Returning to Broadway, for a mile or more it, with the adjacent streets, is the great retail shopping district. Here on the pleasant afternoons are throngs of shoppers. A short distance above, Broadway bends to the left, displaying Grace Church, with its rich marble façade, beautiful spire, and adjoining rectory, chantry and church house, an unique ecclesiastical group, dating from 1846, when it was far "up town," but now almost covered-in by the huge surrounding stores. Fourteenth Street crosses beyond, and here is Union Square, a pretty oval park of about four acres, adorned by an ornamental fountain and statues of Washington, Lafayette and Lincoln. Large buildings and stores surround the square, the chief being Tiffany's noted jewelry establishment. Fourteenth Street is a wide avenue, with an extensive shipping trade. To the eastward of Broadway is the Academy of Music and the noted Tammany Hall. This is the seat of the "Tammany Society," established in 1789 for benevolent purposes, but now controlled by the Democratic political organization ruling New York. The Hall is a capacious brick structure with stone facings, surmounted by a statue of its presiding genius, the old chief and warrior of the Lenni Lenapes, St. Tammany, who with outstretched hand beneficently looks down upon the street. The sturdy Indian, however, was probably more used to the mild and just methods of William Penn and his Quakers on the Delaware than to the political schemes on the Hudson, of which fate seems to have made him a patron saint.
MADISON SQUARE.
Broadway reaches Madison Square at Twenty-third Street, another wide highway crossing the city, and also intersects Fifth Avenue, which is the western side of the Square. This junction has a park of about six acres, surrounded by large hotels and noted buildings, and alongside the triangular intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue is a handsome granite monument to General Worth, a hero of the War with Mexico. The plateau on which it stands is usually availed of as the site for the official reviewing stage for processions. This Square is the great centre of elaborate civic and military displays, and has, with its surroundings and the light stone of the adjacent buildings, an air that is decidedly Parisian, it occupying much the same position for New York as the Place de la Concorde in Paris, or Trafalgar Square in London. In Madison Square are statues of Admiral Farragut (the finest statue in New York), William H. Seward, President Arthur and Roscoe Conkling. At the northwest corner of the Square was for many years Delmonico's famous restaurant, since moved farther up town. Its owner, after feeding wealthy New Yorkers on the choicest viands for several decades, finally lost his mind, and in a fit of aberration wandered over into the wilderness in New Jersey, and becoming lost in the woods, actually died of starvation. The new Appellate Court of New York is on the eastern side of the Square; at the northeast corner is the Madison Square Garden, and at the southeast corner the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, where the great clerical censor of New York, Rev. Dr. Parkhurst, occupies the pulpit. Madison Square may be regarded as the social centre of modern New York. Far to the northward Fifth Avenue stretches, with its rows of palatial brownstone residences, and towards the north-northwest Broadway extends for two miles to Central Park, passing many hotels, theatres, and the tall "French flats" that have been devised for residences in the crowded city where the land surface is so scarce. It also passes, at the intersection of Sixth Avenue, the Greeley and Herald Squares, with statues of Horace Greeley and William E. Dodge, and the New York Herald Building. A short distance beyond is the Metropolitan Opera House, the finest theatre in the city, rebuilt after a fire in 1893. Broadway at Fifty-ninth Street reaches the southwest corner of Central Park and intersects Eighth Avenue, and here is the Columbus Monument, a tall shaft surmounted by a marble statue, erected in 1892. Broadway then becomes the magnificent "Grand Broadway Boulevard," with rows of trees, prolonged far northward.
FIFTH AVENUE.
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.
THE VANDERBILTS.
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.