A vacant lot yawns here again, with a flare of theatrical posters on its fence, and beyond this, on the corner, is a huge hotel, the most agreeable of the three that tower above the fine square at the gate of the Park. With our silly American weakness for something foreign, this square is called the Plaza; I believe it is not at all like a Spanish plaza, but the name is its least offense. An irregular space in the centre is planted with trees, in whose shade the broken-kneed hacks of the public carriages droop their unhappy-heads, without the spirit to bite the flies that trouble their dreams; and below this you get a glimpse of the conventional cross-street terminating the Plaza. At the eastern corner of the avenue is a costly new apartment house of a modified gothic style, and then you come to the second of the great hotels which give the Plaza such character as it has. It is of a light-colored stone, and it towers far above the first, which is of brick. It is thirteen stories high, and it stops abruptly in a flat roof. On the next corner north is another hotel, which rises six or seven stories higher yet, and terminates in a sort of mansard, topping a romanesque cliff of yellow brick and red sandstone. I seek a term for the architectural order, but it may not be the right one. There is no term for the disorder of what succeeds. From the summit of this enormous acclivity there is a precipitous fall of twelve stories to the roof of the next edifice, which is a grocery; and then to the florist’s and photographer’s next is another descent of three stories; on the corner is a drinking-saloon, one story in height, with a brick front and a wooden side. I will not ask you to go farther with me; the avenue continues northward and southward in a delirium of lines and colors, a savage anarchy of shapes, which I should think the general experience of the Fair City at Chicago would now render perceptible even to the dullest sense. VI. There are other points on Fifth Avenue nearly as bad as this, but not quite, and there are long stretches of it, which, if dull, have at least a handsome uniformity. I have said already that it is still, upon the whole, the best of the avenues, in the sense of being the abode of the best--that is the richest--people; we Americans habitually use best in this sense. Madison Avenue stretches northwest farther than the eye can reach, an interminable perspective of brownstone dwellings, as yet little invaded by business. Lexington Avenue is of the same character, but of a humbler sort. On Second Avenue, down town, there are large old mansions of the time when Fifth Avenue was still the home of the parvenus; and at different points on such other avenues as are spared by the elevated roads there are blocks of decent and comfortable dwellings; but for the most part they are wholly given up to shops. Of course, these reiterate with the insane wastefulness of our system the same business, the same enterprise, a thousand times.