flâneur

Founders Notes: Hetty

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Hetty Charles Slack Hetty Green was a fiercely independent and shrewed businesswoman who built a vast fortune through conservative investments, real estate, and lending, often outmaneuvering her male contemporaries and refusing to follow society's expectations for women. Her self-reliance, financial discipline, and willingness to act alone made her both a powerful force on Wall Street and a one-woman bank to cities and businesses, though her fortune ultimately did not remain within her family after her death. She was the lone woman among a gallery of nineteenth-century rogue heroes—Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and the Vanderbilts. She bought and sold real estate, railroads, and entire city blocks. She owned mines, and held mortgages on churches, factories, and office buildings. Major cities, including New York on more than oneoccasion, came to her, hat in hand, when they ran into financial trouble. She adhered all of her life to the simplest yet hardest-to-follow financial wisdom of all: She bought low, sold high, and never panicked during a panic. The rules she chose to live by were her own rather than society's. By casting off the social expectat

Hetty Charles Slack Hetty Green was a fiercely independent and shrewed businesswoman who built a vast fortune through conservative investments, real estate, and lending, often outmaneuvering her male contemporaries and refusing to follow society's expectations for women. Her self-reliance, financial discipline, and willingness to act alone made her both a powerful force on Wall Street and a one-woman bank to cities and businesses, though her fortune ultimately did not remain within her family after her death. She was the lone woman among a gallery of nineteenth-century rogue heroes—Andrew…

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