Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 14.djvu/588

NEW YORK. County Court House, a marble building in Corinthian style, and almost opposite, at the corner of Chambers and Centre Streets, is the new and palatial Hall of Records. The Criminal Courts Building, a superb structure on Centre Street, is connected with the Tombs Prison by a covered bridge. The Tombs, a nickname of the city prison, suggested by its original gloomy architecture in Egyptian style, rebuilt in 1898 and much enlarged, is now, architecturally, one of the finest of modern prisons.

Broadway, from Chambers Street to Tenth, is largely given up to wholesale trade, one of the most prominent features along the route, however, being the massive building of the New York Life Insurance Company. West of Broadway, below Canal Street, lies the great wholesale dry goods centre of the United States, and farther uptown are the wholesale dealers in straw goods, millinery, feathers, and ready-made clothing. Where Broadway changes its direction at Tenth Street, the character of business changes.

Here is Grace Church, one of the most attractive ecclesiastical edifices in New York. It is an ornate Gothic structure, built of white limestone. There are other buildings connected with the church, the whole forming a striking group. In this neighborhood are the Astor Library, long the most important library in the city, the Mercantile Library, and at Fourth Avenue and Eighth Street, (q.v.), a brownstone building erected in 1857. Union Square, once the limit of the retail business of the city, and until 1860 surrounded by private houses, is now wholly given up to business. At the lower end of Fifth Avenue, in Washington Square, stands the Washington Arch, erected by popular subscription at a cost of $128,000, and completed in 1892. It is 70 feet high. On the east side of Washington Square is the large building of New York University, housing the schools of Law and Pedagogy and the Graduate School, and various business establishments. It occupies the site of the celebrated Gothic collegiate structure pulled down in 1894-95. In the district north by east of Union Square lies Gramercy Park, and, at Second Avenue, Stuyvesant Square, on which stands Saint George's Church, with its lofty spires. At Eleventh Street and Second Avenue is the old home of the New York Historical Society, built in 1857. The new building of the society, at Seventy-sixth Street and Central Park West, will cost $1,000,000. The new Lying-in Hospital at Second Avenue and East Seventeenth Street is one of the handsomest structures of its class in the city. Bellevue Hospital, founded in 1826, occupies two blocks extending from Twenty-sixth to Twenty-eighth street on First Avenue to the East River; the City Morgue is situated in the grounds at the foot of Twenty-sixth Street. Broadway from Ninth Street to Thirty-fifth Street, Sixth Avenue, and Fourteenth and Twenty-third streets contain most of the great retail shops of the metropolis. When the Herald Building, copied after a Venetian palace, was built at Thirty-fifth Street and Broadway in 1894, there were but few large retail stores in the neighborhood. To-day the vicinity of Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street bids fair to become the centre of retail trade. One of the largest department stores in the country occupies the block on the west side of Broadway between

Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth streets. Along the line of Broadway, from Twenty-third to Fifty-ninth street, are situated a number of important hotels, apartment houses, and the leading theatres of the city. At the angle of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, upon a triangle, 87 by 190 feet, stands a twenty-story wedge-shaped building known as the ‘Flatiron,’ visible for miles, and presenting a striking architectural contrast with the Madison Square Garden. The graceful tower of the latter, copied from the Giralda of Seville, is surmounted by a gilded statue of Diana. On the east side of Madison Square is the handsome office building of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Another beautiful and imposing marble building is the Court House at Twenty-fifth Street and Madison Avenue, used by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court.

Saint Patrick's Cathedral (Roman Catholic) on Fifth Avenue, between Fiftieth and Fifty-first streets, ranks among the most imposing Gothic edifices in this country. It is built of white marble in the form of a Latin cross, and its two beautiful spires rise to a height of 332 feet. It cost $2,000,000. The corner-stone was laid in 1858, and the church was dedicated on May 25, 1879. At Forty-second Street and Fourth Avenue is the Grand Central Station. Above Fifty-ninth Street, on Broadway, apartment hotels are the great feature of this thoroughfare. The first hotels of this character, in which the tenants furnish their own apartments, but take their meals in a common dining-room, appeared in 1888. To-day there are more than one hundred apartment hotels in Manhattan, each housing from 40 to 200 families, and many more are being built. One of the largest groups of apartment houses is that known as the Navarro, at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, built about sixteen years ago at a cost of $5,000,000. Another noted building of this type is the Dakota, at West Seventy-second Street, facing Central Park. One of the largest of the new apartment hotels is the Ansonia, at Seventy-fourth Street and Broadway, which covers a plot of land 200 × 400 feet, and is 16 stories high.

At 116th Street are the buildings of Columbia University, including a magnificent library, costing about $1,000,000. Near by are Saint Luke's Hospital and the beginnings of the great Protestant Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. The building stands upon a rocky bluff overlooking the Harlem plains on the cast. Various estimates of from thirty to fifty years as the time required to finish the building have been made, and the cost may be anywhere from ten to twenty million dollars. In vastness of dimensions and beauty of design it will take its place among the great cathedrals of the world. On Amsterdam Avenue, between 109th and 110th streets, the new building of the National Academy of Design is approaching completion, the well-known Venetian-Gothic building, formerly occupied by the Academy, at the corner of Twenty-third Street and Fourth Avenue, having been demolished in 1901. Facing Central Park on the west side of Seventy-seventh Street is the Museum of Natural History, one immense wing of which, the southern façade, is already complete. On the east side of the park, and within it, facing on Fifth Avenue at Eighty-second Street, is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Lenox Library occupies a massive limestone building fronting