The Franconi Hippodrome on the Fifth Avenue Hotel site had become a memory, but far downtown Barnum’s Museum was flourishing, with the doors open from sunrise till ten at night.  Early visitors from the country inspected the gallery of curiosities before sitting down to breakfast.  The great showman was living in a brown-stone house on Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Thirty-ninth Street.  He was approaching his sixtieth year, and had retired from active life, although he still held the controlling interest in the Museum.  A.T.  Stewart was living in the white stone home he had erected at Thirty-fourth Street.  James Gordon Bennett’s city residence was on the Avenue at Thirty-eighth Street.  In fact, with a few notable exceptions who still clung to their downtown homes, such as the Astors and the Vanderbilts, all the great money kings of the decade were gathering in the upper stretches of the ripening thoroughfare.  But the descendants of the Patroons held to the sweep from Washington Square to Fourteenth Street, or to lower Second Avenue, which, to the eyes of its “set,” embracing a number of old-school families of Colonial ancestry, was the “Faubourg St. Germain” of New York.

In every other memoir touching on the New York of the sixties will be found an allusion to the Flora McFlimseys.  For example, Mr. W.D.  Howells, in “Literary Friends and Acquaintances,” told of his first visit to the city at the time of the Civil War.  After Clinton Place was passed, he wrote:  “Commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kind dwelt unmolested in the brown-stone stretches of Fifth Avenue.”  There are two poems linked with the story of New York.  They are Edmund Clarence Stedman’s “The Diamond Wedding,” and “Nothing to Wear,” and the William Allen Butler verses, beginning: 

    “Miss Flora McFlimsey, of Madison Square
    Has made three separate journeys to Paris. 
    And her father assures me, each time she was there,
    That she and her friend Mrs. Harris
    (Not the lady whose name is so famous in history,
    But plain Mrs. H., without romance or mystery)
    Spent six consecutive weeks, without stopping,
    In one continuous round of shopping—­”

were the very spirit of the Fifth Avenue of that day.  Butler wrote the poem in 1857, in a house in Fourteenth Street, within a stone’s throw of the Avenue.  After finishing it, and reading it to his wife, he took it one evening to No. 20 Clinton Place, to try it on his friend, Evart A. Duyckinck.  Not only did the verses themselves have a Fifth Avenue inspiration and origin, but the woman who later claimed that she had written the nine first lines and thirty of the concluding lines, told in her story that she had dropped the manuscript while passing through a crowd at Fifth Avenue and Madison Square.  It was a famous case in its day, and the claimant found supporters, just