August Heckscher

August Heckscher: The Zinc King Who Built Playgrounds

On 10 July 1920 a regimental band played in Huntington, Long Island, fireworks went up, and children were handed refreshments. The occasion was the dedication of an art museum. The man who had paid for it, a seventy-one-year-old zinc magnate, told the crowd that the institution should be "especially for the children." It was a strange sentence at a gallery opening. It was also the truest thing August Heckscher ever said about his own money.

Hamburg to the Coal Face

He came ashore in 1867, nineteen years old, out of Hamburg, where he had been born on 26 August 1848 to Johann Gustav Heckscher and Marie Antoinette Bräutigam. There was no soft landing. Heckscher went to work in the coal-mining operation run by his cousin Richard, and studied English at night — the standard immigrant arithmetic of the period, labour by day and grammar by lamplight. What was not standard was the speed with which he converted a job into an ownership stake. He and his cousin formed Richard Heckscher & Company, and the firm was eventually sold to the Reading Railroad, then the commanding presence in Pennsylvania anthracite. Heckscher had absorbed the first lesson of American heavy industry, and absorbed it early: the money is not in the digging. It is in the corporate structure that owns the digging, and in knowing when to sell that structure to somebody larger.

The Zinc Consolidation

He moved from coal to zinc, and there the fortune was actually made. Heckscher organised the Zinc and Iron Company, taking the posts of vice-president and general manager — the operating jobs rather than the ceremonial one, which tells you something about his temperament. In 1897 that company consolidated with others to form the New Jersey Zinc Company, with Heckscher again serving as general manager. This was the age of the American combination, when scattered regional producers were welded into national concerns, and Heckscher was inside one of the more successful weldings. Zinc, copper and coal made him a multimillionaire.

Fifth Avenue

Then he did the thing that industrial fortunes of that generation so often did, and did it more shrewdly than most: he turned metal into Manhattan. He became, in the *New York Times*' description, "one of the largest holders of real estate in [Manhattan's] Fifth Avenue zone." That is a sentence worth pausing on. The Fifth Avenue corridor in the first decades of the twentieth century was the single most rapidly appreciating strip of ground in the Western Hemisphere. To be among its largest holders was to have converted a commodity business, exposed to price cycles and depletion, into an annuity secured by the growth of the world's fastest-growing city. It also meant that when Heckscher gave money away, he was giving away something that kept replenishing itself.

A Thimble Factory in Huntington

In 1906 he bought a former thimble factory and its grounds in Huntington, on the north shore of Long Island. What he did with it over the following decade is the clearest window into how his mind worked, because he did not do one thing. He installed classrooms for local children. He gave the site over, in part, to the Fresh Air Fund, so that underprivileged girls from the city could have a stretch of countryside. He opened public skating and public swimming. He distributed ice to Huntington's poor households, which in the era before domestic refrigeration was not a gesture but a genuine intervention in public health. In 1917 he handed the whole eighteen-and-a-half-acre property to the Heckscher Trust, a non-profit foundation he created to hold it for the town in perpetuity — a legal act designed to outlive his own goodwill and his heirs' interest in the matter.

The Museum and the 185 Pictures

The centrepiece came three years later. Heckscher commissioned Julius Franke, of the firm Maynicke and Franke, to design a fine arts building for the site, and dedicated it on 10 July 1920 with the Seventy-First Regimental Band, fireworks and food for the children. Into it he put 185 works from his own collection. His stated ambition was that Huntington should be "one of the few places in the United States outside of the large cities [that] possess galleries of such extent and importance." He was, in effect, arguing that a suburban town of no particular consequence deserved the same visual education as Manhattan — a proposition that was not obvious in 1920 and that most American museum-building of the period, concentrated in the great cities, quietly contradicted.

Playgrounds, Parks and the Foundation

The giving compounded. He built playgrounds in lower Manhattan and in Central Park; the largest playground in Central Park still carries his name. He created Heckscher Park in Huntington. He gave New York State nearly 1,500 acres at East Islip for what became Heckscher State Park, a tract that hosted the New York Philharmonic's summer concerts for thirty-five years. And he established the Heckscher Foundation for Children, an institution built specifically around child welfare, which remains the most durable of all his structures. Taken together, the pattern is unmistakable: Heckscher's philanthropy was almost entirely about giving children physical space — ground to run on, water to swim in, walls with pictures on them.

Why August Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that Heckscher's business record shows commercial nerve, operational competence and excellent timing rather than intellectual originality. He did not invent a process, patent a device, or theorise about metallurgy. He was a very good general manager who joined a consolidation wave at the right moment and then parked the proceeds in the best real estate on the continent. That last move — the conversion of a depleting industrial asset into appreciating Manhattan land — was genuinely shrewd, but it was shrewdness of a kind many of his contemporaries also managed.

The stronger claim sits on the philanthropic side, and it is a claim about design rather than generosity. Rich men gave money away constantly in this period. Heckscher's distinction was that he thought in systems and in time. He did not fund a building and walk away; he assembled a site that did four different things at once — school, holiday camp, sports ground, ice supply — and then placed it inside a trust so that the arrangement would survive him. He understood that a gift with no institution behind it is a gift with an expiry date. The Heckscher Foundation for Children, the Heckscher Trust and the state park land were all attempts to make charity structural.

Whether that amounts to genius depends on how much weight one gives to institutional imagination as against invention. What it certainly was not is inherited: Heckscher started in a coal mine at nineteen and built the capital himself, which is more than most of the era's great donors could say. The counter-case is simply that a man who could afford to be visionary was funding his vision with the proceeds of a metals cartel and a land boom, and that the skill involved was less rare than the generosity.

Legacy

Heckscher died on 26 April 1941 at Mountain Lake, Florida, aged ninety-two. The Huntington press called him "perhaps the finest benefactor that Huntington ever had." His grandson, August Heckscher II, would become President Kennedy's first White House cultural adviser and New York City Parks Commissioner — a lineage that reads less like coincidence than inheritance of an idea. The museum on Prime Avenue still opens its doors; children still play on the ground in Central Park that bears his name. For a Hamburg immigrant who arrived with nothing but a cousin's job offer, it is an unusually physical form of immortality.