With these things clearly understood, the search for a new site was begun. Various ones were considered, but were finally rejected. For a time the firm considered buying the famous old Gilsey House and the property immediately adjoining it. Another site which appealed to it even more was the former site of the Broadway Tabernacle on the east side of Broadway, just north of Thirty-fourth Street--the site of the present Marbridge Building. The commanding prescience of this corner forced itself upon them. Sixth Avenue, an artery street north and south, threaded by electric surface-cars and the elevated railroad--the McAdoo Tubes had not then come into even a paper being--was crossed at acute angles by an even more important street--New York's incomparable Broadway--and at right angles by Thirty-fourth Street, which even then was giving promise of its coming importance. The original planners of the uptown city of New York made many serious mistakes in their far-seeing scheme. But they made no mistake when they took each half mile or so and made one of their cross streets into a thoroughfare as bold and as wide as one of their north and south avenues. Thirty-fourth was one of the streets picked out for such importance. And from the beginning it realized the judgment of its planners. The completion of the huge Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1897 (the earlier or Waldorf side in Thirty-third Street had been finished in 1893) had fixed the importance of the street. Thirteen years later the opening of the Pennsylvania Station was to confirm it--for all time. In 1900 the vast plan of the Pennsylvania Railroad for the invasion of Manhattan was as yet unknown. Even in the main offices of that railroad, in Broad Street Station, Philadelphia, it still was most inchoate and fragmentary. In the language of the moment, Macy's was "acting on its own." The store was using its own powers of foreseeing--and using them very well indeed. But the site on the east side of Herald Square was not to be. In free titles it was not nearly large enough. But the west side of the square! There was a possibility. If the new store could be builded there it not only could possess an actual Broadway frontage but it would be set so far back from the elevated railroad as not to be bothered by its noise or smoke, even in the slightest degree. As a matter of fact the last already was disappearing. The electric third-rail system was being installed everywhere upon the Manhattan system, and the pertinacious, puffy little locomotives, which so long had been a feature of New York town, were doomed to an early disappearance.