Although he lived in New York City for much of his adult career, Ryan was perhaps the greatest benefactor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Richmond in the decades before the Great Depression.

In addition to paying for schools, hospitals and other charitable works, Ryan's donations paid for the construction of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Richmond, Virginia.

Despite a myth promulgated by Cleveland Amory regarding his background, Ryan was neither orphaned nor penniless as a youth, nor did his ancestors flee the Great Famine of Ireland as did many who worked on or rode his streetcars.

[citation needed] Aged 17, three years after the war ended, Ryan fled the lack of economic opportunity in post-war Virginia and moved to the nearest big city, Baltimore, Maryland, with $100 in his pocket.

By 1872, Barry helped Ryan secure a brokerage assistant position on Wall Street where he would be tutored by William Collins Whitney.

Metropolitan continually acquired additional lines so that by 1900 it controlled 3,000 cars and 300 miles of track, the majority of New York's streetcar operations.

In 1905, amid public outcry, Ryan purchased the $400-million-strong Equitable Life Assurance Society, a major factor in the insurance industry.

Although Ryan strove to make Equitable more responsive to its policy holders, public reaction to his purchase was overwhelmingly negative.

As her husband's wealth grew exponentially, Ida Barry Ryan began making large benefactions to Catholic charitable organizations in New York, Virginia, and across the country.

The Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, whose cornerstone was laid by the apostolic delegate on June 4, 1903, was dedicated by the same nuncio on November 29, 1906, and remains one of the metropolitan area's architectural landmarks.

Pope Pius X recognized the couple's generosity by naming him to the papal nobility and giving Ida Ryan the cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice for her work in the Diocese.

However, Mrs. Ryan refused to allow any funds to be used for "colored work" (including schools and hospitals for Virginia's freed blacks, despite diocesan missionary priorities of the time).

Ryan financed and selected Charles Hoffbauer to create a series of paintings, "The Four Seasons of the Confederacy", commissioned for a major gallery in what is now the Virginia Historical Society.

During the three decades before her death, Ida Barry Ryan funded the construction of the Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as well as the Good Samaritan Hospital.

Re-establishing his roots in his native state of Virginia, he had since 1901 maintained "Oak Ridge" in Nelson County, formerly the estate of tobacco trader William Rives and later of former Confederate and U.S.

[7] Ryan also became a Virginia delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1912, which selected fellow Virginian Woodrow Wilson as the party's presidential candidate.

Although a place had been reserved for Ida Barry Ryan in the crypt of Richmond's Sacred Heart Cathedral, she was ultimately interred in the cemetery at St. Andrews-on-Hudson Seminary in Hyde Park, New York (now The Culinary Institute of America).