Until 1844, New York was guarded against crime by the old “Leather-heads.”  This force patrolled the city by night, or that part of it known as the lamp district.  They were not watchmen by profession, but were recruited from the ranks of porters, cartmen, stevedores, and labourers.  They were distinguished by a fireman’s cap without front (hence the name “Leather-head"), an old camlet coat, and a lantern.  They had a wholesome respect for their skins, and were inclined to keep out of harm’s way, seldom visiting the darker quarters of the city.  When they bawled the hour all rogues in the vicinity were made aware of their whereabouts.  Above Fourteenth Street the whole city was a neglected region.  It was beyond the lamp district and in the dark.

In no way, to the mind of the present scribe, can the contrast between the life of the modern city and of the town of the days when Fifth Avenue was in the making be better emphasized than by comparing the conditions of travel.  It was in the year 1820 that John Stevens of Hoboken, who had become exasperated because people did not see the value of railroads as he did, resolved to prove, at his own expense, that the method of travel urged by him was not a madman’s scheme.  So on his own estate on the Hoboken hill he built a little railway of narrow gauge and a small locomotive.  Long enough had he been sneered at and called maniac.  He put the locomotive on the track with cars behind it, and ran it with himself as a passenger, to the amazement of those before whom the demonstration was made.  So far as is known that was the first locomotive to be built or run on a track in America.  But even with Stevens’s successful example, years passed before steam travel assumed a practical form.

When the pioneer of Fifth Avenue wished to voyage far afield it was toward the stage-coach as a means of transportation that his mind turned, for the stage-coach was the only way by which a large portion of the population could accomplish overland journeys.  To go to Boston, for example, the traveller from New York usually left by a steamboat that took him to Providence in about twenty-three hours, and travelled the remaining forty miles by coach.  Five hours was needed for the overland journey, and was considered amazing speed.  By the year 1832 the overland trip between New York and Boston had been reduced to forty-one hours.  But the passengers were not allowed to break the journey at a tavern, even for four or five hours of sleep, as they had formerly done, but were carried forward night and day without intermission.  A fare of eleven dollars was usually exacted for the trip.