Business & Finance: Death At No. 52

Most famed financial address in the U. S. is No. 23 Wall St., the House of Morgan. Next in fame is No. 52 William St., the House of Kuhn, Loeb. Built eleven years after a Kuhn, Loeb senior partner, Otto Hermann Kahn, arrived in the U. S. from his German birthplace by way of England, No. 52 houses the great banking firm in only four of its 20 floors. There in his day, shrewd old Jacob Schiff reorganized the big Kuhn, Loeb railroads: Union Pacific, Baltimore & Ohio, Missouri Pacific, Wabash, Chicago & Eastern Illinois.

There Partner Felix Warburg, a carnation in his buttonhole, summons the eleven partners to conference punctually at 11 a. m. on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. On the wall of his office is a portrait of bushy old Solomon Loeb who retired one year after Otto Kahn, at 17, began his banking career in Germany as a stamp licker. There is the big white Georgian partners' room, heart of Kuhn, Loeb, where "people just roll in and roll out again." There Otto Kahn worked under his father-in-law, Partner Abraham Wolff. There he became a U. S. citizen during the War. There as Kuhn, Loeb's great "personality" he chatted with railroad tycoons, painters, writers, singers—all wanting help. And there last week, in the private dining room on the fourth floor, Death came to Otto Kahn. He was sitting over his coffee with Partner Benjamin Buttenwieser. Suddenly he slumped forward. His cup rattled to the floor. Before a doctor could reach him the 67-year-old banker was dead of cardiac thrombosis.

News of his death was withheld until the stockmarket closed. At 4 o'clock the curtains of the upper floor where he lay were drawn, and the partners announced that Kuhn, Loeb would remain closed for four days. A few minutes later J. P. Morgan hurried over on foot from No. 23 to pay his respects. So did Morgan Partners Lamont and Leffingwell. At 4:30 a black box was carried out of No. 52, driven to the Kahn home at No. 1100 Fifth Ave.

Widow Kahn and the banker's second son, Musician Roger Wolfe Kahn, were waiting at the door. Mrs. Kahn wept so bitterly when she saw the coffin that she could not bring herself to announce the funeral arrangements. For three days the body lay in the hushed house of many rooms. Through the gloomy light of Manhattan afternoons gleamed the soft faces and figures of the dead man's favorite Botticellis and Rembrandts. On the fourth day the body was taken to the Kahn estate at Cold Spring Harbor, L. I. where for 14 summers Otto Kahn had walked the wide lawns in front of the French house, stepped down the stone terrace into the flower garden to pluck the tearoses he liked to wear in his lapel. The funeral was private. In death as in life he remained true to the Jewish faith. Rabbi Samuel H. Goldenson of Temple Emanu-El read the services. Before sundown the body was lowered into its grave in the family plot at Cold Spring Memorial Cemetery, not far from the bones of an old friend and wise partner, Mortimer Schiff.