“Transportation was principally by stage.  There were car lines on Second, Third, Sixth, and Eighth Avenues.  The men who kept carriages were few and they generally lived in Harlem or Manhattanville.  Occasionally smart four-in-hands were seen, and I recall Madame Jumel driving to town and how we boys used to run to the side of the road to see her pass.  Many business men would go to the city driving a rockaway with a single horse.  Few of the streets were paved, and there were but two classes of pavements, macadam and cobblestones.  Where streets were not paved the sidewalks were in bad condition.  In some places the high banks of earth on either side of the street were washed down by heavy rains and deposited on the sidewalks.

“Oil lamps were in general use as street lights, and the light was easily blown out by the wind.  The lamplighter was usually a tall man, a character, and his position was considered an important one.  Fifth Avenue north of Fifty-ninth Street remained undeveloped for years, and it was not until sometime in the seventies that my father and I finished grading upper Fifth Avenue.  Sixty years ago on both sides were stone walls where there were deep depressions.  There was no traffic except drovers coming down to market with cattle.  There were but two main thoroughfares, Boston Post Road on the east side, and Bloomingdale Road on the west side.  From the Boston Post Road long lanes led to the residences of gentlemen who had country-seats on the East River, and similar lanes led from the old Bloomingdale Road to the country-seats on the Hudson River.  The sites of the Plaza, the Savoy, and the Netherland Hotels were rocky knolls.  A brook which came down Fifty-ninth Street formed several shallow pools which remained for a number of years after the Civil War.”

Whether or not Saint Gaudens was right in his contention that the proper place for his equestrian statue of General Sherman was on the Riverside Drive by Grant’s Tomb, without that gilded bronze figure of heroic size and the Winged Victory leading before, the Plaza would not be quite the Plaza.  Obscured as it is in these days by the vast scaffolding, there is no true son of Manhattan who passes the corner on his way up the Avenue, or enters Central Park, who does not turn to look at the chief ornament of the broad square.  The statue was made several years after Sherman’s death, and the sculptor laboured on it for six years, from the time when he began the work in Paris, to its final unveiling, on Memorial Day, 1903.  Of the statue and its surroundings as he saw them on the occasion of one of his later visits to the city of his birth and boyhood, Henry James wrote: