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JULY 13, 1912.
RECENT TRADE EXPANSION IN FIFTH AVENUE
Old-Time Fashionable Residences in the Fifties Are Giving Way Rapidly
To Stores.—Comer Lots Have Advanced to Half a Million Each.
JN 1900 it was predicted that ten years
later the "social center" of Manhattan
would be at Fifth avenue and Fifty-ninth
street. This conclusion was reached by
a process of reasoning based on the past
shifting of the high grade residential dis¬
tricts.
The customary northward advance of
a block a year had been maintained by
the social center with fair precision be¬
tween 1890 and 1900, though in the latter
years of that decade it was a little faster.
Between 1900 and 1902 the movement was
again about normal. But between 1902
and 1905 the yearly rate was three blocks,
the center of the Circle ibeing found at
Fifth avenue and Fifty-eighth street in
1905. Between 1905 and 1907 the center
moved at the rate of a block and a half a
year. In 1907 it reached Sixty-second
street. In 1910 It showed no appreciable
northward progress but had moved slight¬
ly east toward Madison avenue, at Sixty-
second street. At the taking of the last
"social census," in December, 1911, the
center had shifted again a half block
further north.
Here, then, are two important facts.
The center of the circle, which was in
1900 booked to be at Fifth avenue and
a period of fifty-four years, or since 1860,
when it finally abandoned Broadway for
Fifth g.venue, at Washington Square.
Even In this city of rapid changes in
the utility of land the swift encroachment
of trade upon our imost exclusive resi¬
dence areas has nowhere been more
startling than on the last stretch of mid¬
dle Fifth avenue from which the social
circle has lately shifted its center Not
much more than a decade ago the fash¬
ionable colony, then centered about St.
Patrick's Cathedral, was startled by the
announcement that a big hotel was about
to be erected on a corner facing the Van¬
derbilt houses at Fifty-first and Fifty-
seoond streets. To-day these houses are
practically hemmed in by trade, and busi¬
ness is inching close on the Cornelius
Vanderbilt mansion, facinig the Plaza.
It is interesting here by way of em¬
phasizing not only the radical changes
that have transformed the n-ortherly half
mile of middle Fifth avenue but the er¬
roneous calculations made by some of
our shrewdest millionaire owners, to re¬
call one or two epochal events affecting
Fifth avenue real estate.
Not much more than a generation ago,
or in 1879, William H. Vanderbilt selected
move uptown he presumably discounted
the most extravagant estimates of his
time as to the likelihood of -being dis¬
turbed by trade.
And yet it was only as recently as in
1904 that the big house at Fifty-eighth
street was built. It was fashioned after
the Chateau Du Bois, near Paris. It was
for its time one of tlie most expensive
houses in America and is said to have
cost about $4,000,000. The efforts of the
best American artists were supplemented
in its decoration ;by the work of such
celebrated foreigners as Toudouze, Heb¬
ron, Alare, and Cuel. To-day art shops
and high grade specialty houses are set¬
tled on nearby corners, and the history
of the lower Vanderbilt colony is being
repeated at the Plaza.
The decade between 1900 and 1910
brought about a radical change on the
avenue between Thirty-fourth and Forty-
second streets. It was in the early part
of the last decade that the lower portion
of middle Fifth avenue saw its greatest
changes. The Pennsylvania Railroad's
terminal and tunnel plans, the removal of
Macy's from Fourteenth street to Herald
Square and of Altman's from Sixth ave¬
nue to Fifth avenue and Thirty-fourth
THE BLOCK BETWEEN 52D AND 53D STREETS, EACH SIDE OF LOOKING SOUTH FROM 48TH STREET ON STH AVENUE,
FIFTH AVENUE. The Eight-Story Building in the Foreground Is the New Home of W, &
Here Three Mercantile Buildings Have Gone Up on Land from Which J. Sloane, at th^ Southwest Corner of Forty-seventh Street.
the Wealthy Owners Recently Lifted the Restrictions Against Business,
The Former Gould House Is Opposite.
Fifty-ninth street ten years later, had as
early as 1907 reached Madison avenue and
-Sixty-second street. It had, in other
words, -arj^ived at Sixty-second street some
six years ahead of scheatile time. Since
that time the northward movement has
â– been checked, partly because of the fact
that the wealthy are -more than ever
migrating to country estates and fine
suburban homes, and are adopting apart-.
ment house life, and partly -hecause sev¬
eral sites about Lenox Hill have recently
become available for high class residential
improvement.
It is interesting to trace the close re¬
lationship between this accelerated north¬
easterly movement of the social circle in
the last decade and the changes that have
transformed middle Fifth avenue from a
notable residence avenue to the most
wonderful retail thoroughfare in the
world. The swerving of the center of the
social circle from Fifth avenue in 1906
was an extremely significant fact. For
it had moved steadily along that line for
the site on the west side of Fifth ave¬
nue from Fifty-first street to Fifty-sec¬
ond street on which now stand the Van¬
derbilt houses. The Stewart miansion
which up to about 1900 stood on the cor¬
ner of Fifth avenue and Thirty-fourth
street, then ranked among our finest
residences and -was one of the show
places of the city. In the early eighties
the line of residences along Fifth avenue,
north of Union -Square, was hardly
broken by trade except at Twenty-third
street, where business was flourishing,
and at Forty-second street, where it was
spreading because of the influence of the
Grand Central Station. But the wealth¬
iest families were moving north. As has
been said, William H. Vanderbilt had se¬
lected a site half a mile north of Forty-
second street. The clubs and the hotels
were also drifting north.
In 1893 the Waldorf replaced the old
Astor home at Thirty-third street to
Thirty-fourth street. And when the
elder Cornelius Vanderbilt decided to
street were leading events. Other re¬
movals to this section followed rapidly.
By 1908 the transformation was practic¬
ally complete. On Fifth avenue from
Thirty-fourth to Forty-eighth streets
hardly half a dozen dwellings still serve
the purpose for which they were designed.
The ultimate retreat of the private house
north of Forty-eighth street before the
big business structure was foreshadowed
ten years ago. The Roman Catholic Or¬
phan Asylum property on the east side
of the avenue, from Fifty-first to Fifty-
second street, was sold in 1899. Two years
later it cost the Vanderbilts nearly $1.-
000,000 to prevent, by purchase of the site,
the construction of a skyscraper hotel on
the southeast corner of Fifty-second
street.
This plot was shortly afterwards im¬
proved with three dwellings, the Morton
F. Plant house on the corner and two
houses just north for members of the
Vanderbilt family, adjoining the newly
erected Union Club. This was only nine