Fifth Avenue | Page 2

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 1811. Through the centre of the map there is a
line indicating Fifth Avenue north to Thirteenth Street. Here and there
is a spot apparently intended to represent a farmhouse, but that is all;
for in 1820, though Greenwich Village and Chelsea were, the city
proper was far to the south. Some of the names on the old map are
familiar and some are not.
Just above the bending lane that ran along the north side of Washington
Square, then the Potter's Field, may be read "Trustees of Sailor's Snug
Harbor." The land thus marked extends from what is now Waverly
Place to