Brooke Astor, “Aristocrat of the People,” as her Times obituary labeled her, died Monday afternoon at the ripe age of 105. She will be missed sorely by a city that loved her, and that she loved back.

Taking a stroll in any of the city’s five boroughs, it is unlikely that one could avoid noticing some park, tenement, library or other institution that Mrs. Astor’s generosity had not touched.

Hopefully a very public, and very ugly, fight will not erupt over Mrs. Astor’s will. Her son, Anthony Marshall, made headlines for allegedly stealing priceless art work from Astor’s apartment and leaving his own mother in a state of egregiously poor care. He was sued by his own son, Philip, who secured affidavits from a host of New York dignitaries (Henry Kissinger, Annette de la Renta, David Rockefeller) to protect his grandmother’s safety. Marshall and his wife, as part of a settlement in which they would not have to admit guilt, agreed to give up their roles as co-executors of Mrs. Astor’s estate.

Everyone who has enjoyed the cultural blessings that New York City has to offer owes a debt of gratitude to Brooke Astor. Perhaps her greatest contribution was not Astor Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Astor Hall at the New York Public Library, or the windows she paid to install at a nursing home on Riverside Drive, but the example she set of private philanthropy for the betterment of her fellow citizens.