Brooke Astor, the white-gloved doyenne of New York society who gave away almost $200 million to feed the city's poor and nourish its cultural life, has died. She was 105.

She died yesterday at her weekend estate in Briarcliff Manor, New York, according to the New York Times, which cited Kenneth E. Warner, a lawyer for Astor's son, Anthony D. Marshall.

She was the last of the American branch of the Astors, a family whose financial and social prestige was once synonymous with the wealth and power of the Rockefellers and the Morgans. The family's holdings at various times included the St. Regis Hotel, the Empire State Building's site and Newsweek magazine. One of the Astors died on the Titanic.

Astor was "an energetic, charming but level-headed municipal fairy godmother, who found and made adventure out of conventional upper-class life until some curious fate gave her the magical power of the Astor money,'' the New York Times said in a review of her 1980 memoir, "Footprints.''

[Bloomberg]