rn structure reaches
superciliously skyward. Beside it and below it the buildings of
yesterday give the impression of feeling acutely conscious of their
impending doom. They know. Their race is almost run. Tomorrow the old
bricks will be tumbled down, the chutes will roar with their passing,
and the air will be shrill with the steam drills and riveters ushering
into the world the young giants that will take their places. At the
northeast corner of Twenty-sixth Street, where the Avenue touches the
Square, there is a vast edifice of surpassing ugliness. It is the
Brunswick Building, on the site of the old Brunswick Hotel, once famous
as the headquarters of the Coaching Club. At one end the principal
establishment of one of those firms that have given the term "grocer" a
new meaning, at the other, a great book-shop of international
reputation, and between, a booking office where the pictures and maps in
the show windows stir the passer-by to disquieting dreams on streams of
Canada and Maine in the summer, and of semi-tropical verdure in the
winter.

Now and again, on the way up the slope, there is a house, which,
sturdily and stubbornly, has remained what it was built for, a place of
residence, despite the encroachments of commerce. But there are only
four or five such. Until a few years ago this was a section of Clubland
with the Reform, and the Knickerbocker, the latter at the Thirty-second
Street corner, and the New York, just above the Thirty-fourth Street
crossing. But the clubs, too, have moved on to the north, and the
stretch of today is a riot without order or design, tailors, automats,
art shops, opticians, railway offices, steamship offices, florists,
leather goods, cigars, Japanese gardens, Chinese gardens, toys, pianos,
and even an antique shop or two, which have somehow found their way over
from Fourth Avenue to the more aristocratic thoroughfare to the west,
and where the visitor, like Raphael of Balzac's "Le Peau de Chagrin,"
may wander in imagination up and down countless galleries of the mighty
past. At the Twenty-eighth Street corner there is a tall apartment
house, retaining a sort of left-behind dignity; and there are two
churches which belong to the Avenue's story, one of them on the Avenue
itself, and the other in a side street, a stone's throw to the east. The
first is the Marble Collegiate Church, which is at the northeast corner
of Twenty-ninth Street, adjoining the Holland House. It is one of the