_Beyond Murray Hill_
Stretches of the Avenue--The Public Library--Temple Emanuel--The Draft
Riots--The Coloured Orphan Asylum--The Willow Tree Inn--Remaining
Residences--Clubs of the Section--As Seen by Arnold Bennett and Henry
James--Three Churches and a Cathedral--The Elgin Botanical Gardens--Old
Land Values.
O beautiful, long, loved Avenue,
So faithless to truth and yet so true.
--_Joaquin Miller._
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 on Lafayette Place, and the Lenox Library at Fifth Avenue and
Seventieth Street. Designed by Carrere and Hastings, the Library was
built by the city at a cost of about nine million dollars. It is three
hundred and ninety feet long and two hundred and seventy feet deep, the
material is largely Vermont marble, and the style that of the modern
renaissance. The lions that guard the main entrance from the Fifth
Avenue side are the work of E.C. Potter. The pediments at the ends of
the front, the one at the north representing History and the one at the
south Art, are by George Grey Barnard. The fountains are by Frederick
MacMonnies. Above the main entrance are six figures by Paul Bartlett, in
order from south to north, Philosophy, Romance, Religion, Poetry, Drama,
and History. Augustus St. Gaudens, who was to have directed the choice
of the sculptors and supervised the work died before the Library was
completed.
Although consideration of the Public Library must necessarily be brief,
a word should be said of the collection of paintings. The paintings
comprise the gifts of three donors: James Lenox, whose collection of
about fifty paintings was presented in 1877; the Robert Stuart
Collection of about two hundred and fifty paintings, bequeathed by Mrs.
Stuart in 1892; and some of John Jacob Astor's pictures, presented by
William Waldorf Astor in 1896. Paintings of importance are, in the main
room, Munkacsy's Blind Milton Dictating "Paradise Lost" to his
Daughters, Sir Henry Raeburn's Portrait of Lady Belhaven, Copley's
Portrait of Lady Frances Wentworth, Turner's Scene on the French Coast,
Sir Joshua Reynolds's Mrs. Billington as Saint Cecilia, Gilbert Stuart's
Washington, Horace Vernet's Siege of Saragossa, Raeburn's Portrait of
Van Brugh Livingston; in the Stuart Room, Boughton's Pilgrims Going to
Church, Schreyer's The Attack, Inness's Hackensack Meadows, Sunset,
Troyon's Cow and Sheep, Detaille's Chasseur of the French Imperial
Guard, Bougereau's The Secret, and Weir's View of the Highlands from
West Point.
[Illustration: "ON THE SITE OF THE OLD CROTON RESERVOIR THE CORNER-STONE
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"]
About 1825 the land on the east side of Fifth Avenue from Forty-second
to Forty-fourth Streets belonged to Isaac Burr, whose estate extended
along the old Middle Road. The present Seymour Building at the
north-east corner of Forty-second Street is on the site formerly
occupied by the home of Levi P. Morton, and before that by the Hamilton
Hotel. Near the adjoining corner to the north is No. 511, the late
residence of Mr. Richard T. Wilson, Jr. That number was once the home of
"Boss" Tweed. Arrested for robbing the city, Tweed asked permission to
return to his house for clothes. While policemen were guarding the Fifth
Avenue entrance he escaped through a rear alley, made his way to his
yacht in the East River, and sailed to Spain. Today unsightly
advertising signs, thorns in the flesh of the Fifth Avenue Association,
disfigure the north-west corner of Forty-second Street. Behind the signs
there is an office building. Until a few years ago the Bristol Hotel
stood here, and back in the days before the Civil War there was a small
tavern on the site, while on the adjoining lot was the garden of
William H. Webb, the ship-builder. Webb's house was at 504 Fifth Avenue,
and 506 was once the home of Russell Sage.
The brown synagogue, Temple Emanuel, at the north-east corner of
Forty-third Street, dates from 1868. The congregation was organized in
1845, first holding services in the Grand Street Court Room, thence
moving in 1850 to a remodelled Unitarian Church in Chrystie Street, and
again, in 1856, to a Baptist Church in Twelfth Street. The present
structure, considered one of the finest examples of Saracenic
architecture in the country, was designed by Leopold Eidlitz, and
completed at a cost of six hundred thousand dollars. The materials are
brown and yellow sandstone, with black and red tiles alternating on the
roof. Within, near the entrance, are memorial tablets to Dr. Leo
Merzbacher, first Rabbi, 1845-56, and to his successors, Dr. Samuel
Adler (father of Felix Adler), 1857-74, and Dr. Gustav Gottheil,
1873-1903. The present Rabbi is the Rev. Joseph Silverman.
