fth Street on land
that is now occupied by the Bazaar of Best and Company. The
international house of Brentano, before it moved into its present
headquarters in the Brunswick Building at Twenty-seventh Street, was in
Union Square. Today Brentano's is the largest shop of its kind in the
city, while Scribner's, on the east side of the Avenue at Forty-eighth
Street, has been called "the most beautiful bookstore in the world."

In the new shopping district beginning at Thirty-fourth Street and
running along the Avenue almost to the Plaza, like the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel, so the saying goes, exclusiveness for the masses, Altaian was the
pioneer. In view of what was then considered the prohibitively high
price of real estate the projected invasion of the Avenue by the
department stores was thought extremely hazardous. In 1901 the street
still suggested the time when it had been lined by the dull, monotonous
high stoops. Those old fronts had been knocked away, business had
invaded many of the lower stories, but there still remained something of
the former flavour. But property holders were awake to their
opportunities. Inside lots twenty-five by one hundred feet on the Avenue
were held at one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, and corner
lots correspondingly higher. Within two years these prices had doubled
and trebled. Altman's, covering an entire block, eight stories in
height, with an addition that rises twelve stories, is a stately
guardian of the corner at which the Avenue becomes the Lane of
magnificent commerce. The building, of French stone, was designed by
Trowbridge and Livingston. Directly across the street is an entrance to
McCreery's, although that establishment faces on Thirty-fourth Street.
Above McCreery's, opposite the corner where the New York Club once had
its home, and on property part of which was formerly the house of the
Engineers Club, is Best's, once Lilliputian in more than one sense, but
no more so. Thereafter every block has its imposing monument to
commerce. Silverware is represented by Gorham's at Thirty-sixth Street.
Furs in magnificent display fill the windows of Gunther's Sons between
Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh. At the southeast corner of
Thirty-seventh Street is Tiffany's. Information as to the nature of the
merchandise in which the establishment deals would be superfluous, and
the management is evidently of the opinion that the display in the
windows tells the story to all the worl