aria, a large Italian cook who presided autocratically over the kitchen
of the basement restaurant, long since migrated somewhere to the north.
She had exacted her share of the homage and the substance of her
clients. After her departure there was still the attempt to keep up the
ancient fire of witticism, and "la la la la!" was still uttered in what
was thought to be the best Parisian accent, and the judgments of
magazine editors, and the achievements of the painters who sold their
portraits, and the writers whose novels crept into the lists of the "six
bestsellers" continued to be damned in no uncertain tones. But the old
spirit seems irrevocably gone.

CHAPTER XI

_The Slope of Murray Hill_

Stretches of the Avenue--Murray Hill: a Slope in Transition--Early Astor
Land Purchases--The Brunswick Building--A Deserted Clubland--Churches of
the Stretch--The Marble Collegiate--The "Little Church Around the
Corner" and its Story--When Grant's Funeral Procession Passed--The
Waldorf and the Astoria--On the Hill in 1776--When the Red-Coats
Loitered.

After its half-mile journey between the great, square sordid mountains
of stone and steel that lie to the north of Fourteenth Street, Fifth
Avenue emerges into the sunshine of Madison Square. There it draws in
deep breaths of pure ozone before resuming its way as a canyon at
Twenty-sixth Street. Reverting to the past, from the Square to
Thirty-first Street, the lane runs through what was the Caspar Samler
farm. North of that were the twenty acres that John Thompson bought in
1799 for four hundred and eighty-two pounds and ten shillings. A little
later, a more familiar name appeared on the maps. In 1827 the Astor hand
reached up to this then remote section, William B. Astor purchasing a
half-interest, including Fifth Avenue from Thirty-second to
Thirty-fifth, for twenty thousand five hundred dollars. While other
real-estate investors who considered themselves astute were planning for
the future by gobbling up stretches of land along the shore of the East
River the Astors were buying across what was primitively known as the
backbone of the island.

The sharp rise to what was the old summit and to the modified hill of
the present does not begin until Thirty-third Street is reached. But
there is perceptible a grade of a kind as soon as the Avenue leaves the
northern line of the Square. Today it is a slope in transition. Here and
there the change has been wrought. A mode