This version bears all the impress of being undoubtedly a fraud. Astor was remarkably secretive and dissembling, and never revealed his plans to anyone. That he bought the lots is true enough, but his attributed loquacity is mythical and is the invention of some gushing eulogist. At that time he was buying for $200 or $300 each many lots on lower Broadway, then, for the most part, an unoccupied waste. What he was counting upon was the certain growth of the city and the vastly increasing values not that he would give his land, but which would accrue from the labor of an enlarged population. These lots are now occupied by crowded business buildings and are valued at from $300,000 to $400,000 each. Throughout those years in the first decade of the nineteenth century he was constantly buying land on Manhattan Island. Practically all of it was bought, not with the idea of using it, but of holding it and allowing future populations to make it a thousand times more valuable. An exception was his country estate of thirteen acres at Hurlgate (Hellgate) in the vicinity of Sixtieth street and the East River. It was curious to look back at the fact that less than a century ago the upper regions of Manhattan Island were filled with country estates--regions now densely occupied by huge tenement houses and some private dwellings. In those days, not less than in these, a country seat was considered a necessary appendage to the possessions of a rich man. Astor bought that Hurlgate estate as a country seat; but as such it was long since discontinued although the land comprising it has never left the hold of the Astor family. What were the intrinsic circumstances of the means by which he bought land, now worth hundreds of millions of dollars? For once, we get a gleam of the truth, but a gleam only, in the "popular writer's" account when he says: "John Jacob Astor's record is constantly crossed by embarrassed families, prodigal sons, mortgages and foreclosure sales. Many of the victims of his foresight were those highest in church and state. He thus acquired for $75,000 one-half of Governor George Clinton's splendid Greenwich country place [in the old Greenwich village on the west side of Manhattan Island].... After the Governor's death, he kept persistently at the heirs, lent them money and acquired additional slices of the family property.... Nearly two-thirds of the Clinton farm is now held by Astor's descendants, and is covered by scores of business buildings, from which is derived an annual income estimated at $500,000." THE FATE OF OTHERS HIS GAIN.