n some places the high
banks of earth on either side of the street were washed down by heavy
rains and deposited on the sidewalks.

"Oil lamps were in general use as street lights, and the light was
easily blown out by the wind. The lamplighter was usually a tall man, a
character, and his position was considered an important one. Fifth
Avenue north of Fifty-ninth Street remained undeveloped for years, and
it was not until sometime in the seventies that my father and I finished
grading upper Fifth Avenue. Sixty years ago on both sides were stone
walls where there were deep depressions. There was no traffic except
drovers coming down to market with cattle. There were but two main
thoroughfares, Boston Post Road on the east side, and Bloomingdale Road
on the west side. From the Boston Post Road long lanes led to the
residences of gentlemen who had country-seats on the East River, and
similar lanes led from the old Bloomingdale Road to the country-seats on
the Hudson River. The sites of the Plaza, the Savoy, and the Netherland
Hotels were rocky knolls. A brook which came down Fifty-ninth Street
formed several shallow pools which remained for a number of years after
the Civil War."

Whether or not Saint Gaudens was right in his contention that the proper
place for his equestrian statue of General Sherman was on the Riverside
Drive by Grant's Tomb, without that gilded bronze figure of heroic size
and the Winged Victory leading before, the Plaza would not be quite the
Plaza. Obscured as it is in these days by the vast scaffolding, there is
no true son of Manhattan who passes the corner on his way up the Avenue,
or enters Central Park, who does not turn to look at the chief ornament
of the broad square. The statue was made several years after Sherman's
death, and the sculptor laboured on it for six years, from the time when
he began the work in Paris, to its final unveiling, on Memorial Day,
1903. Of the statue and its surroundings as he saw them on the occasion
of one of his later visits to the city of his birth and boyhood, Henry
James wrote:

"The best thing in the picture, obviously, is Saint Gaudens's great
group, splendid in its golden elegance and doing more for the scene (by
thus giving the beholder a point of such dignity for his orientation)
than all its other elements together. Strange and seductive for any
lover of the reasons of things this inordinate value, on the spot, of
dauntless refinement of the Sherman im