Back from the Avenue, on the west side, between Forty-third and
Forty-fourth Streets, there once stood the Coloured Orphan Asylum. It
was a square four-story building, occupying almost the entire block, and
there was a garden in front extending to the road. The Asylum, which was
under the management of the Association for the Benefit of Coloured
Orphans, organized in 1836 by a number of prominent New York women,
received from the city in 1842 a grant of twenty-two lots and erected
the building in which the children were housed and taught trades. In the
summer of 1863 there were between two hundred and two hundred and fifty
children in the institution. Then Congress passed the Conscription Law.
In the evening papers of Saturday, July 11th, the names of those drafted
from New York were announced. Excitement seethed that night and all day
Sunday. Monday the storm broke. The draft offices were surrounded by a
mob, and as the first name was called a stone crashed through a window.
That was the signal. The offices were rushed and the building soon in
flames. The police were routed, and a squad of soldiers sent to their
aid disarmed and badly beaten. Then the mob ranged, pillaging the house
of William Turner on Lexington Avenue, firing the Bull's Head Hotel at
Forty-fourth Street, and the Croton Cottage opposite the Reservoir,
plundering the Provost Marshal's office at 1148 Broadway, and destroying
an arms factory at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-first Street. Then some one
in the mob cried out that the war was being fought on account of the
negroes and the rioters started in the direction of the Asylum. When
they reached the spot they found an empty building, for the alarm had
been given and the children taken to the Police Station and later
conducted under guard to the Almshouse on Blackwell's Island. But the
structure they destroyed, and when they came upon a coloured man in the
neighbourhood they hanged him to the nearest tree or lamp-post.
During the riot the draft-rioters made their headquarters at the Willow
Tree Inn, which stood near the south-east corner of Fifth Avenue and
Forty-fourth Street, and which at one time was run by Tom Hyer, of
prize-ring fame. A photograph shows it as it was in 1880, with the tree
from which it took its name in front, and the Henry W. Tyson Fifth
Avenue Market adjoining it. "Fifth Avenue" quotes from Mr. John T.
Mills, Jr., whose father owned the cottage: "My mother planted the old
willow tree," said Mr. Mills, "and I remember distinctly the Orphan
Asylum fire. The only reason our home was not destroyed was that father
ran the Bull's Head stages which carried people downtown for three
cents, and the ruffians did not care to destroy the means of
transportation." There were many vacant lots in this section of Fifth
Avenue at the time of the Civil War, and a small shanty below the Willow
Cottage was the only building that stood between Madison Avenue and
Fifth Avenue. On the north-west corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth
Street, then considered far north, stood a three-story brick building.
The stockyards were between Fifth Avenue and Fourth Avenue from
Forty-fourth to Forty-sixth Street, and Madison Avenue was not then cut
through. The stockyards were divided into pens of fifty by one hundred
feet, into which the cattle were driven from runs between the yards. On
the east side of Fifth Avenue, just above Forty-second Street, stood
four high brown-stone-front houses, the first to be built in this
neighbourhood. In the rear of these were stables that had entrances on
Fifth Avenue. "Fifth Avenue" points to the Willow Tree Inn as
illustrating the appreciation of Fifth Avenue real estate. "In 1853 this
corner was the extreme south-west angle of the Fair and Lockwood farm,
and was sold for eight thousand five hundred dollars. Here in 1905 a
twelve-story office building was erected, replacing Tyson's meat market
and the old Willow Tree Inn. The corner was then held at two million
dollars. The property was bought in 1909 for one million nine hundred
thousand dollars by the American Real Estate Company."
At No. 7 West Forty-third Street is the home of the Century Association,
at the corresponding number in Forty-fourth Street that of the St.
