This part of the Avenue faces the Obelisk, Cleopatra’s Needle, a present to the United States from the Khedive of Egypt, brought to this country in 1877, and erected here in 1880; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the latter on the site of what was once the Deer Park.  The Museum had its origin in a meeting of the art committee of the Union League Club in November, 1869.  Among the founders were William Cullen Bryant, president of the Century Association, Daniel Huntington, president of the National Academy of Design, Dr. Barnard, president of Columbia, Richard M. Hunt, president of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and Dr. Henry W. Bellows.  Andrew H. Green, the “Father of Greater New York,” who was one of those representing the city, was the first to suggest placing the Museum in the Park.  For a time the collection was kept in a house rented for the purpose in West Fourteenth Street.  The first wing of the present building was opened in 1880.

To continue the list of the private residences of the Avenue.  Jonathan Thorne (1028), Louis Gordon Hammersley (1030), Countess Annie Leary (1032), George C. Smith (1033), Herbert D. Robbins (1034), James B. Clews (1039), Lloyd Warren (1041), Mrs. James Hedges (1044), R.F.  Hopkins (1045), Michael Dricer (1046), George Leary (1053), William H. Erhart (1055), James Speyer (1058), Henry Phipps (1063), Abraham Stein (1068), Dr. James H. Lancashire (1069), Mrs. Herbert T. Parsons (1071), W.W.  Fuller (1072), J.H.  Hanan (1073), Benjamin Duke (1076), Malcolm D. Whitman (1080), McLane Van Ingen (1081), A.M.  Huntington (1083).

In the block between Ninetieth and Ninety-first Streets, on land where once the squatter gloried, is the home of the Iron Master, perhaps of all the residences in the long line of the Avenue the one most observed by the stranger within our gates.  “So well have the architect and the landscape gardener co-operated,” is the comment of “Fifth Avenue,” “that this mansion and its surroundings have already the dignity and picturesqueness which age alone can give, although the building is of comparatively recent date.  It is the only house on all Fifth Avenue which looks as if it might have been transplanted from old England.”  The Carnegie house is almost the outpost to the north of “Millionaire’s Row.”  Two blocks beyond, after the I. Townsend Burden house, and the Warburg house, and the Willard D. Straight house have been passed, we are once more in the region of unprepossessing chaos.  Between Ninety-third Street and the end of the Park there is a riot of hideous signboards, and vacant lots, and lots that though occupied, are unadorned.  The only relief in the unpleasant picture is the Mount Sinai Hospital at One Hundredth Street.  In name at least the Avenue marches on, its progress being suspended for a space where Mount Morris Park rises to the summit of the Snag Berg, or Snake Hill, where, in the days of the Revolution, a Continental battery for a moment commanded the valley of the Harlem, only to be whisked away, when the enemy came, and a Hessian battery was installed in its place.  But where the stretch of magnificence breaks, although it continues to be Fifth Avenue in name, it ceases to be Fifth Avenue in spirit.