Massive and splendidly Gothic is St. Thomas’s.  The church dates from 1823.  In 1867 the present site was secured, and the brown-stone edifice of the early seventies, designed by Richard Upjohn, was for nearly two generations the ultra-fashionable Episcopal church of the city.  In 1905 it was destroyed by fire, and with it, in the flames, perished its artistic contents, among them the decorations made by John La Farge and Augustus Saint Gaudens.  For six months the congregation was without a home.  Then a wooden structure was erected and the new church was built without interfering with the services during the following years.  Designed by Ralph Adams Cram, the present St. Thomas’s is of white limestone from Kentucky.  The left entrance, which is surmounted with a garland of Gothic foliage composed of orange blossoms, is the Bride’s Door.  Carved on each side of the niche above the keystone is a “true-lover’s-knot.”  A cynical observer (Rider’s “New York City”) comments:  “Few visitors note the sly touch of irony which, by a few strokes of the chisel, has converted the lover’s knot on the northerly side into an unmistakable dollar sign.”

On the west side of the Avenue, running from Fifty-first to Fifty-second, are the Vanderbilt twin residences, the wonder of the town of a quarter of a century ago.  They were built, in 1882, by the late William H. Vanderbilt, the southerly for his own use, and the northerly one for his daughter, Mrs. William D. Sloane.  In 1868 the land on which the brown-stone mansions stand was occupied by one Isaiah Keyser, whose small three-story frame house was in the middle of a vegetable garden.  That garden supplied the residents along lower Fifth Avenue, and its owner also dealt in ice and cattle.  In the house which Mr. Vanderbilt erected for himself Henry C. Frick lived for a time.  The Vanderbilt family spent millions of dollars in purchasing property to protect themselves against business encroachments.

In former days the neighbourhood was given over largely to philanthropic and religious institutions.  The New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb stood between Forty-eighth and Fiftieth Streets and Fourth and Fifth Avenues.  That was from 1829 to 1853.  The building was one hundred and ten feet long, sixty feet wide, four stories high, with a beautiful colonnade fifty feet long in front.  The grounds are described as “beautifully laid out in lawns and gardens, planted with trees and shrubbery.”  When the Asylum sold the property in 1853 it moved to Washington Heights.  For many years the National Democratic Club and the Buckingham Hotel have stood on the land.  The site of St. Patrick’s, originally part of the Common Lands of the City, was sold in 1799 for four hundred and five pounds and an annual quit rent of “four bushels of good merchantable wheat, or the value thereof in gold or silver coin.”  Then it became the property of the Jesuit Fathers, and in 1814 the Trappist Monks