Nicholas Club, formed of descendants of residents, prior to 1785, of
either the City or State of New York, and facing diagonally at
Forty-fourth Street, are the establishments of Delmonico and Sherry. The
site of the former restaurant was occupied from 1846 to 1865 by the
Washington Hotel, otherwise known as "Allerton's," a low white frame
building surrounded by a plot of grass. The rest of the block was a
drove yard. Thomas Darling bought the entire block in 1836 for
eighty-eight thousand dollars. David Allerton, to whom he leased part of
it, ran the Washington Hotel during the Civil War. When the cattle-yards
were removed to Fortieth Street and Eleventh Avenue the tavern's living
was gone. John H. Sherwood, a prominent builder who contributed much
towards developing upper Fifth Avenue as a residential section, bought
the site and erected the Sherwood House. It was in the basement of the
hotel that the Fifth Avenue Bank first opened for business. An
interesting record of early rental values is found in the original
minute book of the Bank. The Bank's offices in the basement of the
Sherwood House were secured "at a rental of two thousand six hundred
dollars per year, said rental to include the gas used and the heating of
the rooms." There have been but four transfers of the corner upon which
the Bank now stands at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street since Peter
Minuit, in 1626, bought the island from the Indians for a handful of
trinkets.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE PUBLIC LIBRARY. THE LIBRARY, 590 FEET
LONG AND 270 FEET 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]
Despite the invasion of business there are many houses in this stretch
of the Avenue that recall the tradition and flavour of the older New
York. Between Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth, Nos. 555 and 559,
respectively, are the residences of Mrs. James R. Jessup and Mrs. John
H. Hall. At the north-east corner of Forty-seventh Street is the home of
Mrs. Finley J. Shepard, formerly Miss Helen Gould. Between Forty-seventh
and Forty-eighth live Captain W.C. Beach (585), Mrs. James B. Haggin
(587), Mrs. Robert W. Goelet (591), Mrs. Russell Sage (604), Mrs. Ogden
Goelet (608), and Mrs. Daniel Butterfield (616). On the next block,
Charles F. Hoffman (620), and August Hecksher (622); and between
Fifty-first and Fifty-second, William B. Coster (641), William B.O.
Field (645), and Robert Goelet (647). Then, on to the Plaza, comes the
sweep of the houses of the Vanderbilts, and the residence of Lewis
Stuyvesant Chanler (673), Samuel Untermeyer (675), F. Lewisohn (683), H.
McK. Twombly (684), William Rockefeller (689), Mrs. M.H. Dodge (691), W.
Kirkpatrick Brice (693), Mrs. Benjamin B. Brewster (695), Adrian Iselin,
Jr. (711), Mrs. N.W. Aldrich (721), John Markle (723), Mrs. Lewis T.
Hoyt (726), H.E. Huntington (735), Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs (739), Joseph
Guggenheim (741), and William E. Iselin (745).
Of this land the stretch from Forty-fifth Street to Forty-eighth on the
east side of the Avenue was a part of the fifty-five-acre estate bought
by Thomas Buchanan between 1803 and 1807 from the city, which was then
disposing of its common land, for the sum of seven thousand five hundred
and thirty-seven dollars. One hundred and eight years later "Fifth
Avenue" appraised its value at twenty million dollars. For his
country-seat Buchanan purchased a tract of ground along the East River
front between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-seventh Streets. Buchanan died in
1815. A daughter, Almy, married Peter Goelet, and another daughter,
Margaret, married Robert Ratzer Goelet, which accounts for the large
Goelet holdings in this section.
In this stretch of the Avenue and in the adjacent streets is the heart
of the new Clubland. The Century in Forty-third and the St. Nicholas in
Forty-fourth have been mentioned. At No. 10 West Forty-third Street is
the home of the Columbia University Club. In Forty-fourth Street are the
City Club (55 W.), the New York Yacht (37 W.), and the Harvard (27 W.).
Until a few years ago the Yale Club was diagonally across the street
from the Harvard Club, but now the alumni of "Old Eli" have a superb
club-house of their own on Vanderbilt Avenue between Forty-fourth and
Forty-fifth Streets, which they are occupying jointly with the alumni of
Princeton for the duration of the war. Farther up the Avenue, on the
northeast corner of Fifty-first Street, is the Union Club, which moved
there after relinquishing the house it held so long at the corner of
Twenty-first Street. Then, at the north-west corner of Fifty-fourth
Street, is the University Club, to the mind of Mr. Arnold Bennett, the
finest of all the fine buildings that line the Avenue. "The residential
blocks to the north of Fifty-ninth Street," he wrote in the book that on
this side of the North Atlantic was known as "Your United States," "fall
short of their pretensions in beauty and interest. But except for
the miserly splitting, here and there, in the older edifices, of an
inadequate ground floor into a mezzanine and a narrow box, there is
nothing mean in the whole street from the Plaza to Washington Square.
Much mediocre architecture, of course, but the general effect
homogeneous and fine, and, above all, grandly generous.... The single
shops, as well as the general stores and hotels on Fifth Avenue, are
impressive in the lavish spaciousness of their disposition. Neither
stores nor shops could have been conceived, or could be kept, by
merchants without genuine imagination and faith."
