As soon as I sighted the beaver plaque at the Astor Place subway station, shown above, I recalled a passage from Eric Jay Dolan's Fur, Fortune, and Empire about John Jacob Astor, his astute real estate acumen, the places in New York that bear his name and those he once owned that do not, and his role in the beaver fur trade. Here is an excerpt from a most excellent chronicle of the North America fur trade: Not one to let his money sit idle, Astor plowed his growing profits from the fur trade into real estate. His first purchase came in 1789, when he bought two lots of land on Bowery Lane for a little more than six hundred dollars....Over the years many of Astor's associates ridiculed his real estate transactions, especially those in which he acquired empty land well beyond the city proper. They said he had wasted money on dirt and trees, but when the city expanded right up to the edge of Astor's holdings, he sold or rented his "worthless" land for enormou