The Romance of a Great Store

Even then the elegant New York was moving rapidly uptown. Union Square, still known, however, to older New Yorkers as Union Place, was the heart of its life and fashion. It was lined by the fine houses of the elect and two of the most superb hotels of the metropolis, the Brevoort and the Union Square, while the Clarendon, which was destined soon to house the young Prince of Wales, stood but a block away. At Irving Place and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets had just been completed the new Academy of Music. New York at last had a real opera-house, with a stage and fittings large enough and adequate to present music-drama upon a scale equal to that of the larger European capitals. She had plenty of theaters, too: the Broadway, the Bowery, Laura Keene's, Niblo's Garden, and Wood & Christy's Negro Minstrels, chief amongst them. While down at the point where Chatham Street (now Park Row) debouched into Broadway, Barnum's Museum already stood, with its gay bannered front b