Background
Andrew Freedman was born on September, 1, 1860, in New York. He was the son of Joseph and Elizabeth (Davies) Freedman.
Andrew Freedman was born on September, 1, 1860, in New York. He was the son of Joseph and Elizabeth (Davies) Freedman.
Freedman attended Grammar School No. 35, a public school in Lower Manhattan.
After attending a public school on Thirteenth Street, Freedman found employment in a wholesale dry-goods house, picked up a little law, and embarked in the real-estate business. By ways that are no longer traceable he achieved a conspicuous success.
He had a hand in several large transactions, such as the sale of the Academy of Music in 1887, dealt extensively in Fifth Avenue properties, and exploited large tracts of land in the Bronx, which was then a sparsely settled outskirt of the city. Meanwhile, he became a close friend of Richard Croker.
When Croker married for the second time, Freedman acted as his best man. When Croker returned from his retirement abroad to reassume the leadership of Tammany Hall, Freedman came with him, was treasurer of the Democratic campaign in 1897, and was reputed to be a power in municipal politics.
Mayor Van Wyck, it is said, stood ready to appoint him to any office that he might desire, but Freedman was busy with other projects. One of these was the Maryland Fidelity and Guarantee Company, which he organized in 1898. The company did a good deal of bonding for the city of Baltimore.
Having sold out his holdings in it in 1903, Freedman next formed the Casualty Company of America, which grew so rapidly that in 1908 it had a premium income of $1, 500, 000. In 1909, he disposed of his interest in it to Lyman A. Spaulding and several other men. Another and more devious project of his was the building of the first New York subway.
John B. McDonald, a contractor, came to him with the original idea, and together they secured the support of August Belmont. On January 16, 1900, the contract was awarded to McDonald, whose bids for constructing the several sections totaled $35, 000, 000. Freedman’s relations with the various building and operating companies concerned in the subway appear to have been highly complicated.
At the time of his death, a committee of the New York legislature was endeavoring to unravel some of the complications, but its efforts to get access to Freedman’s papers were blocked by his executors, and the investigation was dropped.
From 1894 to 1902, Freedman was the owner of the New York Baseball Club (the “Giants”), which he made the most remunerative enterprise of its kind.
In New York, Freedman lived at Sherry’s, on Fifth Avenue at Forty-fourth St. ; he had a handsome estate, “Tower Hill, ” at Red Bank, New Jersey, where in the last year of his life, he was laying out a model dairy farm and stocking it with pure-bred Holsteins.
Freedman was generous to his friends.
Himself a Jew, he left the bulk of his $7, 000, 000 estate to a non-sectarian home for the aged and made special provision that in it married couples might live out their lives in decent comfort and seclusion.
Freedman never married.