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Fifth Avenue

Chapter 5 No.5

Word Count: 4936    |    Released on: 30/11/2017

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s and Birthplaces-Lower Fifth Avenue Residents in the Fifties-Blocks of Departed Glories-The Centre of the Universe-Madison Square in Colonial Days-Franconi's Hippodrome-The Op

death in 1813, and used the land, comprising about twenty-two acres, as a market garden farm. Spingler's granddaughter, Mrs. Mary S. Van Beuren, fell heiress to most of the property, and built the Van Beuren brown-stone front house on Fourteenth Street, where she lived for years, and maintained a little garden with flowers and vegetables, a cow and chickens. In the fifty-seven years between the Smith sale and 1845 the value of the estate had increased from four thousand seven hundred dollars to two hundred thousand dollar

rs, and as captain of the "Grafton," had had a share in the seizure of the rock of Gibraltar by the British. But New York was his first official post, and here he had been sent at the orders of the home government, to keep an eye on events, and to sound the loyalty of the American colonies. The little island above the great bay and between the two broad rivers won his heart from the first, and after every new adventure he returned to it, until, in 1747, he was summoned to London, to enter Parliament and to be made Admiral of the Red Squadron. The affection for the town seems to have been rec

his father-in-law's firm, "Messieurs Stephen De Lancey and Company," and had pocketed the proceeds of the sale. His "French and Spanish swag," is the way Thomas A. Janvier expressed it. Of the house in Greenwich Village on land that is bounded by the present Charles, Perry, Bleecker, and Tenth Streets, Janvier wrote: "The house stood about three hundred yards back from the river, on ground which fell away in a gentle slope towards t

Colonel Skinner. New York's affection and esteem for Sir Peter Warren extended to his daughters and through them to their husbands. The old name of Christopher Street was Skinner Road. There was a Fitzroy Road that ran northward from Fourteenth Street. Then, still existing, is Abingdon Square, and Abingdon Road, better known as "Love Lane," was somewhere in the neighbourhood of the present Twenty-first Street. It is to the past rather than the present that the student of the Avenue turns in contemplating the stretch between Fourteenth and Twenty-second Streets. Here and there an historical point may be indicated. On Sixteenth Street, a few yards to the west, is the New Yor

etch was sometimes called the Paternoster Row of New York on account of the number of publishing houses that lined it. Also it was long the home of many of the churches that were erected in the middle of the last century, among them the South Dutch Reformed Church, bui

H. Wolfe, James McBride, Charles M. Parker, L. M. Hoffman, August Belmont, Benjamin Aymer, Henry C. Winthrop, Eugene Schiff, Captain Lorillard Spencer, Moses Taylor, John C. Coster, Henry A. Coster, Sidney Mason, Marshall O. Roberts, Robert L. Cutting, Gordon W. Burnham, Robert C. Townsend, George Opdyke, Robert L. Stuart, whose magnificent art collection was given to the Lenox Library, and James Lenox, the founder

southwest corner of Eighteenth Street, the Arcadian, at No. 146, between Nineteenth and Twentieth Streets, the Manhattan, occupying the Charles C. Parker house at the southwest corner of Fifteenth Street, the New York, which, occupying another corner at the same street, until 1874,

kes the eye. The Parisian, sipping an apéritif at the corner table of the Café de la Paix, believes himself to be occupying the exact centre of the universe. The Manhattanite knows him to be wrong by a matter of three

me vested in John Horn the second. In the middle of the present roadway west of the Flatiron Building the Horn farmhouse, occupied by John the Second's daughter and son-in-law, Christopher Mildenberger, stood when the Avenue was cut through to Twenty-third Street in 1837. It was allowed to remain there two years more, when it was removed to the famous site at the northwest corner of Twenty-third Street and became the Madison Cottage. The old chroniclers tell of the joyous spirit and flavour of that roadhouse, a favourite rend

cumference was the Hippodrome, of brick sides, two stories high, with an oval ring in the centre two hundred feet wide by three hundred feet long, seating six thousand people, and having standing room for about half as many more. It was a bold venture, perhaps too bold for its time. When the novelty had worn off the profits began to dwindle and then ceased entirely. Amos F. Eno, a New Englander who had prospered exceedingly in New York, bought the property and planned to erect a hotel that was to surpass anything that t

