[Illustration:  THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, ON THE SITE OF WHAT WAS ONCE THE DEER PARK, HAD ITS ORIGIN IN A MEETING OF THE ART COMMITTEE OF THE UNION LEAGUE CLUB IN NOVEMBER, 1869]

But back to our sheep and to the Avenue.  At the south-east corner of Sixty-second Street is the Knickerbocker Club, which moved there a few years ago from the home it held so long at the Avenue and Thirty-second Street, but before it is reached are passed the residences of Mrs. J.A.  Bostwick (800), Mrs. Fitch Gilbert (801), William Emlen Roosevelt (804), and William Lanman Bull (805).  On Sixty-second Street, near the Knickerbocker, is the house of the late Joseph H. Choate.  Continuing along the Avenue to Sixty-eighth Street the residences are:  Mrs. Hamilton Fish (810), Francis L. Loring (811), George G. McMurty (813), Robert L. Gerry (816), Clifford V. Brokaw (825), Henry Mortimer Brooks (826), William Guggenheim (833), Frank Jay Gould (834), Frederick Lewisohn (835), Mrs. Isadore Wormser (836), Mrs. William Watts Sherman (838), Vincent Astor (840), Mrs. Henry O. Havemeyer, south-east corner of Sixty-sixth (No. 3 East Sixty-sixth is the former home of General Grant), Miss Elizabeth Kean (844), George Barney Schley (845), the late Colonel Oliver H. Payne (852), George Grant Mason (854), Perry Belmont (855), Judge Elbert H. Gary (856), George J. Gould (857), and Thomas F. Ryan (858).

At this point begins what prior to 1840 was the farm of Robert Lenox, extending on to what is now Seventy-third Street.  The uncle of Robert Lenox was a British commissary during the Revolution.  The farm, which is worth at the present day perhaps ten million dollars, was bought in the twenties of the last century for forty thousand dollars.  Under the various sections of his will which bear the dates of 1829, 1832, and 1839, Lenox, or “Lennox” as it was then spelled, devised his farm, then comprising about thirty acres, to his only son, James, with his stock of horses, cattle, and farming utensils, during the term of his life and after his death, to James’s heirs forever.  The will reads:  “My motive for so leaving this property is a firm persuasion that it may, at no distant date, be the site of a village, and as it cost me more than its present worth, from circumstances known to my family, I will to cherish that belief that it may be realized to them.  At all events, I want the experiment made by keeping the property from being sold.”  Under a clause in the will dated 1832, however, he withdrew the restriction covering the sale of the farm, but, nevertheless, urged his son not to sell it, as he was still of the firm conviction that some day there would be a village near by, and the property would appreciate.  It was the son James Lenox who erected the Lenox Library, which was a conspicuous mark on the upper Avenue until it was merged with the Astor in the formation of the present Public Library.  The Lenox Library antedated by some years the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It was designed by Richard Morris Hunt, who died in 1893, and whose Memorial, the work of Daniel Chester French, is on the edge of the opposite Park.