Fifth Avenue, one hundred feet wide, is probably the New York street
that is most talked about, for they say the main object of working so
hard to get rich in the metropolis is to be able to live in a fine
mansion on Fifth Avenue. This great highway extends northward almost
in the centre of Manhattan Island, but it has an humble beginning,
starting from the original "Potter's Field," where for many years the
outcast and the unknown were buried and over a hundred thousand
corpses are believed to have been interred. When the city spread
beyond this cemetery it was decided to make the place a park, and thus
was formed Washington Square on Fourth Street, a short distance west
of Broadway, an enclosure of about nine acres. From this Square Fifth
Avenue is laid in a straight line six miles northward, to the Harlem
River. The fine Washington Centennial Memorial Arch spans the avenue
at the southern end, near the Square, marking the Centenary of
Washington's inauguration as President. In the lower portions the
famous avenue has been largely invaded by business establishments, but
above, it is the finest residential street in the world, there being
four or five miles of architectural magnificence, in which for two
miles it borders Central Park. The street displays the best dwelling
and church architecture, the progress northward into the newer
portion showing how the styles have changed. All railways have been
carefully excluded from this street. At the southern end the older
houses are generally of brick, gradually developing into the use of
brownstone facings, and then into almost uniform rows of elaborate
brownstone buildings, with imposing porticos reached by high and broad
flights of steps. The rich yet gloomy brown is somewhat monotonous,
but as Central Park is approached this is broken, as all styles of
designs and materials are used. Fifth Avenue has the great "Methodist
Book Concern" at Twentieth Street, and in this neighborhood are also
several of the leading book houses. The wealthy and exclusive Union
Club is at Twenty-first Street, with the Lotus Club in a more modest
house adjacent.
Northward from Madison Square the great street stretches up the
aristocratic grade of Murray Hill, with its rows of stately buildings.
Parallel and a short distance eastward is Madison Avenue, also a
street of fashionable residence, and second only to Fifth Avenue in
grandeur. At Twenty-ninth Street is the plain and substantial granite
Dutch Reformed Church, and to the eastward is an odd-looking little
church that has attained a wide reputation. It is a picturesque
aggregation of low brick buildings, set back in a small enclosure
between Fifth and Madison Avenues, and looking like a quaint mediæval
structure. Some years ago a pompous rector, when asked to read the
last prayers over the dead body of an actor, sent the sorrowing
friends to this church, saying he could not thus pray for the ungodly,
but they might be willing to do it at the little church around the
corner. The public quickly caught on, through newspaper aid, and the
result was that this attractive Church of the Transfiguration
performed the last rites in presence of an overflowing congregation,
and its official title has since been overshadowed by the popular one
of "the Little Church Around the Corner." It is much attended by the
theatrical fraternity, and contains a handsome memorial window to
Edwin Booth.
Mounting the gentle grade of Murray Hill, we come to Thirty-fourth
Street, the locality typifying the two greatest fortunes amassed in
America before the advent of the Vanderbilts. The whole block between
Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets is occupied by the towering
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, built of brick and sandstone in German
Renaissance, and occupying the land originally the home of the Astors,
while across Thirty-fourth Street is the white marble Stewart palace.
The ancestor of the Astor family, John Jacob Astor, accumulated the
largest fortune known in this country before the Civil War, his
estates representing the early growth of New York, and the wealth
coming from the advancing value of land as the city expanded. He was a
poor German peasant-boy who came from the village of Waldorf, near
Heidelberg, to London, and worked there prior to 1783, making musical
instruments for his brother. In that year, at the age of about twenty,
he sailed for America with $500 worth of instruments, meeting a
furrier on the ship, who suggested that he trade the instruments for
American furs. This he did in New York, and returning to London, sold
the furs at a large profit. Coming back to New York, he established a
fur-trade with England, and built ships for his business. He
prospered, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century was worth
$250,000. Then he began buying land and houses in New York, built many
buildings, and was so shrewd in real-estate investments that they
often increased a hundredfold. He was liberal and charitable, and
dying in 1848, his estate, then the largest in the country, was
estimated at $25,000,000. His chief public benefaction was the Astor
Library, which his son, William B. Astor, also aided, so that besides
the buildings it has an endowment of about $1,800,000. The great Astor
estates, now represented by the fourth generation, are estimated at
over $200,000,000.
The splendid palace at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and
Thirty-fourth Street was built by Alexander T. Stewart when at the
height of his fame as the leading New York merchant. Intended to
eclipse anything then known in New York, he expended $3,000,000 upon
the building and its decoration, so that this house outshone all other
New York residences until the Vanderbilt palaces were erected farther
out Fifth Avenue. Its latest occupant has been the Manhattan Club.
Stewart's fortune was accumulated through the facilities at New York
for successful trading, though much of his wealth was afterwards
invested in large buildings in profitable business localities, and
notably in great hotels. Stewart, like Astor, began his career with
almost nothing, but at a later period. He was born at Belfast,
Ireland, in 1802, studied at Trinity College, Dublin, but before
taking his degree migrated to New York as a teacher in 1818. He got
into the dry-goods trade in a small way near the City Hall Park, and
his business grew until he acquired all the adjacent buildings, and
put up the store at Chambers Street, and afterwards the retail store
farther up Broadway. Enlarging in every direction, his business became
the greatest in the country, with branches in the leading cities. He
was an extensive importer, and owned various factories making the
fabrics he sold. His business methods were profitable but unpopular,
involving the remorseless crushing of rivals, so that he had few
friends and many enemies. Yet he was charitable, sending a shipload of
provisions to relieve the Irish famine in 1846, and he made large
public gifts to aid suffering. When he died he was building on Fourth
Avenue an enormous structure intended as a "Home for Working Girls,"
on which $1,400,000 were expended. It was opened soon after his
death, but with such stringent regulations that a rebellion soon arose
among the intended beneficiaries, and it had to be closed. There was a
shrewd suspicion that the difficulty came by design, for the building
was soon reopened as a hotel. Stewart had scarcely moved into his
marble palace when he died, his body being put temporarily into a
vault in the churchyard of old "St. Mark's Church in the Bowerie,"
awaiting removal to the magnificent mausoleum preparing for it at
Garden City, Long Island. Then came the horrible news that the corpse
had been stolen to avenge business tyranny. The childless widow lived
in gloomy grandeur in the palace until her death, rarely seeing
visitors, and having watchmen pacing the sidewalk at all hours.
Stewart left no direct descendants, and his great business has gone,
like his estate, to strangers.