Glimpses of the Sixties—­At the “Sign of the Buck-horn”—­Madison Square in Civil War Times—­A Contemporary Chronicler—­Mushroom Fortunes—­Foreign Adventurers—­Filling the Ballroom—­Brown of Grace Church—­Sunshine and Shadow—­The Avenue and the Five Points—­The Old Bowery—­Blackmail—­The Haunts of Chance—­Two Famous Poems, William Allen Butler’s “Nothing to Wear,” and Edmund Clarence Stedman’s “The Diamond Wedding.”

It seems but yesterday that the old Fifth Avenue Hotel passed to the limbo of bygone things.  When “Victoria’s Royal Son” came to visit us it was new and stately, and held by loyal patriots to be something for strangers from beyond the seas to behold and wonder at.  But before the hotel there had been a famous tavern on the site, and then a hippodrome.

“Can it be true,” wrote Mrs. Schuyler Van Rennselaer in an article in the “Century Magazine” many years ago, “that I dreamily remember a canvas hippodrome where the Fifth Avenue Hotel stands?  Kids curvetting in idiotic pride over imaginary mountain peaks on the rough ground of what is Madison Square?  Can it be true that when we looked from our nursery windows towards Sixteenth Street we saw, on a lot foolishly called vacant, the most interesting of possible houses, an abandoned street-car, fitted with a front door and a chimney pot, and inhabited by an Irish family of considerable size?” That delightful Swiss Family Robinson-like habitation may have been a creation of Mrs. Van Rennselaer’s fancy, but Franconi’s Hippodrome was an historical fact, and the tavern that she remembers was Corporal Thompson’s Madison Cottage, where, at the “Sign of the Buck-horn,” trotting men gathered.  When Fifth Avenue was in its infancy Madison Square still recalled the name of Tieman’s, and in the centre there was a House of Refuge for sinful boys.  At the Square the old Boston Post Road for a moment touched what was afterwards to be the Avenue before it twisted off in a northeasterly direction.

Corporal Thompson’s establishment was a diminutive frame cottage, surrounded by what might be called “a five acre lot,” which was used, when used at all, for cattle exhibitions.  It was, Mr. Dayton recorded, “the last stopping place for codgers, old and young.  Laverty, Winans, Niblo, the Costers, Hones, Whitneys, Schermerhorns, Sol Kipp, Doctor Vache, Ogden Hoffman, Nat Blount, and scores more of bon vivants, hail fellows well met, would here end their ride for the day by ‘smiling’ with the worthy Corporal, and wash down any of their former improprieties with a sip of his ne plus ultra, which was always kept in reserve for a special nightcap.  There was a special magnetism about the snug little bar-room, always trim as a lady’s boudoir, which induced the desire to tarry awhile, as if that visit were destined to be the last; so it frequently happened that a jolly party was compelled to grope slowly homewards through the unlighted, gloomy road that led to the city.”