The construction of the white marble Stewart palace was the first
serious innovation made upon the rich brownstone fronts of Fifth
Avenue, the possession of which was a necessary adjunct to social
standing in New York before the Civil War. The material, quarried
generally in Connecticut, was in such extensive use that it gave a
distinctive coloring to New York, its sombreness and uniformity of
architecture making most of the residential streets corridors of
gloom. For years, as a local authority described it, "our new houses
and blocks were all turned out from the same moulds, and apparently
congealed from the same coffee-colored liquid." The builders, since
the war, have made large inroads with other materials, thus giving
more individuality to the finer buildings of later construction. To
the eastward, Fourth Avenue is tunnelled for several blocks under
Murray Hill, to carry street railways up to the Grand Central Station
at Forty-second Street, the open spaces above, giving the tunnel light
and air, being surrounded by pleasant little parks, so that the
widened street, called Park Avenue, is an attractive residential
region, the view being closed to the northward by the louvre domes of
the Vanderbilt railway station.
Continuing out Fifth Avenue, the "Old Brick Church" of the
Presbyterians, built solid and substantial, with a tall spire, stands
about on the most elevated portion of Murray Hill, the congregation
dating from 1767. A short distance beyond, at Thirty-ninth Street, is
the finest club-house in New York, the elaborate brick and brownstone
Union League Club, its spacious windows disclosing the luxurious
apartments within. Just above is the historic Vanderbilt house, where
the old Commodore lived--a wide, brownstone dwelling, having alongside
a carriage entrance into a small courtyard. The Vanderbilt fortunes,
the greatest accumulated, represent the financially expansive
facilities of modern New York as manipulated by corporation
management and the Stock Exchange. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt,
born on Staten Island in 1794, in 1817, at the age of twenty-three,
owned a few small vessels, and estimated his wealth at $9000. He
became a steamboat captain, and went into the transportation business
between New York and Philadelphia, afterwards broadening his
operations, and in 1848 owning most of the profitable steamboat lines
leading from New York. When the California emigration fever began, he
started ocean steamers in connection with the transit across the
Isthmus of Panama. This business grew, and at the height of his
steamship career the Commodore owned sixty-six vessels. The finest,
named the Vanderbilt, which cost him $800,000, he gave the Government
for a war vessel, to chase the rebel privateers. As American
vessel-owning became unprofitable, he determined to abandon it and
devote himself to railway management, having already bought largely of
railway stocks. When he thus changed, he estimated his fortune at
$40,000,000. He got control of various railroads leading east, north
and west from New York, buying the shares at low prices, his excellent
methods improving their earning powers, so that their value greatly
enhanced. The greatest of these corporations was the New York Central
and Hudson River Railroad. When the Commodore died his estate was
estimated at $75,000,000, left almost wholly to his son William H.
Vanderbilt. When the latter died it had reached $200,000,000,
bequeathed chiefly to his two eldest sons, Cornelius, who died in
1899, and William K. Vanderbilt. The family are now housed in a row of
palaces farther out the avenue near Central Park, and there are
fabulous estimates of their colossal fortunes, which are the greatest
in America, and probably in the world.
Upon the west side of Fifth Avenue the New York Public Library is
being erected on the site of the old Croton Reservoir, which occupied
the summit of Murray Hill, and behind it is the pretty little Bryant
Park, extending to Sixth Avenue. This Library comes from the
consolidation of the Astor and Lenox Libraries, augmented by the
Samuel J. Tilden Trust Fund, amounting to about $2,500,000. North of
this, Forty-second Street crosses the city, having the Grand Central
Station of the Vanderbilt lines opposite Fourth Avenue, the only
railway station in New York, though other roads are expecting to come
in by tunnels under the rivers. At Forty-third Street and Fifth Avenue
is the finest American synagogue, the Jewish Temple Emanu-El, a
magnificent specimen of Saracenic architecture, the interior being
rich in Oriental decoration. Creeping plants tastefully overrun the
lower portions of its two great towers. There are numerous fine
churches on this portion of the avenue, two of which are rather more
famous than the others. When the old Dutch Governor Peter Minuit
bought Manhattan Island from the Indians, he founded an orthodox Dutch
church in 1628. This church is now a costly brownstone structure in
Decorated Gothic at the corner of Forty-eighth Street, having a
crocketed spire two hundred and seventy feet high. Its inscription
tells us it is the "Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of the
City of New York, organized under Peter Minuit, Director General of
the New Netherlands, in 1628, chartered by William, King of England,
1696." The present church was built in 1872. Occupying the entire
block at Fiftieth Street is the magnificent white marble Roman
Catholic Cathedral of St. Patrick, in Decorated Gothic, with two
spires rising three hundred and thirty-two feet. This noble church
much resembles the great Cathedral at Cologne, particularly in the
interior. Behind it, fronting on Madison Avenue, is the Archbishop's
white marble residence, and adjacent is the old building of Columbia
College, the original King's College of New York, founded in 1754 by a
fund started from the proceeds of various lotteries, which then raised
$17,215. It now has new buildings elsewhere.
In the neighborhood of these churches there must not be overlooked, in
this part of Fifth Avenue, the residence of Helen Gould, a
square-built house with an elaborate portico, at the corner of
Fifty-seventh Street. This was originally the home of one of the most
extraordinary men ever developed in New York--Jay Gould. He was an
orphan boy in Northeastern Pennsylvania, who became a clerk in a
country store, a surveyor and map-maker, and finally was employed in a
tannery, and to sell its leather first took him to New York. Finally
he removed there, and soon became a leading Wall Street stock
operator. Nobody ever made such daring ventures; he became the "great
bear" on the market, wrecking, pulling down, ruining; controlling
newspapers, courts, legislatures, and being even accused of trying to
bribe a President. Then, as he acquired wealth, he became an extensive
investor in railways and telegraphs, and died, leaving a fortune
estimated at $80,000,000. He is buried in a magnificent mausoleum, a
miniature of the Pantheon, in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the northern
suburbs, and his daughter Helen is trying, by her beneficent
charities, to make the best use she can of the share of the money she
inherited. Westward from Fifty-first Street are the famous Vanderbilt
palaces where most of the sons and daughters of William H. Vanderbilt
reside, five grand residences which cost $15,000,000 to build and
furnish. Standing among them is the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church,
said to be the largest and wealthiest in the world of this
denomination, where the late pastor, Dr. John Hall, is described as
preaching to $250,000,000 every Sunday. This is the most splendid
portion of Fifth Avenue, with grand residences all about, and as
Central Park is approached, there are also enormous apartment-houses
and huge hotels. The avenue reaches the Park at Fifty-ninth Street,
and for two miles its grand buildings face that attractive
pleasure-ground. At Seventieth Street is the Lenox Library, the
benefaction of James Lenox, and at Eighty-second Street the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, containing some of the finest collections
in the world, and patterned largely after the British Museum. Its
treasures of art and science, antiquities and museums, are valued at
$9,000,000, and it has an elaborate building fronting on Fifth Avenue,
within the Park.