City or State of New York, and facing diagonally at
Forty-fourth Street, are the establishments of Delmonico and Sherry. The
site of the former restaurant was occupied from 1846 to 1865 by the
Washington Hotel, otherwise known as "Allerton's," a low white frame
building surrounded by a plot of grass. The rest of the block was a
drove yard. Thomas Darling bought the entire block in 1836 for
eighty-eight thousand dollars. David Allerton, to whom he leased part of
it, ran the Washington Hotel during the Civil War. When the cattle-yards
were removed to Fortieth Street and Eleventh Avenue the tavern's living
was gone. John H. Sherwood, a prominent builder who contributed much
towards developing upper Fifth Avenue as a residential section, bought
the site and erected the Sherwood House. It was in the basement of the
hotel that the Fifth Avenue Bank first opened for business. An
interesting record of early rental values is found in the original
minute book of the Bank. The Bank's offices in the basement of the
Sherwood House were secured "at a rental of two thousand six hundred
dollars per year, said rental to include the gas used and the heating of
the rooms." There have been but four transfers of the corner upon which
the Bank now stands at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street since Peter
Minuit, in 1626, bought the island from the Indians for a handful of
trinkets.

[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE PUBLIC LIBRARY. THE LIBRARY, 590 FEET
LONG AND 270 FEET DEEP, WAS BUILT BY THE CITY AT A COST OF ABOUT NINE
MILLION DOLLARS. THE MATERIAL IS LARGELY VERMONT MARBLE, AND THE STYLE
THAT OF THE MODERN RENAISSANCE]

Despite the invasion of business there are many houses in this stretch
of the Avenue that recall the tradition and flavour of the older New
York. Between Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth, Nos. 555 and 559,
respectively, are the residences of Mrs. James R. Jessup and Mrs. John
H. Hall. At the north-east corner of Forty-seventh Street is the home of
Mrs. Finley J. Shepard, formerly Miss Helen Gould. Between Forty-seventh
and Forty-eighth live Captain W.C. Beach (585), Mrs. James B. Haggin
(587), Mrs. Robert W. Goelet (591), Mrs. Russell Sage (604), Mrs. Ogden
Goelet (608), and Mrs. Daniel Butterfield (616). On the next block,
Charles F. Hoffman (620), and August Hecksher (622); and between
Fifty-first and Fifty-second, William B. Coster (641), William B.O.
Field (645), and Robert Goelet (647). Then, on to the Plaza, comes the
s