Traffic in Fifth avenue, like traffic almost everywhere else in New York is a problem increasing in perplexity. A little while ago the situation was met and for a time improved by slicing off the fronts of the buildings--perhaps the most expensive shave that the town has ever known--and setting back the sidewalks six or eight feet. But the benefits then gained have already been over-reached and the traffic policeman at the street corners all the way up the avenue must possess rare wit and diplomacy--while their fellows at such corners as Thirty-fourth and Forty-second are hardly less than field generals. And with all the _finesse_ of their work the traffic moves like molasses. Long double and triple files of touring cars and limousines, the combined cost of which would render statistics such as would gladden the heart of a Sunday editor, make their way up and down the great street tediously. If a man is in a hurry he has no business even to essay the Avenue. And occasionally the whole tangle is double-tangled. The shriek of a fire-engine up a side street or the clang of an ambulance demanding a clear right-of-way makes the traffic question no easier. Yet the policemen at the street corners are not caught unawares. With the shrill commands of their own whistles they maneuver trucks and automobiles and even some old-fashioned hansom cabs, pedestrians, all the rest--as coolly and as evenly as if it had been rehearsed for whole weeks.
New York is wonderful, the traffic of its chief show street--for Fifth avenue can now be fairly said to have usurped Broadway as the main highway of the upper city--tremendous. You begin to compute what must be the rental values upon this proud section of Fifth avenue, as it climbs Murray Hill from Thirty-fourth street to Forty-second street, when Katherine interrupts you once again. She knows her New York thoroughly indeed.
You follow her glance to a very simple brick house, upon the corner of an inconsequential side street. Beside it on Fifth avenue is an open lot--of perhaps fifty feet frontage, giving to the avenue but a plain brown wooden fence.
"A corking building lot," you venture, "Why don't they--"
"I expected you to say that," she laughs. "They have wanted to build upon that lot--time and time again. But when they approach the owner he laughs at them and declines to consider any offer. 'My daughter has a little dog,' he says politely, 'It must have a place for exercise.' We New Yorkers are an odd lot," she laughs. "You know that the Goelets kept a cow in the lawn of their big house at Broadway and Nineteenth street until almost twenty years ago--until there was not a square foot of grass outside of a park within five miles. And in New York the man who can do the odd thing successfully is apt to be applauded. You could not imagine such a thing in Boston or Baltimore or Philadelphia, could you?"