After studying law in Pittsburgh with lawyer David Reed, he was admitted to the Allegheny County bar in January 1864.

Gazzam, Wallace, and his father-in-law were all incorporators of what was to become the Beech Creek Railroad in 1882, a venture of William H. Vanderbilt to bring coal from Pennsylvania's Clearfield Coalfield into the New York Central system.

Gazzam served as president of a long list of corporations, including the Wilkes-Barre and Eastern Railroad, the New York and Fort Lee Railroad (another Vanderbilt road), the Rees Welsh Law & Digest Publishing Company of Philadelphia, the Rennyson Tredyffrin Lithia Water Company of Philadelphia, and others.

[6] In 1889 Gazzam spent time in Asheville, North Carolina and built the original Kenilworth Inn hotel there.

A major stockholder was George Washington Vanderbilt II, who was beginning construction on the Biltmore Estate nearby.

[11] Anna Reading Gazzam was the author of a novel, A Sketch in the Ideal (1891) and several books of poetry, Night Etchings (1892) and Gleams and Echoes (1903).

Antoinette Gazzam became an object of public attention after she inherited a substantial fortune from her mother (reports varied from $1,250,000 to $3,000,000.)

She was, like her mother, sued for alienation of attentions, in her case by the wife of a man named Marshall Clark, also known as "Niblo the Palmist".