It was about 1901 that the movement began that was to transform Fifth Avenue from a residential thoroughfare into a shopping street beside which the vaunted glories of London’s Bond Street and Paris’s Rue de la Paix seem dim.  In the Knickerbocker days the important shops of the town lined lower Broadway and the adjacent streets.  Then it was to Grand Street that the ladies journeyed to barter and bargain for the latest fashions from the Paris whose styles were dominated by the Empress Eugenie.  When Grand Street had been outgrown the shops moved northward to Fourteenth Street and Union Square.  There are tens of thousands of New Yorkers whose childhood dates back to the early eighties who recall as one of the delights of the Yuletide season the visit to the revolving show in the window of old Macy’s at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue.  For a decade or so Sixth Avenue was the shop paradise.  Above Macy’s were O’Neill’s, and Simpson, Crawford and Simpson’s, and Altman’s, and Ehrich’s, besides the countless emporiums of lesser magnitude.  Macy’s moved north to Greeley Square, and Gimbel’s came to take its place on an adjoining corner, but the movement in bulk turned eastward at Twenty-third Street, lining the south side of that thoroughfare as far as Fifth Avenue.  Some of the pioneers had ventured farther to the north, but Twenty-third Street was the centre as the nineteenth century came to a close.

[Illustration:  COMMERCE, WITH GIANT STRIDE, IS MARCHING UP THE STATELY AVENUE.  THE STORY OF A BUSINESS HOUSE THAT BEGAN IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF CHERRY HILL, MIGRATED TO GRAND STREET, THENCE TO BROADWAY AND UNION SQUARE, AND AGAIN TO THE SLOPE OF MURRAY HILL, IS, IN EPITOME, THE STORY OF THE CITY ITSELF]

A writer in the “Century Magazine,” describing “Shopping in New York” in 1901, said that even then New York was known as a City of Shops just as Brooklyn was known as a City of Churches, and went on:  “The district begins at Eighth Street, where the wholesale establishments end, and follows Broadway as far as Thirty-fourth Street.  At Fourteenth Street and again at Twenty-third Street it diverges to the west until it strikes Sixth Avenue, including that part of Sixth Avenue only which lies between the two thoroughfares.  From Broadway at Twenty-third Street, it makes another departure, running up Fifth Avenue and ending at Forty-seventh Street.”  When the department stores lined the south side of Twenty-third Street a number of the great book-shops were on the north side, near the old Fifth Avenue Hotel.  Among such was the long-established Putnam, and adjoining that shop was the shop of the Duttons.  Of the publishing houses that carried in their traditions back to Knickerbocker days Harper’s was in the home of its beginnings and to which it still clings to the present time, the rambling structure hard by Franklin Square, while on Fifth Avenue, below Twenty-third, were the houses of D. Appleton and Company, Charles