Although the name it now bears and has borne for four or five years is the Columbia Trust Company, the building at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street is likely to be known and referred to as the Knickerbocker Trust for a long time to come.  As such it was the storm centre of the great panic which shook the country in 1907, ruining many, shaking some of America’s supposedly most solid fortunes, and involving a dramatic suicide.  The story of the site goes back almost three-quarters of a century.  There, at the beginning of the Civil War, was the residence of “Dr.”  Samuel P. Townsend.  Originally a contractor, he had “discovered” a sarsaparilla, advertised it on an extensive scale, acquired a fortune and the nickname of “Sarsaparilla” Townsend.  His house, a four-story brown-stone, was one of the wonders of the town.  For some reason he did not live in it long, selling it in 1862 to Dr. Gorham D. Abbott, an uncle of Dr. Lyman Abbott of the “Outlook.”  For a number of years Dr. Abbott, who had been the principal of the Spingler Institute on Union Square, conducted a school there.  Then A.T.  Stewart, the famous merchant, bought the site.  He found brown-stone and left marble.  “Sarsaparilla” Townsend’s pride and folly was tumbled to the ground, carted away, and in its place there went up the Italian palace that is still a familiar memory to most New Yorkers.  It cost two million dollars.  Stewart did not live long to enjoy it.  But after his death in 1876, his widow occupied the palace until her death in 1886, when the property was leased to the Manhattan Club.  There was a story to the effect that during the club’s occupancy it was found necessary to make certain interior alterations.  One of the committee in charge was an Irishman.  He complained that the work was unduly expensive for the reason that “the woodwork was all marble.”

But before Stewart demolished and built, and before “Sarsaparilla” Townsend built what Stewart later demolished, there had been a famous mansion in this neighbourhood.  Thackeray, in one of his letters to the Baxter family, alluded to the long journey he was about to undertake in order to travel from his hotel to a certain famous house up in the country at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street.  That was the Coventry Waddell house, on land where the Brick Presbyterian Church now stands.  Waddell was a close friend of President Jackson, and his fortune sprang from the services he rendered as financial representative of the “Old Hickory” Administration.  In 1845, when he went “into the wilderness” to build, the Avenue, beyond Madison Square, was nothing but a country road lined with farms.  It is told that when he was bargaining for the land, his wife sat under an apple-tree in a neighbouring orchard.  Nine thousand one hundred and fifty dollars he paid for the tract, which ten years later brought eighty thousand dollars, and for part of which the Brick Church paid fifty-eight thousand dollars in 1856.