be seen the garden beyond
the high board fence. Many covetous eyes of commerce have regarded it;
many tempting offers have been made. But according to popular tradition
Mr. Wendell clung to the garden because his sisters desired it as a
place in which to exercise their dogs. Now, after the death of John
Gottlieb, the three elderly sisters still live in the house, in a state
of the same old-time plainness. They, with a married sister, are the
sole heirs of the eighty million dollars in New York real estate left by
their brother. The house, a few years ago, was assessed at five thousand
dollars, the site is valued at two million.

Directly across the Avenue from the Wendell house is the Union League
Club, on land that formerly was occupied by Dickel's Riding Academy,
fifty years ago the fashionable equestrian school of New York. The early
story of the organization will be found in another chapter. The present
home at the northeast corner of Thirty-ninth Street was built in
1879-1880 at a cost of four hundred thousand dollars. The building is in
Queen Anne style, of Baltimore pressed brick, with brown-stone
trimmings, the interior decorations are the work of John La Farge, Louis
Tiffany, and Franklin Smith, and the club's art collection includes
Carpenter's Inauguration of Lincoln. The long room on the first floor
facing Fifth Avenue, from the windows of which at any hour of the day
may be seen comfortable-looking gentlemen blandly surveying the passing
procession, is the Reading Room, decorated in Pompeian style.

On the corner above where the Union League now stands there was, in
1854, a small country tavern known as the Croton Cottage. It took its
name from the Croton Reservoir, a block above, then on the other side of
the Avenue. A yellow, wooden structure, with a veranda reached by deep
stoops from the sidewalk, and surrounded by trees and shrubbery, it
flourished by vending ice cream and other refreshment to those who came
to view the city from the top of the Reservoir walls. During the Draft
Riots in 1863 it was burned down, and Commodore Vanderbilt bought the
site in 1866 for eighty thousand dollars, built a house, lived in it,
and left it to his son, Frederick W. Vanderbilt. It is the Arnold,
Constable site. On the same side of the Avenue as the Croton Cottage, in
the block between Forty-first and Forty-second Street, was the Rutgers
Female Cottage. This institution was first opened in 1839 on ground
given it by