FIFTH   AVENUE
 

71
 

From a photograph.
 

Copyright, 1915, by Perry Walton.

METROPOLITAN  MUSEUM  OF  ART.
View southward from 84th Street and Fifth Avenue.
 

Richard M. Hunt. Here was housed, until the building was torn
down, a collection of priceless paintings, masterpieces of ancient and
modern literature, sculpture, missals, bibles, incunabula Americana,
autographs, ceramics, the Drexel musical collection, and other treas¬
ures now in the New York Public Library.

The Temple Beth-El, which stands at the southeast corner of
Fifth Avenue and 76th Street, is a magnificent synagogue, built of
Indiana limestone. It was completed in 1891. The congregation is
a consolidation of the congregations Anshi-Chesed and Adas-Jesurun,
and represents the first German-Jewish congregation in this country,
dating back to 1826.

On the site formerly called Deer Park, in Central Park, near 82nd
Street, is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which, from small be¬
ginnings, has grown until it has become one of the great art museums of
the world. It sprang from a meeting of the art committee of the Union
League Club in 1869, which purchased an art collection and exhibited
it at 681 Fifth Avenue. The committee rented a house at 126 West
14th Street in which it kept the exhibition for a while, but in 1872,
having purchased the antiquities unearthed in Cyprus by General
L. P. di Cesnola, it applied to the Park Commissioners for a site in
Central Park.    Here in 1880 the first wing of the Museum was opened.

Where now are some of the most beautiful homes in the world
about 1836 on the north side of 88th Street near Fifth Avenue, stood
the New York Magdalen Benevolent Society, an institution for the
reformation of fallen women. This Society occupied a plot of ground
containing twelve city lots and an old frame building, which was
 

Temple
Beth-El
 

Metropoli¬
tan Museum
of Art
 

New York
Magdalen
Benevolent
Society