Goodbye to a Grande Dame
I don't imagine that most people who didn't grow up in New York City would know who Brooke Astor was, but to New Yawkuhs and ex-New Yawkuhs alike, hers is a name we saw everywhere in the city. There are few whose lives she didn't touch some way, and with good reason. Astor lived to be 105, which in itself would be an accomplishment.
Of course, that's not why some kid from Brooklyn would have known the name Astor. The Astors are a family that helped to make New York, and few Astors did as much for the intellectual and cultural institutions of one of the world's most intellectually and culturally significant towns. Brooke Astor got a lot out of New York, to be sure, but she also spent her long, long life putting a lot back into it. She gave more millions than any of us will ever see to the New York Public Library, the Botanical Gardens, the Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of Modern Art. If all those things make you think "cold and impersonal marble halls" for some reason, consider that she also gave her support to various programs that helped train disadvantaged youth for employment and that provided them with money for higher education in the forms of grants and scholarships. She put cash into developing affordable housing back when New York was floundering through some of its worst economic hardships and Jerry Ford told us to "drop dead."
This is a lady (and I mean that in terms of her class as much as anything) who touched a whole lot of lives, including my own.
Astor isn't being buried in New York City, and it doesn't matter. She imbued the city with her spirit. She'll be interred, instead, in Irvington, a town that overlooks the Hudson which, as did Astor herself, spends its existence flowing through the city. The epitaph on her tombstone will read, "I had a wonderful life."
She sure did, and she made a lot of other lives a little more wonderful in the bargain, too, which is about as much as any of us can hope for. She deserved to live to 105, and she deserves thanks from people like me who never met her but who benefit from all that New York has to offer and so all that she had to offer New York.
