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.
CENTRAL PARK.
New York is very proud of its great pleasure-ground, the Central Park, upon which has been lavished all that art and money could accomplish. This Park is a parallelogram in the centre of Manhattan Island, a half-mile wide and two and a half miles long, covering eight hundred and forty-three acres, though nearly one-fourth of this space is occupied by the Croton water reservoirs. The original surface was either marsh or rock, very rough, and with topography generally the reverse of that needed for a park. It took prodigious labor and an enormous outlay to overcome the difficulties, but skillful engineering and landscape gardening have made the most of the unsightly surface, so that it has become one of the handsomest parks in the world, its beauties increasing as the growing trees mature. Entering at the "Scholar's Gate" from Fifth Avenue, the road within the Park leads by a gently winding course past vista views and pretty lakes to the Mall, or general promenade. Here, on pleasant days, thousands gather to listen to the music. To the westward are broad green surfaces giving a tranquil landscape, and looking northward through the avenue of elms upon the Mall, a little gray stone tower called the Observatory closes the view far away over another pretty lake. At the end of the Mall a terrace is crossed bordering this lake, the ground sloping to its edges. Here a fountain plashes on one side, and on the other is the concert ground, overlooked by the Pergola, a shaded Gallery. Across the lake, on the Observatory side, is the Ramble, a rocky, forest-covered slope with paths winding through it, and on the highest point a massive Belvedere. There are a menagerie and an aviary, and the children have playgrounds and varied amusements. Beyond this enchanting region the road winds past statues and ever-changing beauties of garden and landscape, and comes out in a space alongside the smaller reservoir, where stands Cleopatra's Needle, brought from Egypt and set up near the Museum of Art. Then the road passes alongside the larger reservoir, with barely enough room to get through between it and Fifth Avenue, though both are admirably masked. The northern portion of the Park has greater natural attractions and less ornamentation, the land ascending to a fine lookout on the western side, where there is a grand view over the Harlem River, displaying the tall arches of the "High Bridge" bringing the Croton Aqueduct across, and the tower alongside, which makes a high level reservoir. The expanding city, however, is extending its buildings over large surfaces north and west of the Park.
One Hundred and Tenth Street is the northern boundary of Central Park. Upon the western side of the Park, in Manhattan Square, is being gradually constructed the American Museum of Natural History, with elaborate buildings and collections already exceeding $3,000,000 in value. Near the northwestern corner of the Park, extending to One Hundred and Twenty-third Street, is the long and narrow Morningside Park, a high elevation held by massive retaining walls on the hill-slope, and ascended by flights of steps. Morningside Avenue, its western boundary, has at One Hundred and Twelfth Street what will be the largest ecclesiastical edifice in the United States, the new Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, of which the corner-stone was laid in 1892, and building slowly progresses. The splendid St. Luke's Hospital adjoins to the northward, while to the northwest, on an elevated site overlooking the Hudson River, are the fine new buildings of Columbia College in an enclosure of about twenty acres. This great University has buildings and collections valued at $7,000,000, an endowment of $12,000,000, and is attended by about two thousand students. Farther westward, upon the high ground at the edge of the Hudson River, stretches the stately Riverside Park for about three miles, making a magnificent drive, along which many handsome residences are being constructed. Near its northern end is the tomb of General Grant, a white granite mausoleum ninety feet square and surmounted by a cupola, which was finished in 1897 and cost $600,000. The interior arrangement is like Napoleon's tomb in Paris, the body, contained in a red porphyry sarcophagus, being placed in an open crypt below the centre of the dome. Beyond Central Park, the broad public roads known as the Boulevards traverse the island northward, and many elaborate structures are being erected along them.
SPUYTEN DUYVEL AND CROTON.
The Spuyten Duyvel Creek, the strait connecting the Harlem with the Hudson, winds through a deeply-cut gorge around the northern end of Manhattan and makes it an island. Knickerbocker, the veracious historian of early Dutch New York, tells how it got its name. Old Governor Stuyvesant, he says, had a wonderful trumpeter, Anthony von Corlaer, who persisted in swimming across during a violent storm, and lost his life. Thus of it, Knickerbocker writes: "The wind was high, the elements were in an uproar, and no Charon could be found to ferry the adventurous sounder of brass across the water. For a short time he vapored like an impatient ghost upon the brink, and then, bethinking himself of the urgency of his errand (to arouse the people to arms), he took a hearty embrace of his stone bottle, swore most valorously that he would swim across in spite of the devil—en spyt den duyvel—and daringly plunged into the stream. Luckless Anthony! Scarcely had he buffeted half-way over when he was observed to struggle violently, as if battling with the spirit of the waters. Instinctively he put his trumpet to his mouth, and giving a vehement blast, sank forever to the bottom. The clangor of his trumpet, like that of the ivory horn of the renowned Paladin Orlando, when expiring on the glorious field of Roncesvalles, rang far and wide through the country, alarming the neighbors around, who hurried in amazement to the spot. There, an old Dutch burgher, famed for his veracity, and who had been a witness to the fact, related to them the melancholy affair, with the fearful addition (to which I am slow in giving belief) that he saw the Duyvel, in the shape of a huge moss-bunker (a species of inferior fish), seize the sturdy Anthony by the leg and drag him beneath the waves. Certain it is, the place, with the adjoining promontory which projects into the Hudson, has been called Spyt den Duyvel ever since."
