Of this land the stretch from Forty-fifth Street to Forty-eighth on the east side of the Avenue was a part of the fifty-five-acre estate bought by Thomas Buchanan between 1803 and 1807 from the city, which was then disposing of its common land, for the sum of seven thousand five hundred and thirty-seven dollars.  One hundred and eight years later “Fifth Avenue” appraised its value at twenty million dollars.  For his country-seat Buchanan purchased a tract of ground along the East River front between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-seventh Streets.  Buchanan died in 1815.  A daughter, Almy, married Peter Goelet, and another daughter, Margaret, married Robert Ratzer Goelet, which accounts for the large Goelet holdings in this section.

In this stretch of the Avenue and in the adjacent streets is the heart of the new Clubland.  The Century in Forty-third and the St. Nicholas in Forty-fourth have been mentioned.  At No. 10 West Forty-third Street is the home of the Columbia University Club.  In Forty-fourth Street are the City Club (55 W.), the New York Yacht (37 W.), and the Harvard (27 W.).  Until a few years ago the Yale Club was diagonally across the street from the Harvard Club, but now the alumni of “Old Eli” have a superb club-house of their own on Vanderbilt Avenue between Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth Streets, which they are occupying jointly with the alumni of Princeton for the duration of the war.  Farther up the Avenue, on the northeast corner of Fifty-first Street, is the Union Club, which moved there after relinquishing the house it held so long at the corner of Twenty-first Street.  Then, at the north-west corner of Fifty-fourth Street, is the University Club, to the mind of Mr. Arnold Bennett, the finest of all the fine buildings that line the Avenue.  “The residential blocks to the north of Fifty-ninth Street,” he wrote in the book that on this side of the North Atlantic was known as “Your United States,” “fall short of their pretensions in beauty and interest.  But except for the miserly splitting, here and there, in the older edifices, of an inadequate ground floor into a mezzanine and a narrow box, there is nothing mean in the whole street from the Plaza to Washington Square.  Much mediocre architecture, of course, but the general effect homogeneous and fine, and, above all, grandly generous....  The single shops, as well as the general stores and hotels on Fifth Avenue, are impressive in the lavish spaciousness of their disposition.  Neither stores nor shops could have been conceived, or could be kept, by merchants without genuine imagination and faith.”

Bennett, though not in an unkindly spirit, was looking for aspects, not to praise, but to abuse.  It was a far different neighbourhood forty-five years ago.  Henry James, writing in 1873, in “The Impressions of a Cousin” (Tales of Three Cities), said:  “How can I sketch Fifty-third Street?  How can I even endure Fifty-third Street?  When I turn into it from the Fifth Avenue the vista seems too hideous, the narrow, impersonal houses with the hard, dry tone of their brown-stone, a surface as uninteresting as that of sandpaper, their steep, stiff stoops, their lumpish balustrades, porticos, and cornices.  I have yet to perceive the dignity of Fifty-third Street.”