32
 

FIFTH    AVENUE
 

Picking

Blackberries

on the

Site of the

Altman

Block
 


 

From an old print.                                                                                              Putnam's Magazine.

COVENTRY WADDELL MANSION.

Northwest corner of 37th Street and Fifth Avenue.    Now the site of the Brick

Presbyterian Church.

which cost about $100,000, was one of the wonders of the City. He
sold it in 1862 to Dr. Gorham D. Abbott, uncle of Dr. Lyman Abbott
of The Outlook, and here Dr. Gorham D. Abbott, who had been princi¬
pal of the Spingler Institute on Union Square, conducted a school
until the site was sold to A. T. Stewart, the famous merchant. Stewart,
as a lad, came to America from Belfast in 1818; began life as a school
teacher; opened a small shop for trimmings; entered the dry-goods
business; and when he died in 1876, left an estate worth $40,000,000.
The estate included the Italian marble palace which he had built at
the corner of 34th Street at a cost of $2,000,000. His widow occupied
it until her death in 1886, after which the Manhattan Club leased the
property. It was later torn down to make room for the building of
the Columbia Trust Company.

As remarkable a transformation as may be found anywhere on
Fifth Avenue is the development of the section in the neighborhood of
34th Street and Fifth Avenue. Within the span of a lifetime it has
changed from a rural district into the most exclusive residential locality
in the City, and, finally, into the notable business section which it now
is. Benson J. Lossing, the historian, writes that in 1845 he and a com¬
panion, while strolling up the country lane then known as the Middle
Road, picked blackberries at what is now the corner of 35th Street
and Madison Avenue—the northeast corner of the Altman block.