Astor: the name still found on every New York block

By Moira HodgsonIn 1981, when Anderson Cooper was 13, he joined his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, for lunch at Mortimer’s on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. There, she introduced him to a “very small lady in a very big fur coat” who swept in and sat down at the next table. It was Brooke Astor, the doyenne of New York society. A major philanthropist, she had given tens of millions of dollars to the city’s charities, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library. Looking at the “delica...