52
 

FIFTH   AVENUE
 

From Valentine's Manual.                                                  Collection of New York Historical Society.

THE ELGIN BOTANIC GARDENS.
Between 50th and 51st Streets, and Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 1825.
 

Land

given to

Columbia

College
 

Collegiate

Church

of St.

Nicholas
 

from the City, in 1801, the plot mentioned above, for the purpose of
establishing a botanical garden. In 1804 the Elgin Botanical Gardens
were opened. By 1806 two thousand species of plants with one
spacious green-house and two hot-houses, having a frontage of one
hundred and eighty feet, occupied what to-day is one of the most
valuable real estate sites in New York, the tract being now valued
without buildings at over $30,000,000.

The financial burden of maintaining the garden was more than
the doctor could carry, and he appealed to the Legislature for sup¬
port. Finally on March 12, 1810, a bill was passed authorizing the
State, for the purpose of promoting medical science, to buy the
garden. The doctor sold it for $74,268.75, which was $28,000 less
than he had spent on it. The State finally conveyed the grounds
in 1814 to Columbia College, and this property, part of which the
College still holds, has largely contributed to the wealth of this great
University.

The Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, a Dutch Reformed Church,
dedicated in 1872, is located at the northwest corner of 48th Street,
on part of the Elgin Garden site. In the tower hangs a bell, cast in
Amsterdam in 1731, which for years hung in the Middle Dutch Church
on Nassau Street, where the Mutual Life Building is now situated.
This bell was taken down and secreted while the British held New
York. In the Consistory of the Church of St. Nicholas are portraits
in oil of all its ministers from Dominie Du Bois, who in 1699 preached
in the old Church in the Fort, to the present.

In the centre of the block between 51st and 52nd Streets, on the
west side of Fifth Avenue, there stood back from the street in 1868 a