Fifth Avenue, too, was just beginning to come into its own. Some of the handsome homes in the lower reaches of that thoroughfare and upon the northern edge of Washington Square which have been suffered to remain until this day had already been built and an exodus had begun to them from the older houses to the south. All of the churches were gone from down town with but a few exceptions, the most conspicuous of which were the two Episcopalian churches in Broadway--Trinity and St. Paul's--the Roman Catholic Church of St. Peter's in Barclay Street, St. George's in Beekman, the North Dutch in William, the Middle Dutch in Nassau and the Brick Presbyterian, also in Beekman Street. This last, in fact, had already been sold for secular purposes and had been abandoned. The congregation was building a new house up in the fields at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street, a step which was regarded by its older members as extremely radical and precarious, to put it mildly. The ancient home of the Middle Dutch Reformed had also gone for secular purposes. In it was housed the New York Post Office, already a brisk place, which soon was to outgrow its overcrowded quarters and to expand into its ugly citadel at the apex of the City Hall Park.
The two great fires--the one in 1833 and the other in 1845--had removed from the lower portions of the city many of their more ancient and unsightly structures. The rebuilding which had followed them gave to the growing town much larger structures of a finer and more dignified architecture. Six and seven story buildings were quite common. This represented the practical limitations of a generation which knew not elevators, although the new Fifth Avenue Hotel which already was being planned upon the site of the old Hippodrome, at Broadway and Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Streets, was soon to have the first of these contraptions that the world had ever seen.
Gone, too, were other old landmarks of downtown--some of them in their day distinctly famous--the City Hall, the Union Hotel, the Tontine Coffee House, the Bridewell and the reservoir of the Manhattan Company in Chambers Street. The new Croton Works, with their wonderful aqueduct, the High Bridge, upon which it crossed the ravine of the Harlem, and the dual reservoirs at Forty-second Street and at Eighty-sixth, had rendered this last structure obsolete. The State Prison had disappeared from its former site at the foot of East Twenty-third Street. A new group of structures at Sing Sing had replaced the old upon the island of Manhattan.