Stretches of the Avenue--Fourteenth to Madison Square--From Brevoort to Spingler--The Story of Sir Peter Warren--The First City Hospital--The Paternoster Row of New-York--Former Homes and Birthplaces--Lower Fifth Avenue Residents in the Fifties--Blocks of Departed Glories--The Centre of the Universe--Madison Square in Colonial Days--Franconi's Hippodrome--The Opening of the Fifth Avenue Hotel--A Thanksgiving Day of the Nineties--Monuments of the Square--The Garden, the Presbyterian Church, and the Metropolitan Tower--The Face of the Clock. In 1762, a Brevoort--Elias was his Christian name--sold a part of the family farm to John Smith, a wealthy slave-holder. On the choicest site of the purchase, now the centre of Fourteenth Street just west of Fifth Avenue, Smith built his country residence. After he died his widow continued to occupy the house until 1788, when the executors of Smith's estate, among whom was James Duane, Mayor of the city, sold the property for about four thousand seven hundred dollars to Henry Spingler. Spingler lived in the house until his death in 1813, and used the land, comprising about twenty-two acres, as a market garden farm. Spingler's granddaughter, Mrs. Mary S. Van Beuren, fell heiress to most of the property, and built the Van Beuren brown-stone front house on Fourteenth Street, where she lived for years, and maintained a little garden with flowers and vegetables, a cow and chickens. In the fifty-seven years between the Smith sale and 1845 the value of the estate had increased from four thousand seven hundred dollars to two hundred thousand dollars. Keeping still to the bucolic days of the Avenue, we pass, going from Fifteenth to Eighteenth Street, through what was the farm of Thomas and Edward Burling, relatives of John and James Burling, old-time merchants whose name was given to Burling Slip, down by the East River. Also in the course of these blocks the Avenue crosses land that was the farm of John Cowman until 1836. Between Eighteenth and Twenty-first Streets was part of the farm acquired in 1791 by Isaac Varian, who bought from the heirs of Sir Peter Warren.