The Birmingham age-herald., 1909-08-01
FIFTH AVENUE IS
 BEING DESERTED Millionaire Homes Give Way to
 Business INVASION OF COMMERCE Early History of Celebrated Thorough fare Which Took It's Start From Potters FleId-Three Stages
 of Development.
INVASION OF COMMERCE

NeW orh, July 0l.-NSpec1al. )--F1fth
 avenue-most famous of fashionable American streets-is swiftly passing
 from the glory of residential exclu-
 siveness to the more obscure if not
 less useful role of an ordinary com mercial thoroughfare. Only a few days ago the police found 1t necessary to make wholesale arrests In order to prevent the blocking of the sidewalks in what was only few years ago the most aristocratic section of the ave- nue by workers in the big manufac- turing establish ments that have in. vaded its once sacred precincts
 Throughout the lower two miles of its course which 20 years ago was solidly lined with the brownstone fronts that typified wealthy ownership in that period of the city's develop ment, there are today only e few scat tered residences where a handful of stubborn Knickerbockers continue to defy the invasion of trade and com merce. Even these few homes are oversh allowed by the lofty skyscrap CTS that rear their fronts in. ever-in- creasing numbers along the stately avenue and most of them remain with barred doors and windows during the greater part of the year. In another half-decade the last of them probably will have disappeared or will have been converted into shops. and 1t Is only a matter of very brief time when there will not be a private residence left along Fifth avenue below Central park. This includes practically all that the New Yorker of a generation ago meant by Fifth avenue, for the upper portion of the street was then given over to scattered novels and un- slightly heaps of rock.
 Fifth avenue Is not an old street as compared with Broadway or the Bowery or Wall street or any of the thorough fares that extend to the lower portion of Manhattan Island. It dates back only to 1Sl1, when the present plan of the city was adopted. Its name then signified no more than did those of Sixth and Seventh or any other of the numerically desig- mated avenues extending up and down the island. In fact, its development was slower than that of some of these others for many years, due probably to the cir cumstances that 1t took its beginning at what was then the Potters field, now Washington square, while it's upper course was f1anked by rocky elevations which competent engineers asserted could not be turned into building sites with any profit.
 At that time, and for many years there after Second avenue-and Stuyvesant square through which it ran--was the fashionable residence section of the metropolis. Here were grouped the abodes of such wealth and fashion as New York then boasted. the Rutherfords, ~. the social life of the day. All semblance of wealth and fashion has long since departed from the locality and the last of the famous homes, that of Senator and Secretary of State William M Evarts, was torn down a year or two ago to make way for cheap apartment houses. Today Second avenue Is one of the business thor oughfares of the teeming East Side, a re- zion of delicatessen shops and foreign cafes on which the signs bear names about equally distributed between German and Italian. It's fallen state, however, may be only @ forerunner Of the fate which is to overtake it's more celebrated successor, for the signs of the foreign in- vasion are already beginning to appear in lower Fifth avenue.
 The prestige of Fifth avenue as a street of luxurious homes dates back about 50 years, and was contemporaneous with two important developments in It's history. The first of these was the building of the city reservoir at Fifth avenue and Forty second street and the second was the erec- ton of the Fifth Avenue hotel at the in- tersection of the avenue with Broadway and Twenty-third street. The hotel was for many years the most famous caravan sary in the country while the reser- voir soon became the favorite terminus for Sunday strolls the inception of the famous church parade which was for many years a feature of avenue life and which is still kept up after fashion on Easter Sunday. Between these two points and along the part of the avenue below Twenty third street the aristocracy of wealth which came into existence follow ing the civil war built it's homes. A lit- tie later the opening of Central park set a new northern limit to the fashionable residence district, and as the ranks of those who numbered their wealth by hun dreds of thousands instead of by tens null tiplied this new territory was gradually occupied until the avenue was fanked by a double line of millionaires' residences extending in an almost unbroken success sion for two miles and a hail.
 This was Fifth avenue in the height of its glory when a directory of it's resi- dents would have included four-hfths of the very wealthy and very fashionable of the city, and when it held such show places as the Astor, Vanderbilt and Stew art homes. It was before the day of au- tomob1es or rubber-neck wagons with their vociferous lecturers" but the New Yorker never failed to take his country cousins for walk ''up the avenue" and to descant upon the glories of its magnifl- cent establishments and of the famous ones whom they sheltered. Perhaps he had a chance also to point out William H. Vanderbilt or Robert Bonner setting out behind some world-renowned trotting horse for a spin through Central Park or Ward McAllister, arbiter of the -Four Hundred" strolling along the sidewalk after luncheon at Delmonico's or the Brunswick.
 Following and overlapping the era when Fifth avenue was solely a residence cfr vubo ba