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I was quite carried away with my success, and my enthusiasm made me an easy prey to the temptation of participating in a still larger scheme—the development of the Town of Bridgeport, Alabama. A few years prior to 1891 there had been a great boom in Birmingham and Anniston, so that I was easily persuaded by the firm that had been associated with me in the purchase of the Astor Block to go in with them to develop Bridgeport.

All of us in the North felt that the South was “coming back” and Bridgeport was near coal and iron fields and had good water power. We started development, stove- and iron-pipe companies, a hotel, and a bank. We believed, with energetic New Yorkers back of it, this little town on the Tennessee River could be made a great manufacturing centre; we all forgot that it was very far from Broadway. Before I knew it, I had sunk more than my Washington Heights profit, and I am still paying taxes on some of the land that I bought at that time.

The loss of that money was a wholesome lesson, and I resolved to stick to New York. I broke this resolve on only one other occasion, and that was my venture into the Bamberger-Delaware gold mine: we took out plenty of gold—something like $600,000 a year, but it cost us more than that to do so. That investment also proved a total loss.