of the Yuletide season the visit to the revolving
show in the window of old Macy's at the corner of Fourteenth Street and
Sixth Avenue. For a decade or so Sixth Avenue was the shop paradise.
Above Macy's were O'Neill's, and Simpson, Crawford and Simpson's, and
Altman's, and Ehrich's, besides the countless emporiums of lesser
magnitude. Macy's moved north to Greeley Square, and Gimbel's came to
take its place on an adjoining corner, but the movement in bulk turned
eastward at Twenty-third Street, lining the south side of that
thoroughfare as far as Fifth Avenue. Some of the pioneers had ventured
farther to the north, but Twenty-third Street was the centre as the
nineteenth century came to a close.

[Illustration: COMMERCE, WITH GIANT STRIDE, IS MARCHING UP THE STATELY
AVENUE. THE STORY OF A BUSINESS HOUSE THAT BEGAN IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF
CHERRY HILL, MIGRATED TO GRAND STREET, THENCE TO BROADWAY AND UNION
SQUARE, AND AGAIN TO THE SLOPE OF MURRAY HILL, IS, IN EPITOME, THE STORY
OF THE CITY ITSELF]

A writer in the "Century Magazine," describing "Shopping in New York" in
1901, said that even then New York was known as a City of Shops just as
Brooklyn was known as a City of Churches, and went on: "The district
begins at Eighth Street, where the wholesale establishments end, and
follows Broadway as far as Thirty-fourth Street. At Fourteenth Street
and again at Twenty-third Street it diverges to the west until it
strikes Sixth Avenue, including that part of Sixth Avenue only which
lies between the two thoroughfares. From Broadway at Twenty-third
Street, it makes another departure, running up Fifth Avenue and ending
at Forty-seventh Street." When the department stores lined the south
side of Twenty-third Street a number of the great book-shops were on the
north side, near the old Fifth Avenue Hotel. Among such was the
long-established Putnam, and adjoining that shop was the shop of the
Duttons. Of the publishing houses that carried in their traditions back
to Knickerbocker days Harper's was in the home of its beginnings and to
which it still clings to the present time, the rambling structure hard
by Franklin Square, while on Fifth Avenue, below Twenty-third, were the
houses of D. Appleton and Company, Charles Scribner's Sons, and Dodd,
Mead and Company, the last-named being the pioneer in the movement
northward when it relinquished its corner at the Avenue and Twenty-first
Street to try the slope of Murray Hill at Thirty-fi