High society, working class attend Brooke Astor funeral

NEW YORK – New York’s power brokers united in mourning with its working-class residents Friday as the city that Brooke Astor loved so dearly bid a bittersweet farewell to the philanthropist and society fixture.

Astor’s wooden casket sat on the altar inside St. Thomas Church on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, where the pews held Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Mayors Edward I. Koch and David Dinkins, entertainer Whoopi Goldberg, opera star Jessye Norman and banker David Rockefeller.

“On behalf of 8.2 million New Yorkers: She will be deeply missed,” Bloomberg said in his eulogy before about 1,000 mourners.

Astor died Monday of pneumonia at age 105, after months of declining health and family infighting over her care and financial legacy.

She had been planning her funeral since 1979, leaving a guest list and detailed instructions including requests for which hymns to sing. She was to be buried in a cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, about 25 miles north of Manhattan near her estate by the Hudson River.

Hugh Stroud, 67, a social worker who said he met Astor while working on children’s programs she funded in Harlem, waited in a long line of mourners stretching along the side of the church.

“She was truly a woman of all times. And she never gave up being good,” he said.

During her lifetime, Astor gave away nearly $200 million. Among her beneficiaries were the New York Public Library, Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Natural History, Central Park, the Bronx Zoo and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

She also was known to make significant financial donations to Maine entities that came to her attention while she vacationed at her seasonal Cove End estate in Northeast Harbor.

In her will, Astor left money to the Asticou Azalea Garden, Northeast Harbor Library, College of the Atlantic and St. Mary’s and St. Jude’s Episcopal Parish.

Earlier this week in Westchester County Surrogate’s Court, Astor’s friend Annette de la Renta, wife of designer Oscar de la Renta, and JPMorgan Chase filed papers asking a judge to appoint them as temporary administrators of the estate, said de la Renta’s attorney, Paul C. Saunders.

They had been put in charge of her care last year after Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, was accused of neglecting her. While that matter was settled and he was cleared of abuse, the dispute over what happens to her fortune now that she has died was just getting under way.

De la Renta argues that the socialite was not mentally competent or was unduly influenced when she signed her last will in 2002 and several amendments to it benefiting her son. An attorney for Marshall, Kenneth Warner, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the 2002 document and its amendments should stand.

At stake is a fortune said to be worth about $130 million and a trust valued at $60 million, left by Astor’s late husband Vincent Astor. Brooke Astor’s original 1997 will left about half her estate to her son.

BDN writer Bill Trotter contributed to this report.