Those hovels of yesterday have made way for the beautiful Park and the superb mansions that have earned for the eastern stretch of Fifth Avenue overlooking the Park the title of “Millionaire’s Row.”  There is one impression of the “Row” which one is bound to take away whether the point of observation be the top of a passing omnibus or the sidewalk adjoining the stone wall guarding the boundaries of the Park.  That is of a mysterious unreality, due, perhaps to the shades being always lowered and the curtains tightly drawn.  In considerable excitement an immaculately garbed little old gentleman was one day seen to descend hurriedly from the Imperiale of the snorting monster by which he had designed to travel down to Washington Square.  On the sidewalk, flourishing his cane, he pointed in the direction of a stately palace of white marble.  “It is incredible,” he kept repeating, “but I certainly saw some one come out of that house.  I am the original New Yorker, and I know the thing has never happened before.”

As the great lane beyond Fifty-ninth Street is known as “Millionaire’s Row,” it could have no more appropriate guarding outpost than the Metropolitan Club, more generally called the “Millionaire’s Club.”  The organization was founded in 1891 by members of the Union Club, and the present white marble club-house, at the north-east corner of Sixtieth Street, on land formerly owned by the Duchess of Marlborough, was erected in 1903.  The gate to the Park diagonally across from the club, at Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, is the Scholars’ Gate.  The other gates along the stretch of the Avenue are the Students’ Gate, at Sixty-fourth Street, the Children’s Gate, at Seventy-second Street, the Miners’ Gate, at Seventy-ninth Street, the Engineers’ Gate, at Ninetieth Street, the Woodman’s Gate, at Ninety-sixth Street, and the Girls’ Gate, at One Hundred and Second Street.

“Park life with us,” writes Miss Henderson, “has perhaps become obsolete; our national breathlessness cannot brook this paradox of pastoral musings within sight and sound and smell of the busy lure of money making.  Within its gates we pass into a new element; and this element is antipathetic to the one-sided development imposed by city life.  Instead of resting us, it presents a problem, and the last thing for which we now have time is abstract thought.  And so we prefer the dazzling, twinkling, clashing, clamoring, death-dealing, sinking, eruptive, insistent Broadway, where every blink of the eye catches a new impression, where the brain becomes a passive, palpitating receptacle for ideas which are shot into it through all the senses; and where, between ‘stepping lively’ and ‘watching your step,’ a feat of contradictoriness only equalled in its exaction by the absorbing exercise of slapping with one hand and rubbing with the other, independent thought becomes an extinct function.”