If you had hundreds of millions in the bank and could easily afford to buy any Brooklyn house or apartment you desired, would you? Or would the idea of paying real estate taxes rankle you so much, you prefer to go from crummy rental to rental for the rest of your life?
Hetty Green chose the latter. She made a fortune on Wall Street in the 1880s. But instead of building a Gilded-Age mansion, she slummed around in rentals in Brooklyn Heights (staying for a time in the St. George Hotel) and Hoboken to avoid taxes.
Hetty and her dog, Dewey. Kind of Leona Helmsey-like.
Her miserly ways were legendary. Nicknamed “The Witch of Wall Street” and chronicled in the papers as a sort of celebrity curiosity, she “dodged between one city and another, using aliases, always posing as a transient and always proving non-residence,” says a 1930 New York Times article.
“She always dressed in cast-offs and looked like a ragbag….she [realized] she could save money by buying boot tops at wholesale and then sewing them to the soles, also bought at wholesale,” the article continues. Supposedly she’d only eat cold oatmeal and wouldn’t turn on the heat or hot water.
Hetty died in 1916. Today, her fortune would equal $17 billion.
Tags: Brooklyn Heights, Gilded Age, Hetty Green, St. George Hotel, world's richest woman
January 5, 2009 at 1:50 am |
Hetty Green resided (or not) in Bellows Falls, Vermont, for part of her life.