t except for
the miserly splitting, here and there, in the older edifices, of an
inadequate ground floor into a mezzanine and a narrow box, there is
nothing mean in the whole street from the Plaza to Washington Square.
Much mediocre architecture, of course, but the general effect
homogeneous and fine, and, above all, grandly generous.... The single
shops, as well as the general stores and hotels on Fifth Avenue, are
impressive in the lavish spaciousness of their disposition. Neither
stores nor shops could have been conceived, or could be kept, by
merchants without genuine imagination and faith."

Bennett, though not in an unkindly spirit, was looking for aspects, not
to praise, but to abuse. It was a far different neighbourhood forty-five
years ago. Henry James, writing in 1873, in "The Impressions of a
Cousin" (Tales of Three Cities), said: "How can I sketch Fifty-third
Street? How can I even endure Fifty-third Street? When I turn into it
from the Fifth Avenue the vista seems too hideous, the narrow,
impersonal houses with the hard, dry tone of their brown-stone, a
surface as uninteresting as that of sandpaper, their steep, stiff
stoops, their lumpish balustrades, porticos, and cornices. I have yet to
perceive the dignity of Fifty-third Street."

Besides being a stretch of clubs it is a stretch of churches. Shrinking
back from the sidewalk on the east side of the Avenue between
Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Streets is the Church of the Heavenly Rest.
So inconspicuous in appearance is it that once a passer-by commented: "I
can perceive the Heavenly, but where is the Rest?" Two blocks to the
north, at the corner of Forty-eighth, is the Collegiate Church of St.
Nicholas, occupying the block between Fiftieth and Fifty-first is the
Cathedral, and at Fifty-third is Saint Thomas's. Once the tract from
Forty-seventh to Fifty-first Street was occupied by the Elgin Botanical
Gardens. The story of the Gardens, says "Fifth Avenue," "begins in 1793
in the garden of Professor Hamilton near Edinburgh, where Dr. David
Hosack, a young American, who was studying with the professor, was much
mortified by his ignorance of botany, with which subject the other
guests were familiar. Hosack took up the study of botany so diligently
that in 1795 he was made professor of botany at Columbia College, and in
1797 held the chair of Materia Medica. He resigned to take a similar
professorship in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he
remain