Bennett, though not in an unkindly spirit, was looking for aspects, not
to praise, but to abuse. It was a far different neighbourhood forty-five
years ago. Henry James, writing in 1873, in "The Impressions of a
Cousin" (Tales of Three Cities), said: "How can I sketch Fifty-third
Street? How can I even endure Fifty-third Street? When I turn into it
from the Fifth Avenue the vista seems too hideous, the narrow,
impersonal houses with the hard, dry tone of their brown-stone, a
surface as uninteresting as that of sandpaper, their steep, stiff
stoops, their lumpish balustrades, porticos, and cornices. I have yet to
perceive the dignity of Fifty-third Street."
Besides being a stretch of clubs it is a stretch of churches. Shrinking
back from the sidewalk on the east side of the Avenue between
Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Streets is the Church of the Heavenly Rest.
So inconspicuous in appearance is it that once a passer-by commented: "I
can perceive the Heavenly, but where is the Rest?" Two blocks to the
north, at the corner of Forty-eighth, is the Collegiate Church of St.
Nicholas, occupying the block between Fiftieth and Fifty-first is the
Cathedral, and at Fifty-third is Saint Thomas's. Once the tract from
Forty-seventh to Fifty-first Street was occupied by the Elgin Botanical
Gardens. The story of the Gardens, says "Fifth Avenue," "begins in 1793
in the garden of Professor Hamilton near Edinburgh, where Dr. David
Hosack, a young American, who was studying with the professor, was much
mortified by his ignorance of botany, with which subject the other
guests were familiar. Hosack took up the study of botany so diligently
that in 1795 he was made professor of botany at Columbia College, and in
1797 held the chair of Materia Medica. He resigned to take a similar
professorship in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he
remained until 1826. For over twenty years he was one of the leading
physicians of New York, bore a conspicuous part in all movements
connected with art, drama, literature, city or State affairs, and was
frequently mentioned as being, with Clinton and Hobart, 'one of the
tripods upon which the city stood.' He was one of the physicians who
attended Alexander Hamilton after his fatal duel with Burr. While
professor of botany at Columbia he endeavoured to interest the State in
establishing a botanical exhibit for students of medicine, but failing
to accomplish this he acquired from the city, in 1801, the plot
mentioned above, for the purpose of establishing a botanical garden. In
1804 the Elgin Botanical Gardens were opened. By 1806 two thousand
species of plants with one spacious greenhouse and two hot houses,
having a frontage of one hundred and eighty feet, occupied what today is
one of the most valuable real estate sites in New York, the tract being
now valued without buildings at over thirty million dollars. The
financial burden of maintaining the garden was more than the doctor
could carry, and he appealed to the Legislature for support. Finally on
March 12, 1810, a bill was passed authorizing the State, for the purpose
of promoting medical science, to buy the garden. The doctor sold it for
seventy-four thousand two hundred and sixty-eight dollars and
seventy-five cents, which was twenty-eight thousand dollars less than he
had spent on it. The State finally conveyed the grounds in 1814 to
Columbia College, and this property, part of which the College still
holds, has largely contributed to the wealth of the great University."
But to revert to the churches. The Heavenly Rest is noted for its fine
wood carvings and its stained glass windows. In the tower of the
Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas hangs a bell, cast in Amsterdam in
1731, which for years hung in the Middle Dutch Church in Nassau Street.
While the British held New York the bell was taken down and secreted.
When the Middle Dutch Church became the Post Office in 1845 the bell was
removed, first to the Ninth Street Church, then to the Lafayette Place
Church, and later to its present location. The crocketed spire of the
Church of St. Nicholas is two hundred and seventy feet high. Within the
edifice is a tablet to the soldiers and sailors of the Revolution,
placed by the Daughters of the Revolution, and oil portraits of all the
ministers of the church from Dominie Du Bois, who, in 1699, preached in
the old Church in the Fort.
[Illustration: "O BEAUTIFUL, LONG, LOVED AVENUE, SO FAITHLESS TO TRUTH
AND YET SO TRUE"--JOAQUIN MILLER]
Then St. Patrick's Cathedral. It was conceived, in 1850, by Bishop
Hughes of the Diocese of New York, the cornerstone was laid in 1858, and
the Cathedral dedicated in 1879 by Cardinal McClosky. It was designed by
James Renwick, the architect of Grace Church and St. Bartholomew's. The
Cathedral is three hundred and thirty-two feet in length and one hundred
and seventy-four feet in breadth, the spires rise three hundred and
thirty feet above the ground, and the seating capacity of the edifice is
two thousand five hundred. But its full capacity is eighteen thousand,
and it is eleventh in point of size among the cathedrals of the world.
