| At the northeast corner of the Avenue and Tenth Street is the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, built in 1840, and consecrated November 5, 1841. It belongs to a part of the Avenue, from the Square to Twelfth Street, which has changed little since 1845. |
32 |
| Madison Square. Yesterday it was the home of the Flora McFlimsies of the William Allen Butler poem "Nothing to Wear." Today, in the eyes of the Manhattanite, it is the centre of the Universe. |
68 |
| "The Tower of the Metropolitan Building. Whatever artists may think of it the tower is, structurally, one of the wonders of the world. Exactly halfway between sidewalk and point of spire is the great clock with the immense dials." |
86 |
| In the bright sunlight the Avenue glitters with the pavillions of patriotism. Old Glory may be counted by the tens of thousands; England's Union Jack, and the Tricolour of France by the thousands. To forestall the Kaiser the Avenue is "coming across". |
112 |
| Where the Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street cross stands the building popularly known as the Knickerbocker Trust Company. Here, in the middle of the last century, "Sarsaparilla" Townsend built in brown-stone, and A. T. Stewart later built in white marble. |
136 |
| "At the northwest corner of Fifty-fourth Street is the University Club, to the mind of Arnold Bennett ('Your United States'), the finest of all the fine structures that line the Avenue". |
172 |
| "The site of the old Lenox Library is now occupied by the house of Mr. Henry C. Frick, one of the great show residences of the Avenue and the City. A broad garden separates the house, which is eighteenth century English, from the sidewalk". |
218 |
| The terrace of the Public Library. Today the spot is the scene of the activities of those engaged in the work of speeding America's Answer. Once it was far uptown, and on the eastern side of the Avenue were the residences known as "Spanish Row," or "The House of Mansions". |
248 |
| Commerce, with giant stride, is marching up the stately Avenue. The story of a business house that began in the neighbourhood of Cherry Hill, migrated to Grand Street, thence to Broadway and Union Square, and again to the slope of Murray Hill, is, in epitome, the story of the city itself. |
260 |
| "On the site of the old Croton Reservoir the cornerstone of the Public Library was laid November 10, 1902, and the building opened to the public May 23, 1911. To it were carried the treasures of the Astor Library and the Lenox Library." |
268 |
| Entrance to the Public Library. The Library, 590 feet long and 270 deep, was built by the City at a cost of about nine million dollars. The material is largely Vermont marble, and the style that of the modern renaissance. |
274 |
| "O beautiful, long, loved Avenue, So faithless to truth and yet so true."—Joaquin Miller |
280 |
| South of where "St. Gaudens's hero, gaunt and grim, rides on with Victory leading him," may be seen the Fountain of Abundance, and, in the background, the new Plaza Hotel. |
290 |
| The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on the site of what was once the Deer Park, had its origin in a meeting of the Art Committee of the Union League Club in November, 1869. |
304 |
FIFTH AVENUE
CHAPTER I
The Shadow of the Knickerbockers
The Shadow of the Knickerbockers—An Old-time Map—The Beginnings of the Avenue—Watering Place Life—The Beach at Rockaway—Coney Island—Newspapers in the Thirties—Early Day Marriages—The Knickerbocker Sabbath—Home Customs—Restaurants and Hotels—The Leather-heads—Conditions of Travel—Stage-coaches and Steamers—The Clipper Ships—When Dickens First Came.
Boughton, had you bid me chant
Hymns to Peter Stuyvesant.
Had you bid me sing of Wouter.
(He! the Onion-head! the Doubter!)
But to rhyme of this one-mocker,
Who shall rhyme to Knickerbocker?
—Austin Dobson.
Before the writer, as he begins the pleasant task, is an old half-illegible map, or rather, fragment of a map. Near-by are three or four dull prints. They are of a hundred years ago, or thereabouts, and tell of a New York when President Monroe was in the White House, and Governor De Witt Clinton in the State Capitol, at Albany, and Mayor Colden in the City Hall. To pore over them is to achieve a certain contentment of the soul. Probably it held itself to be turbulent in its day—that old New York. Without doubt it had its squabbles, its turmoils, its excitements. We smile at the old town—its limitations, its inconveniences, its naïvetés. But perhaps, in these years of storm, and stress, and heartache, we envy more than a little. It is not merely the architectural story that the old maps, prints, diaries tell; in them we can find an age that is gone, catch fleeting glimpses of people long since dust to dust, look at past manners, fashions, pleasures and contrast them with our own.
But to begin with the old map. The lettering beneath conveys the information that it was prepared for the City in 1819-1820 by John Randel, Jr., and that it shows the farms superimposed upon the Commissioner's map of
