Abroad in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
After all these years and so many changes, Fifth Avenue from 34th to 59th Streets remains the city’s showplace thoroughfare. Walking north from the former B. Altman & Co. department store on the east side of the avenue between 34th and 35th Streets, one passes the Gorham Building, the old Tiffany Building, the former Knox Hat Building, the New York Public Library, the Scribner Bookstore, the Rockefeller Center Promenade, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Cartier store, St. Thomas Church, the Aeolian Building, the University Club, the Peninsula Hotel, and the St. Regis Hotel before reaching Grand Army Plaza and the Plaza Hotel.
Few cities can boast such an impressive sequence of buildings. I am reminded of why Arnold Bennett said in 1912 that Fifth Avenue was the most spectacular thing of its kind in the world. But the grand sequence also makes me angry at the unconscionable intrusions, the storefront modernizations, the banal office buildings, the glass facades, and the tawdry or vulgar stores and restaurants. What is it about New York that allows something so special and so beautiful to be trashed in the ways Fifth Avenue has been?
B. Altman & Co. went out of business in 1989, an occasion that brought tears to the eyes of many New Yorkers with fond memories of the elegant and friendly emporium. A few years later, the grand building found adaptive reuse as the City University Graduate Center and as the Science, Industry, and Business Library. Alas, the impressive old store interiors are gone. But the facades remain, a stalwart of quiet beauty on an exceedingly tawdry stretch of avenue.
Benjamin Altman began buying up the row houses in the block bounded by 34th and 35th Streets, and Fifth and Madison Avenues in 1895. It took him 18 years to get the whole block.
Assembling so vast a site with so many owners was an arduous process. Altman had enough contiguous lots by 1906 that he was able to move his famous store from Sixth Avenue and 18th Street (in the building now housing the Container Store) to Fifth Avenue. But he wouldn’t get the 34th Street corner until 1911. Knoedler Gallery leased the lot from the Griswold estate, and occupied an old house with its blue-chip gallery. Knoedler resisted Altman’s entreaties to buy out its lease, and it wasn’t until the gallery’s lease expired that Altman could in his turn lease the lot from its owners. Altman finally had the full Fifth Avenue frontage two years before his death; the Madison Avenue frontage wasn’t completed till shortly after his death.
We know amazingly little about the taciturn though apparently kindly bachelor who lived on Fifth Avenue and 50th Street, where Palazzo d’Italia now stands. We do know he collected art on an epic scale and that the European painting galleries of the Met would be much diminished without such bequests of his as Rembrandt’s “Lady With a Pink.” We know just enough about Altman to know he was a great New Yorker.
