Fifth Avenue (New York, N.Y.); Streets -- New York (State) -- New York
In this stretch of the Avenue and in the adjacent streets is the heart
of the new Clubland. The Century in Forty-third and the St. Nicholas in
Forty-fourth have been mentioned. At No. 10 West Forty-third Street is
the home of the Columbia University Club. In Forty-fourth Street are the
City Club (55 W.), the New York Yacht (37 W.), and the Harvard (27 W.).
Until a few years ago the Yale Club was diagonally across the street
from the Harvard Club, but now the alumni of "Old Eli" have a superb
club-house of their own on Vanderbilt Avenue between Forty-fourth and
Forty-fifth Streets, which they are occupying jointly with the alumni of
Princeton for the duration of the war. Farther up the Avenue, on the
northeast corner of Fifty-first Street, is the Union Club, which moved
there after relinquishing the house it held so long at the corner of
Twenty-first Street. Then, at the north-west corner of Fifty-fourth
Street, is the University Club, to the mind of Mr. Arnold Bennett, the
finest of all the fine buildings that line the Avenue. "The residential
blocks to the north of Fifty-ninth Street," he wrote in the book that on
this side of the North Atlantic was known as "Your United States," "fall
short of their pretensions in beauty and interest. But except for
the miserly splitting, here and there, in the older edifices, of an
inadequate ground floor into a mezzanine and a narrow box, there is
nothing mean in the whole street from the Plaza to Washington Square.
Much mediocre architecture, of course, but the general effect
homogeneous and fine, and, above all, grandly generous.... The single
shops, as well as the general stores and hotels on Fifth Avenue, are
impressive in the lavish spaciousness of their disposition. Neither
stores nor shops could have been conceived, or could be kept, by
merchants without genuine imagination and faith."
Bennett, though not in an unkindly spirit, was looking for aspects, not
to praise, but to abuse. It was a far different neighbourhood forty-five
years ago. Henry James, writing in 1873, in "The Impressions of a
Cousin" (Tales of Three Cities), said: "How can I sketch Fifty-third
Street? How can I even endure Fifty-third Street? When I turn into it
from the Fifth Avenue the vista seems too hideous, the narrow,
impersonal houses with the hard, dry tone of their brown-stone, a
surface as uninteresting as that of sandpaper, their steep, stiff
stoops, their lumpish balustrades, porticos, and cornices. I have yet to
perceive the dignity of Fifty-third Street."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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