the War of the Revolution.  The first Wendell and the first Astor, his partner, married sisters, and they bequeathed to their descendants the sound principle of buying land and buying beyond.  The John Gottlieb Wendell of recent memory, a great-great-grandson of the founder of the family fortune, was distinguished for his eccentricities.  Although he collected his own rents, would never give more than three-year leases, and could not be persuaded to part with a foot of his land holdings, he was characterized as “one of the squarest landlords in the city.”  In the old-fashioned brick and brown-stone house he lived in extreme simplicity.  From the top of a passing bus may be seen the garden beyond the high board fence.  Many covetous eyes of commerce have regarded it; many tempting offers have been made.  But according to popular tradition Mr. Wendell clung to the garden because his sisters desired it as a place in which to exercise their dogs.  Now, after the death of John Gottlieb, the three elderly sisters still live in the house, in a state of the same old-time plainness.  They, with a married sister, are the sole heirs of the eighty million dollars in New York real estate left by their brother.  The house, a few years ago, was assessed at five thousand dollars, the site is valued at two million.

Directly across the Avenue from the Wendell house is the Union League Club, on land that formerly was occupied by Dickel’s Riding Academy, fifty years ago the fashionable equestrian school of New York.  The early story of the organization will be found in another chapter.  The present home at the northeast corner of Thirty-ninth Street was built in 1879-1880 at a cost of four hundred thousand dollars.  The building is in Queen Anne style, of Baltimore pressed brick, with brown-stone trimmings, the interior decorations are the work of John La Farge, Louis Tiffany, and Franklin Smith, and the club’s art collection includes Carpenter’s Inauguration of Lincoln.  The long room on the first floor facing Fifth Avenue, from the windows of which at any hour of the day may be seen comfortable-looking gentlemen blandly surveying the passing procession, is the Reading Room, decorated in Pompeian style.

On the corner above where the Union League now stands there was, in 1854, a small country tavern known as the Croton Cottage.  It took its name from the Croton Reservoir, a block above, then on the other side of the Avenue.  A yellow, wooden structure, with a veranda reached by deep stoops from the sidewalk, and surrounded by trees and shrubbery, it flourished by vending ice cream and other refreshment to those who came to view the city from the top of the Reservoir walls.  During the Draft Riots in 1863 it was burned down, and Commodore Vanderbilt bought the site in 1866 for eighty thousand dollars, built a house, lived in it, and left it to his son, Frederick W. Vanderbilt.  It is the Arnold, Constable site.  On the same side of the Avenue as the Croton Cottage,