Glen Cove’s north shore was wall-to-wall Rockefeller-era plutocrats.

Evidence

The northern tip of Long Island’s Glen Cove peninsula was Morgan’s estate, the waters beside it the anchorage for his great black yacht, Corsair, and all the northern reaches of the peninsula were “Morgan Country.” His son—Morgan the Younger, reporters called him—and four partners of the House of Morgan lived there, their yachts riding to anchor beside that of their father and chief, and so did George F. Baker, the chop-whiskered, taciturn Sphinx of Wall Street who was the president of the First National Bank, the largest single stockholder of both AT&T and United States Steel (his holdings in Big Steel alone totaled 212,500,000 in 1920), and who rode at the right hand of Morgan the Elder in the turn of the century’s bloodiest stock-market raids. Baker was old now—eighty in 1920—but not too old to lift his sword; in 1930, when he was ninety and America was in the Depression, he climbed out of bed, pushed aside his doctors, strode to his office and, in a series of incredible stock manipulations, increased his fortune in that year alone by 50,000,000. … To the south of the Morgans lay the demesnes of Standard Oil, where Charles Pratt and Stephen C. Harkness, partners of John D. Rockefeller the First, had carved out adjoining fiefs on either side of a small stream. On his, Pratt built six manor houses for his six sons. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 651

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing interest in how wealth concentrates geographically and how land itself becomes a physical map of power. — connects to: Long Island’s North Shore was a colony of concentrated industrial-era wealth — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 654
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: did Morgan-era estate land come to Glen Cove by purchase, or were the very top financiers consolidating fiefs that trace to later land uses like parks and institutions?

Broader Connections

• Long Island’s North Shore was a colony of concentrated industrial-era wealth #expands (0.95) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 654