The construction of the white marble Stewart palace was the first serious innovation made upon the rich brownstone fronts of Fifth Avenue, the possession of which was a necessary adjunct to social standing in New York before the Civil War. The material, quarried generally in Connecticut, was in such extensive use that it gave a distinctive coloring to New York, its sombreness and uniformity of architecture making most of the residential streets corridors of gloom. For years, as a local authority described it, "our new houses and blocks were all turned out from the same moulds, and apparently congealed from the same coffee-colored liquid." The builders, since the war, have made large inroads with other materials, thus giving more individuality to the finer buildings of later construction. To the eastward, Fourth Avenue is tunnelled for several blocks under Murray Hill, to carry street railways up to the Grand Central Station at Forty-second Street, the open spaces above, giving the tunnel light and air, being surrounded by pleasant little parks, so that the widened street, called Park Avenue, is an attractive residential region, the view being closed to the northward by the louvre domes of the Vanderbilt railway station. Continuing out Fifth Avenue, the "Old Brick Church" of the Presbyterians, built solid and substantial, with a tall spire, stands about on the most elevated portion of Murray Hill, the congregation dating from 1767. A short distance beyond, at Thirty-ninth Street, is the finest club-house in New York, the elaborate brick and brownstone Union League Club, its spacious windows disclosing the luxurious apartments within. Just above is the historic Vanderbilt house, where the old Commodore lived--a wide, brownstone dwelling, having alongside a carriage entrance into a small courtyard. The Vanderbilt fortunes, the greatest accumulated, represent the financially expansive facilities of modern New York as manipulated by corporation management and the Stock Exchange. Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, born on Staten Island in 1794, in 1817, at the age of twenty-three, owned a few small vessels, and estimated his wealth at $9000. He became a steamboat captain, and went into the transportation business between New York and Philadelphia, afterwards broadening his operations, and in 1848 owning most of the profitable steamboat lines leading from New York. When the California emigration fever began, he started ocean steamers in connection with the transit across the Isthmus of Panama. This business grew, and at the height of his steamship career the Commodore owned sixty-six vessels. The finest, named the Vanderbilt, which cost him $800,000, he gave the Government for a war vessel, to chase the rebel privateers. As American vessel-owning became unprofitable, he determined to abandon it and devote himself to railway management, having already bought largely of railway stocks. When he thus changed, he estimated his fortune at $40,000,000.