Considering St. Patrick's in its artistic aspect Miss Henderson, in "A
Loiterer in New York," has said: "Renwick considered it his chief work;
and the cathedral holds high rank as an example of the decorated, or
geometric, style of Gothic architecture that prevailed in Europe in the
thirteenth century, and of which the cathedrals of Rheims, Cologne,
and Amiens are typical.... The modern French and Roman windows, which,
to the eye of the later criticism, impair the beauty of the simple
interior, were considered something most desirable in their day, and
their completion was hurried in order that they might be shown at the
Centennial Exhibition, of 1876, where they were a feature much admired.
One of them--the window erected to St. Patrick--has at least an
antiquarian interest. It was given by the architect, and includes, in
the lower section, a picture of Renwick presenting the plans of the
Cathedral to Cardinal McClosky. The rose window is said to be a
fac-simile of the rose window at Rheims, recently destroyed by German
bombs; a _provenance_ that may be the more securely claimed since the
original has been immolated. As a matter of fact, it too bears the
stigma of the Centennial period, of which it is a characteristic
example. The only windows of æsthetic interest in the church are the
recent lights in the ambulatory, made by different firms in competition
for the windows of the Lady Chapel, which is to be treated in the same
rich manner."
Massive and splendidly Gothic is St. Thomas's. The church dates from
1823. In 1867 the present site was secured, and the brown-stone edifice
of the early seventies, designed by Richard Upjohn, was for nearly two
generations the ultra-fashionable Episcopal church of the city. In 1905
it was destroyed by fire, and with it, in the flames, perished its
artistic contents, among them the decorations made by John La Farge and
Augustus Saint Gaudens. For six months the congregation was without a
home. Then a wooden structure was erected and the new church was built
without interfering with the services during the following years.
Designed by Ralph Adams Cram, the present St. Thomas's is of white
limestone from Kentucky. The left entrance, which is surmounted with a
garland of Gothic foliage composed of orange blossoms, is the Bride's
Door. Carved on each side of the niche above the keystone is a
"true-lover's-knot." A cynical observer (Rider's "New York City")
comments: "Few visitors note the sly touch of irony which, by a few
strokes of the chisel, has converted the lover's knot on the northerly
side into an unmistakable dollar sign."
On the west side of the Avenue, running from Fifty-first to
Fifty-second, are the Vanderbilt twin residences, the wonder of the town
of a quarter of a century ago. They were built, in 1882, by the late
William H. Vanderbilt, the southerly for his own use, and the northerly
one for his daughter, Mrs. William D. Sloane. In 1868 the land on which
the brown-stone mansions stand was occupied by one Isaiah Keyser, whose
small three-story frame house was in the middle of a vegetable garden.
That garden supplied the residents along lower Fifth Avenue, and its
owner also dealt in ice and cattle. In the house which Mr. Vanderbilt
erected for himself Henry C. Frick lived for a time. The Vanderbilt
family spent millions of dollars in purchasing property to protect
themselves against business encroachments.
In former days the neighbourhood was given over largely to philanthropic
and religious institutions. The New York Institution for the Instruction
of the Deaf and Dumb stood between Forty-eighth and Fiftieth Streets and
Fourth and Fifth Avenues. That was from 1829 to 1853. The building was
one hundred and ten feet long, sixty feet wide, four stories high, with
a beautiful colonnade fifty feet long in front. The grounds are
described as "beautifully laid out in lawns and gardens, planted with
trees and shrubbery." When the Asylum sold the property in 1853 it moved
to Washington Heights. For many years the National Democratic Club and
the Buckingham Hotel have stood on the land. The site of St. Patrick's,
originally part of the Common Lands of the City, was sold in 1799 for
four hundred and five pounds and an annual quit rent of "four bushels of
good merchantable wheat, or the value thereof in gold or silver coin."
Then it became the property of the Jesuit Fathers, and in 1814 the
Trappist Monks conducted an orphan asylum there. Eventually it passed
into the hands of the trustees of St. Peter's Church on Barclay Street,
and St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mulberry Street, who, in 1842, conveyed
about one hundred feet square on the north-east corner of Fifth Avenue
and Fiftieth Street to the Church of St. John the Evangelist. The ground
now occupied by the Union Club was once part of the site of the Roman
Catholic Orphan Asylum.