the
hotel there had been a famous tavern on the site, and then a hippodrome.

"Can it be true," wrote Mrs. Schuyler Van Rennselaer in an article in
the "Century Magazine" many years ago, "that I dreamily remember a
canvas hippodrome where the Fifth Avenue Hotel stands? Kids curvetting
in idiotic pride over imaginary mountain peaks on the rough ground of
what is Madison Square? Can it be true that when we looked from our
nursery windows towards Sixteenth Street we saw, on a lot foolishly
called vacant, the most interesting of possible houses, an abandoned
street-car, fitted with a front door and a chimney pot, and inhabited by
an Irish family of considerable size?" That delightful Swiss Family
Robinson-like habitation may have been a creation of Mrs. Van
Rennselaer's fancy, but Franconi's Hippodrome was an historical fact,
and the tavern that she remembers was Corporal Thompson's Madison
Cottage, where, at the "Sign of the Buck-horn," trotting men gathered.
When Fifth Avenue was in its infancy Madison Square still recalled the
name of Tieman's, and in the centre there was a House of Refuge for
sinful boys. At the Square the old Boston Post Road for a moment touched
what was afterwards to be the Avenue before it twisted off in a
northeasterly direction.

Corporal Thompson's establishment was a diminutive frame cottage,
surrounded by what might be called "a five acre lot," which was used,
when used at all, for cattle exhibitions. It was, Mr. Dayton recorded,
"the last stopping place for codgers, old and young. Laverty, Winans,
Niblo, the Costers, Hones, Whitneys, Schermerhorns, Sol Kipp, Doctor
Vache, Ogden Hoffman, Nat Blount, and scores more of _bon vivants_, hail
fellows well met, would here end their ride for the day by 'smiling'
with the worthy Corporal, and wash down any of their former
improprieties with a sip of his _ne plus ultra_, which was always kept
in reserve for a special nightcap. There was a special magnetism about
the snug little bar-room, always trim as a lady's boudoir, which induced
the desire to tarry awhile, as if that visit were destined to be the
last; so it frequently happened that a jolly party was compelled to
grope slowly homewards through the unlighted, gloomy road that led to
the city."

But all that has been in the days before. By the time that the Fifth
Avenue Hotel had been firmly established on the site of the Buck-horn,
the corner had become the centre of the new town. Across the Squ