58
 

FIFTH   AVENUE
 

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From a photograph.                                                                                      Collection of The Tribune.

EASTER SUNDAY PARADE PASSING ST. THOMAS' EPISCOPAL CHURCH.

Northwest corner Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street.    Showing the results of a heavy

snowstorm, April 2, 1915.

Roman      North of the Cathedral, between 51st  and 52nd Streets, on the
Catholic east side of Fifth Avenue, stood the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum,

Orphan which was organized in 1817 as the Roman Catholic Benevolent
Asylum Society, and first established at Prince and Mulberry Streets. The
number of inmates, only thirty at first, so increased that a new
building was taken on Prince Street, which later had to be enlarged.
Finally the property on Fifth Avenue was occupied in 1852. The
first building had accommodations for five hundred boys, and a wing
built in 1893, as a trade school, accommodated two hundred more.
The girls' wing, completed in 1890, held eight hundred. There was
every facility for religious, moral and social training. The asylum
is now located at Sedgwick Avenue and Kingsbridge Road. At the
northeast corner of 51st Street since 1903 has stood the Union Club,
on land once part of the Orphan Asylum site.
St. Thomas'      St. Thomas' Church, at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and

Church 53rd Street, one of the most beautiful examples of Gothic architecture
in this country, was organized in 1823. The first church stood at
Broadway and Houston Street, then a rural community. Later, the
need of a building farther up town was felt, and in 1870 an imposing
structure of brownstone was built, the work of Richard Upjohn,
who regarded it as one of his masterpieces.    It was decorated by