The neighbourhood is rich in gastronomical memories.  At the same corner for twenty years the chop-house of John Wallace flourished.  In the eighties it was one of the few chop-houses uptown.  There was a flavour of Bohemia about the clientele.  Characters who were famous in their day but whose very names are now forgotten, congregated there for the steaks and kidneys and the ale drawn from the wood.  There, so the story goes, was sown the seed of the Great Mince Pie Contest.  An actor, dropping into Wallace’s late one evening for the after-work rarebit, overheard fragments of ah argument about the relative merits of the mince pies of certain of the city’s hotels and refectories.  He was playing at the time in the dramatization of Mr. Tarkington’s “Monsieur Beaucaire,” and the next evening he brought up the subject for discussion with various ladies and gentlemen of the company.  Had it been a matter of lobsters he might have had an apathetic response.  But the homely mince pie roused to riotous enthusiasm.  Each player protested that he or she knew of a place from which came a mince pie surpassing all others.  So the contest was arranged and a jury of unimpeachable character selected, and two nights later the pies were brought proudly in and in turn sampled.  Incidentally the winning pasty came from the old Ashland House at Fourth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, and its sponsor was Mr. A.G. (better known as “Bogey”) Andrews.

There was a family hotel called the Glenham on the Avenue between Twenty-first and Twenty-second Streets, and at the north-east corner of Twenty-second, where part of the base of the “Flatiron Building” now is, was the old Cumberland.  There was one man, at least, who appreciated the Cumberland.  In fact he liked it so well that, when the structure was to be demolished to make way for the new skyscraper, he refused to move out, and having a lease, could not be evicted.  So he stayed there to the last, while the bricks came tumbling down about his ears.  Then, just around the corner, where Broadway joins Madison Square, was the Bartholdi, celebrated by the patronage of Mr. Fitzsimmons, alias Ruby Robert, the Freckled One, the Kangaroo, and beyond, still standing, a memento of yesterday, Dorlon’s, uptown heir to the glories of the old Fulton Market place, which boasted a history that goes back three-quarters of a century.  A relic of the old establishment, a mahogany table round which Cornelius Vanderbilt and Judge Roosevelt (the grandfather of T.R.), and John Jacob Astor, and John Swan used to sit at their oyster dinner consisting of oysters raw, stewed, roasted in the shell, and broiled, is still preserved.