Because of the advanced age, 105, to which Brooke Astor lived and because of the legal battle that enveloped her final year of life, the philanthropist may be remembered first by some younger New Yorkers as the doddering subject of a custody battle. But this, the morning after her death, is a moment to look past that to the many ways in which she enriched our city, its people, and its great institutions.

New Yorkers pondered Astor many times while climbing the marble staircases of the New York Public Library at Bryant Park, where her name is etched into the marble on the list of benefactors. Advancing up the staircase, through the main reading room and into the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts, one might request a rare book, and find that it carried the stamp of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Tilden was the name of a Brooklyn high school and of the only man before Al Gore to have won the popular vote and lost an American presidential election. Lenox is a hill and a hospital. But Astor — now there was a name and a family that is identified with the library it supported even when the city and the institution had fallen on hard times.

Astor’s philanthropy went beyond scholarly institutions such as the library. As The New York Sun’s Stephen Miller reported last summer in his three-part series, “The Brooke Astor Story,” she funded settlement houses serving the poor, the Intrepid Museum, Fraunces Tavern, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bronx Zoo, and even the Animal Medical Center, which cares for the pets of the poor and the elderly.

Ahead of her time as a woman who was more than merely a socialite, Astor pursued a career as a philanthropist in ways that offer lessons for today. She gave away all the funds in the Astor Foundation while she was alive, a move associated more with ideologically conservative foundations such as Olin. While the name Brooke Astor connotes old money, the John Jacob Astor whose fortune she inherited through her husband Vincent was an immigrant who came to America from Germany in 1784. His fortune was the new money of its day.

Finally, in an age in which the rich are all too often vilified, Brooke Astor was a reminder of the uses to which a great fortune can be put and of how great wealth need not prevent a person from winning the affection, admiration, and respect of New Yorkers from all backgrounds. It is a great New York story, and a great American story.