E TOWER IS, STRUCTURALLY, ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD. EXACTLY HALFWAY B

w-fever epidemics. But in 1797 a new Potter's Field was opened in Washington Square. According to the plans of the Commissioners' Map of 1811, there was to be no Fifth Avenue between Twenty-third Street and Thirty-fourth Street. The Avenue was to end temporarily at the former point, and resume its journey eleven blocks farther north. As early as 1785 a powder magazine stood within the present domains of the Square. A United States Arsenal, erected in 1808, was near the spot of the Farragut statue. In 1823

. Jerome, and his elder brother, Addison G. Jerome, who, with William R. Travers, were social leaders and prominent Wall Street brokers; James Stokes, who, in 1851, built at No. 37 Madison Square, East, the first residence on Madison Square, and whose wife was a daughter of Anson G. Phelps

Street and Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Draped down to the wheels with bunting of dark blue or of orange and black the tally-hos drew up before the portico and were soon topped with eager, ardent youth. As they were whirled away up the Avenue there broke out upon the autumn air the sharp "Brek-a Coex-Coex-Coex" of Yale, or the sky-rocket of Princeton. The return was marked by high elation or deep depression according as the Fates had decided on the chalk-lined turf. For the collection of sundry wagers the victors hurried into the near-by Hoffman House, where the presiding genius and stakeholder, Billy Edwards,

as the beautiful structure not made permanent? The Worth Monument, in the centre of the triangular piece of ground bounded by Fifth Avenue, Broadway, Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Streets, dates from 1857. By order of the Common Council the plot was set apart for the erection of the shaft in December, 1854. Major-General William J. Worth, of Mexican War fame, died at San Antonio, Texas, June 7, 1849. The monument was dedicated with a parade and a review November 25, 1857, and the General's remains interred under the south side. In bands around th

son Square, the Farragut statue is his. Unveiled in 1881, executed in Paris when the sculptor was thirty years of age, and exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1880, the Farragut is, in the opinion of Miss Henderson, the base upon which St. Gaudens's great reputation rests. "And while," she writes, "in New York its merits are often balanced with those of the Sherman equestrian group, at the entrance to Central Park; the Peter Cooper, in Cooper Square; and the relief of Dr. Bellows, in the All-Souls' Church-all later works-it has never had to yield precedence to any, but holds its own by force of its splendid vigour and youthful plasticity. It has the essential characteristics of the portrait, but so combined with the attitude of the artist that the figure stands as much more than a portrai

of State, the work of Randolph Rogers. The effigy of Roscoe Conkling, by J. Q. A. Ward, is at the southeast corner. Cold and proud is the stone as the man was cold, and proud, and biting. What chance had haranguing abuse against

ly work of the former inspired by Houdon's Diana of the Louvre. To the more frivolous, the sportingly inclined, the seekers after gross pleasures, the Garden has meant the Arion Ball, or the French Students Ball, the Horse Show, Dog Show, Cat Show, Poultry Show, Automobile Show, Sportsman's Show, the Cake-Walk, the Six-Day Bicycle Race, or events of the prize-ring from the days of Sullivan and Mitchell to those of Willard and Moran; Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show, or the circus, the Greatest Show on Earth, with its houri

it was completed in 1900, at a cost of three-quarters of a million dollars. Among the men whose work is represented in this home of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court for the City and County of New York are Maitland Armstrong, Karl Bitter, Charles Henry Niehaus, Charles Albert Lopez, Thomas Shields

e Wolfe property, offered for sale, was purchased by an official of the Metropolitan Company, and an exchange was effected by which the church relinquished its old site and moved to the northern corner. The present church was designed by Stanford White, who met his death in 1906, the year before the formal dedication. With its grey brick exterior, showing repe

hatever artists may think of it-and there is division of opinion-that tower is, structurally, one of the wonders of the world. Rising seven hundred feet above the sidewalk, topping the Singer Building by ninety feet and being outclimbed only by the Woolworth Building (seven hundred and ninety-two feet), the tower is seventy-five feet by eighty-five at its base, and carries the building to its fifty-second story. Exactly half-way between sidewalk and p

rince Michael, heir to the throne of the Electorate of Valleluna, in O. Henry's "The Caliph, Cupid, and the Clock," to pessimistic utterance. "Clocks," he said, "are shackles on the feet of mankind. I have observed you looking persistently at that clock. Its face is that of a tyr

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