's lack of interest in the social whirl did not stop her activities. She devoted considerable time freezing out people she considered her social inferiors. In 1883, however, she was reluctantly moved to admit Alva Vanderbilt, the first wife of William Kissam Vanderbilt, to her social circle after Alva threatened to block the Astors' daughter from participating in a much-awaited costume ball.
On the death of her brother-in-law John Jacob Astor III in 1890, his son William Waldorf Astor (1848–1919) attempted to challenge Caroline's right to be the "Mrs. Astor" by insisting he was now the head of the family. He demanded that his aunt become "Mrs. William Astor" and his wife be known as the "Mrs. Astor". His plan did not work. That September, William Waldorf Astor and his wife emigrated to Great Britain, where he later became a viscount.
In retaliation for his aunt's intransigence, William Waldorf Astor had his father's house, 350 Fifth Avenue, torn down and replaced by the first Waldorf Hotel. Not willing to live next to a hotel, Caroline moved uptown to an opulent mansion at 840 Fifth Avenue. Her son John Jacob Astor IV built the Astoria hotel at 340 Fifth Avenue, and the two later merged before moving to the present location of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
By the time she moved to the new house, her husband had died. She died there herself at age 78 and was interred in the Trinity Church Cemetery in Manhattan.