To reach the more remote communities of Manhattan Island--Harlem or Manhattanville--one took the steam-cars: either the trains of the Hudson River Railroad in the little old station at Chambers Street and West Broadway, from which they proceeded up to the west side of the island and, as to this day, through a goodly portion of Tenth Avenue, or else the trains of the New York & Harlem, or the New York & New Haven, from their separate terminals back of the City Hall and Canal Street up through Fourth Avenue, the tunnel under Yorkville Hill and thence across the Harlem Plain to the river of the same name. A little later these railroads were to consolidate their terminals, in a huge block-square structure at Madison and Fourth Avenues, Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Streets, the forerunner of the present Madison Square Garden; but the first of the three successive Grand Central Stations was not to come until 1871. Fifth Avenue, too, was just beginning to come into its own. Some of the handsome homes in the lower reaches of that thoroughfare and upon the northern edge of Washington Square which have been suffered to remain until this day had already been built and an exodus had begun to them from the older houses to the south. All of the churches were gone from down town with but a few exceptions, the most conspicuous of which were the two Episcopalian churches in Broadway--Trinity and St. Paul's--the Roman Catholic Church of St. Peter's in Barclay Street, St. George's in Beekman, the North Dutch in William, the Middle Dutch in Nassau and the Brick Presbyterian, also in Beekman Street. This last, in fact, had already been sold for secular purposes and had been abandoned. The congregation was building a new house up in the fields at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street, a step which was regarded by its older members as extremely radical and precarious, to put it mildly. The ancient home of the Middle Dutch Reformed had also gone for secular purposes. In it was housed the New York Post Office, already a brisk place, which soon was to outgrow its overcrowded quarters and to expand into its ugly citadel at the apex of the City Hall Park. The two great fires--the one in 1833 and the other in 1845--had removed from the lower portions of the city many of their more ancient and unsightly structures. The rebuilding which had followed them gave to the growing town much larger structures of a finer and more dignified architecture. Six and seven story buildings were quite common. This represented the practical limitations of a generation which knew not elevators, although the new Fifth Avenue Hotel which already was being planned upon the site of the old Hippodrome, at Broadway and Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets, was soon to have the first of these contraptions that the world had ever seen.