At 35, the young man, now calling himself Charles M. Schwab, was president of the Carnegie Steel Corporation. His boss had become one of the richest men in the world, producing fifty times as much steel as when Schwab started in the Braddock mill fifteen years before. In 1901, the banker J. Pierpont Morgan and Elbert H. Gary founded The United States Steel Corporation by purchasing and merging Andrew Carnegie’s Carnegie Steel with Gary’s Federal Steel and William Henry Moore’s National Steel. The deal was worth about a half billion dollars back then (approximately $15 billion today). Morgan offered Schwab the job of president of the new company. He asked Schwab what he was making with Carnegie. Answer: $1 million a year. Morgan said he could never afford that and $300,000 was the best he could do. Schwab countered that he would accept Morgan’s offer provided he be granted a percentage of the profits above a certain figure. Morgan agreed. In the brief time that Schwab worked for Morgan, he never made less than a million a year. In 1904, Charles Schwab, now 42, and a business legend in America and the industrial nations of the world, entered into a partnership with Philadelphia businessman Joseph Wharton, forming the Bethlehem Steel Corporation. The company had already been in existence for a half century as an iron company. As president and chairman of the board, Schwab brought it into the 20th century. Wharton (who funded the business school at the University of Pennsylvania) was in his late 70s, and primarily an investor. Under Schwab’s direction, the new corporation installed the grey rolling mill and produced the first wide-flange (H-beam), which was largely responsible for the success in building skyscrapers. Bethlehem Steel became the largest supplier to the construction industry, and the second-largest steel company in the world. For the next quarter century, the H-beams that Charlie Schwab’s Bethlehem Steel made built the colossus we know as Manhattan. Three years before, in 1901—by then a rich man, president of U.S. Steel, and long married to the former Eurana Dinkey, whom he met in Pittsburgh more than twenty years before— Schwab decided to build a house in Manhattan. Not coincidentally, Andrew Carnegie and his associates Henry Frick and Henry Phipps had also taken up permanent residence in New York. All of the men had a taste for the center of financial power as well as for the same European-inspired residential grandeur that had affected the Vanderbilts. Unlike 124 QUEST
the aforementioned, who would build their palaces along upper Fifth Avenue, Schwab chose a lot on the West Side—the entire block between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, and 73rd and 74th streets, with a magnificent, uninterrupted view of the Hudson and the Palisades. Before the turn of the century it was widely believed among real estate people that Riverside Drive would become the haven for rich New Yorkers—far enough away from the hustle and bustle of what is now midtown. Schwab commissioned the French architect Maurice Hebert to create a chateau resembling those in the Loire Valley that had impressed him and Eurana, including the Chateaux de Chenonceau and Blois. The result: a 50,000-square-foot mansion of 75 rooms, with a granite façade. The property cost around $800,000, and the building itself came close to another $6 million. The front of the house faced the river and the Palisades. On the 50-foot lawn leading down to Riverside Drive were two immense bronze figures representing Science and Labor, which were said to have cost $45,000 each (or about $3 million in today’s currency). The house was equipped with three heating systems—hot water, steam, and hot air—and