John Innes Kane was an American explorer, scientist and philanthropist who was prominent in New York Society during the Gilded Age.
Early life
Kane was born in 1850, one of eight children born to Oliver DeLancey Kane and Louisa Dorothea Kane. His siblings included Walter Langdon, DeLancey Astor Kane, Woodbury Kane, S. Nicholson Kane. His sisters were Louisa Langdon Kane, Emily Astor Kane, and Sybil Kent Kane. The family lived at "Beach Cliffe", designed by Detlef Lienau, which was one the earliest Newport cottages "to attain a sort of Beaux-Arts purity." Kane was a grandson of Walter Langdon and Dorothea Langdon and a great-grandson of John Jacob Astor. He was a cousin of Lt. Col. John Jacob Astor IV. His paternal lineage descended from John O'Kane who emigrated to the country in 1752 from County Londonderry and Antrim, Ireland. During the American Revolutionary War, O'Kane was living at Sharyvogne, his estate in Dutchess County, which was confiscated after the War due to his Loyalist times. His eldest son, John Jr., stayed and became one of the most prominent merchants in New York.
Interests and clubs
Kane inherited from his mother's family, so he never took an active part in business, "but had always taken a keen interest in scientific matters, in particular those dealing with discovery and exploration. He was also fond of art and travel." In 1912, the Kanes traveled to Egypt with J. Pierpont Morgan. Kane belonged are the Union Club, the Knickerbocker Club, the New York Yacht Club, the Metropolitan, the Whist Club, St. Elmo, the South Side Sportsmen's Club, and the Automobile Club of America. The Kanes attended Alva Vanderbilt's famous March 1883 masquerade ball christening the Vanderbilt's new Petit Chateau on Fifth Avenue. In 1892, several members of Kane's family, but not Kane and his wife, were included in Ward McAllister's "Four Hundred", purported to be an index of New York's best families, published in The New York Times. Conveniently, 400 was the number of people that could fit into Mrs. Astor's ballroom. Kane sat on the Advisory Board of the Cooper Union museum during its first decade, up to near his death in 1913. His wife bequeathed a number of European decorative arts from the Renaissance through the eighteenth centuries to the museum.
After years of renting houses in Lenox, Massachusetts, they acquired a summer estate on a bluff overlooking Frenchman Bay located at 45 Hancock Street in Bar Harbor, Maine. There, Kane had a Tudor Revival Cottage built between 1903 to 1904, designed by local architect Fred L. Savage, that was known both as Breakwater and Atlantique. The interior of the house, however, featured Colonial and Georgian Revival eighteenth-century styling. His widow left the home to Kane's nephew, U.S. diplomat Peter Augustus Jay and his wife, the former Susan Alexander McCook, who left it to her daughter, Susan Mary Alsop. Kane hired the prominent New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White to design his New York City residence. His home, located at 1 West 49th Street, "attracted immediate attention, when completed in 1909, because of its attractive simplicity. It was built in the style of the Italian Renaissance, and its furnishings were brought from all parts of Europe." The home was across the street from 608 Fifth Avenue, the home of Ogden Goelet and his wife, Mary Wilson Goelet. In August 1921, a fire in the library and dining room of the home destroyed family portraits and other heirlooms of the Kane and Schermerhorn families. Reportedly, fireproof construction planned by Stanford White saved the rest of the home from destruction.
