Caroline Webster "Lina" Schermerhorn Astor (September 22, 1830 – October 30, 1908) was an American socialite who led the Four Hundred, high society of New York City in the Gilded Age.

[8] At the time of her birth, her family lived at 1 Greenwich Street, near the Bowling Green, but the population growth and increasing urbanization of lower Manhattan in the 1830s led her family to move farther north to 36 Bond Street, near the ultra-fashionable "Lafayette Place," which had been developed by her future husband's paternal grandfather, fur-trader John Jacob Astor.

[3] In 1862, she and her husband built a four-bay townhouse in the newly fashionable brownstone style at 350 Fifth Avenue,[13] the present site of the Empire State Building.

The Astors also maintained a grand "summer cottage" in Newport, Rhode Island, called Beechwood, which had a ballroom large enough to fit "The 400" – the most fashionable New York socialites of the day.

[17] McAllister once stated that, amongst the vastly rich families of Gilded Age New York, there were only 400 people who could be counted as members of Fashionable Society.

[21] The Vanderbilts, as members of socialite New York through the copious amounts of money that the family had earned rather than inherited, represented a type of wealth that was abhorrent to Astor and her group.

The Vanderbilts were subsequently invited to Astor's annual ball, a formal acknowledgement of their full acceptance into the upper echelon of New York society.

Charlotte's son, William Waldorf Astor, felt that his own wife, Mary "Mamie" Dahlgren Paul, should be "the Mrs.

The Waldorf Hotel was thirteen stories tall and was built in the form of a German Renaissance chateau: it thus not only overshadowed Lina, but all other structures in the neighborhood as well.

Unwilling to live next door to New York's latest sensation and public draw, Mrs. Astor and her son, Jack, first contemplated tearing down her house and replacing it with livery stables.

[27] The Astors' Fifth Avenue home and the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel were both eventually torn down in 1927 and 1928 to make way for Temple Emanu-El and the Empire State Building, respectively.

[28][26] By the time she moved into her new house facing Central Park, at the corner of 65th Street, Mrs. Astor's husband had died, and she lived with her son and his family.

Spending her last several years suffering from periodic dementia, she died at age 78 on October 30, 1908, and was interred in the Trinity Church Cemetery in upper Manhattan.

The inscription is dated A.D. MCMXIV and the cenotaph is located within the small churchyard cemetery at the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street, in which many prominent early Americans are buried.