Empty Mansions: Don’t be old and rich in New York City

What an unfortunate event to befall a family of who acquired such wealth by honest means:<p>In an 1907 essay Mark Twain portrayed Clark as the very embodiment of Gilded Age excess and corruption:<p>He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a ball and chain on his legs. To my mind he is the most disgusting creature that the republic has produced since Tweed&#x27;s time.[5]

This sounds very similar to famous socialite Brooke Astor who died a few years ago at 105 in New York with a $198 million estate. There were all sorts of charges of elder abuse and stealing from her, and claims that she was forced to live in squalor. Her son and his attorney ended up serving jail time for grand larceny and forgery.<p>She was married to the great-great grandson of super-rich John Jacob Astor. I find this to be an interesting example of how long wealth can persist in the US, and a counterexample to the &quot;three generations shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves&quot; theory. (As a random aside, her husband&#x27;s enormously wealthy father died on the Titanic after being denied a lifeboat spot. I find it hard to imagine this happening to the rich and famous today.)

I&#x27;m mystified by the pro-aristocracy tone of the article:<p>&gt; There are some happy parts of the book. Clark uses her fabulous wealth to indulge a taste for the world’s best dollhouses and model Japanese castles, built by craftsmen in Germany and Japan. She pays an assistant to write down transcripts of Flintstone episodes. When she wants to make a little music, she takes a Stradivarius violin out of the closet (first she needs to choose which of her Stradivariuses to play).<p>Yes, it&#x27;s horrible that these people took advantage of her, but I find it very difficult to get that worked up over it. On the balance, she still won the cosmic lottery, inheriting a tremendous fortune she did nothing to earn, and getting to spend it on trivialities like dollhouses. Rich heiresses attract scumbags for precisely the reasons suggested in the book (they are easy to deceive), and in a way such activity is just the natural downside of inheriting a large fortune in the first place. Without justifying the behavior of any of the people involved, I can&#x27;t help but feel my feelings of pity are better directed elsewhere.

The book being reviewed here is one I&#x27;ve been meaning to pickup and read for a while, just been lazy about it. Huguette Clark was literally a living fossil - possibly the very very last holdover from the gilded age, really a very sad story. Though by all accounts - she was happy largely - so maybe not so sad in absolute terms over all.

Although the doctors and nurses were taking care of this woman as best they could, their ultimate goals were purely monetary based on her large wealth.<p>Sad.

How truly sad, it must have been so hard for her only ending up with $310 million at the end of her life.<p>It&#x27;s far better to be old and poor in New York City, that way you can get food stamps instead of having to subsist on a paltry quarter billion dollars.

It&#x27;s deplorable that so many stole from her. But as to the title, it&#x27;s even sadder how <i>poor</i> people were systematically stolen from, historically and I&#x27;m sure currently to some degree.

AT&amp;T and DMV does worse to me and i&#x27;m not even rich.

I hate to be that guy, but why was this posted to hacker news, the site dedicated to news for hackers?