Long Island’s North Shore was a colony of concentrated industrial-era wealth

Evidence

To the west of Mackay stretched the fiefs of other barons of American business—the sugar truster Claus Spreckels, for example, and other Standard Oil heirs like Payne Whitney, who in the early 1920’s was paying an annual income tax of a million and a half dollars. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 654

Categorization

• SHARE: The detail that one man’s annual income tax alone was a million and a half dollars in the early 1920s puts the era’s extreme wealth concentration into a single stark number — someone into the gilded age or tax history would love this.
• XREF: connects to: Long Island’s whale-like geography shapes its development arc — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 639; Glen Cove’s north shore was wall-to-wall Rockefeller-era plutocrats. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 651; Long Island’s estate country was settled top-down by Gilded Age industrial partnerships. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 653 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• North Shore barons privately owned virtually the entire Long Island shoreline by 1900 #corroborates (0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 667
• Long Island’s North Shore robber barons staged parties of legendary extravagance #expands (0.80) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 657
• Gilded Age magnates literally imported English royal history into their Long Island homes #exemplifies (0.78) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 655