One Owner Takes All

Commissioners’ Plan of 1811

Acres of forests of hickory, chestnut, and oak, teeming with wildlife, occasionally giving way to marshes, meadows, and pastureland: this was the city-owned “Common Lands” on the island of Manhattan, stretching for 4 miles north of Wall Street, the epicenter of the first capital of a new republic at the close of the 18th century. Hard to believe, then, that in 1807, the city council felt confident enough to form a commission to map out New York’s future. Four years later, that effort culminated in a proposal for a rectilinear grid to overlay Manhattan’s vast midsection. This was the plan the city would grow by: the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. The people, the enterprises, the buildings would come in good time, but now there existed—in pen and ink on paper, anyway—a dozen avenues and 155 streets to lend shape to their ambitions.

WHEN GEORGE WASHINGTON took the oath of office as president on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street on April 30, 1789, the new nation’s capital extended north only as far as today’s Broome Street, less than a mile away.

Just ten years earlier, in 1801, botanist and professor of medicine David Hosack had gotten a jump on the expansion, purchasing 20 acres of rocky, rolling land bordering today’s Fifth Avenue. There he created something he called the Elgin Botanic Garden, an idyllic collection of flowers, shrubs, and trees, gathered with the help of friends such as Alexander Hamilton, and horticultural specimens from donors including Thomas Jefferson. Unable to meet mounting costs, Hosack sold his popular public attraction to New York State, which in turn passed it on to Columbia College in 1814. Initially dismissed as all but worthless, that gift would pay off handsomely in the form of rent payments Columbia collected on its “Upper Estate” for more than 170 years.

THIS PORTION OF James S. Kemp’s drawing of the gridiron proposed by the 1807 Commission shows Elgin Garden overlaying what would come to be 47th to 51st Streets between 5th and 6th Avenues (below).

Hosack’s Elgin Botanic Garden

By the late 1830s, those crisp black lines on the grid plan began to take hard shape. There soon emerged a network of paved streets, on which some of the city’s wealthiest citizens erected sumptuous confections of brick, brownstone, and marble. On August 15, 1858, the city’s first Catholic archbishop, John Hughes, went further. He elevated the middle of Manhattan to a celestial plane by laying the cornerstone for St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the gothic edifice that would take up an entire city block across Fifth Avenue from Dr. Hosack’s garden. By the time St. Patrick’s was consecrated in 1879, the area had seen huge changes, among them Fifth Avenue’s rise to the status of the city’s premier residential thoroughfare, the place where Vanderbilts and Astors chose to reside. On the side streets, more modest homes and, later, apartment buildings took shape.

ST. PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL under construction, circa 1875. Critics call the project “Hughes’s Folly” for being so far outside the city’s center far downtown (left).

LOTS ON FIFTH Avenue are claimed and built up around St. Patrick’s throughout the Gilded Age, often multiple times over (right).

CENTRAL PARK ICE skaters take their exercise with the Dakota apartments in the distance, 1890. The Park lives up to its ideal as a place for New Yorkers of all means and backgrounds to enjoy “refreshing rest” (above).

THE WEST SIDE of bustling Fifth Avenue looking uptown from 51st Street (right).

Over time, Fifth Avenue took on an increasingly commercial tone as upscale stores elbowed out many of the early mansions. One avenue west, an even bigger change arrived with a roar in the 1870s: the Sixth Avenue elevated railway. The trains brought thousands of people from as far south as the Battery, at Manhattan’s southern tip, to as far north as West 58th Street. They also brought soot, grime, and the screech of steel on steel, and—beneath the rails—a thoroughfare as antithetical to sunny, affluent Fifth Avenue as could be imagined.

THE GILDED AGE in New York City is a transitional time: Sixth Avenue, circa 1903, is busy with pedestrian, horse and carriage, and elevated train traffic.

Rendering of Benjamin W. Morris’s never-built Metropolitan Opera House

By the early 20th century, speakeasies and brothels proliferated like mushrooms after a rain; under the Sixth Avenue El, and east of it, Columbia’s rental income suffered. Still, this large parcel had an increasingly rare distinction—it all belonged to a single owner. In 1928, that status drew the attention of a group of New York’s great and good, intent on finding a site for a new home for the Metropolitan Opera. They envisioned a very different Upper Estate: the launchpad for a new kind of urban development, one with a grand opera house at its midblock core, ringed by a trio of commercial towers.

THIS VIEW OF 51st Street at the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue shows the main core of the Rockefeller Center site, predevelopment. St. Patrick’s twin spires are visible an avenue away on Fifth.