of
three-quarters of a million dollars. Among the men whose work is
represented in this home of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court
for the City and County of New York are Maitland Armstrong, Karl Bitter,
Charles Henry Niehaus, Charles Albert Lopez, Thomas Shields Clarke,
George Edwin Bissell, Philip Martiny, Robert Reid, Willard L. Metcalf,
Henry Augustus Lukeman, John Donoghue, Henry Kirke Bush Brown, Edward
Clark Potter, Henry Siddons Mowbray, Frederick W. Ruckstuhl, Herbert
Adams, George Willoughby Maynard, Joseph Lauber, Maximilian M.
Schwartzott, and Kenyon Cox.
The old home of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church was in the block
between Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets. Then, on the northeast
corner of the latter street stood one of the last surviving residences
recalling the days when the Square was the possession of Flora McFlimsey
and her kind, the old brown-stone dwelling of Catherine Lorillard Wolfe.
The Wolfe property, offered for sale, was purchased by an official of
the Metropolitan Company, and an exchange was effected by which the
church relinquished its old site and moved to the northern corner. The
present church was designed by Stanford White, who met his death in
1906, the year before the formal dedication. With its grey brick
exterior, showing repeatedly the Maltese Cross, its interior following
the spirit of the Mosque of Santa Sophia in Constantinople, and its
mural paintings and windows, many of them the work of Louis C. Tiffany,
it is one of the most beautiful of all the city's edifices for religious
worship. But to the casual eye it is quite lost on account of its
proximity to its gigantic neighbour.
The traveller approaching Paris can see from miles away, the apex of the
Eiffel Tower outlined against the sky. The eye of one nearing New York,
whether his point of observation be the deck of an incoming steamer, or
a car-chair in a train arriving from the West, is met first by the
cluster of skyscrapers at the southern end of the island, and then by a
shaft vastly more conspicuous by reason of its isolation, the tower of
the Metropolitan Building. Whatever artists may think of it--and there
is division of opinion--that tower is, structurally, one of the wonders
of the world. Rising seven hundred feet above the sidewalk, topping the
Singer Building by ninety feet and being outclimbed only by the
Woolworth Building (seven hundred and ninety-two feet), the tower is
seventy-five
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