Year: 1876

Real Estate and Business Centres.


New York city is very much like London


in its tendency 10 create business and social


centres During the period of growth these


centres have been changing from year to
year, and the fashionable quarter. owing to
the encroachments of business has been in
different locality in every decade. 1t is
within the memory Of many of our oldest
inhabitants when the Battery was still the
resort of fashion. Mr.. Thurlow Weed called
the attention of our readers the other day to
the time, not so long ago in the history
of great city, when Canal street was
still a swamp. Bleecker street opened
its fashionable portals to the boarding house
mistress within the memory of all. The Fifth
avenue celebrated in satire and in song was
below Twenty-third street. and Flora Nc
Flimsey herself dwelt in Madison square.
Now, however, the fashionable quarter does
not extend below Murray Hill, while the
whole district between ''down town" and


'"up town" is given up to retail trade and
the middle class of boarding houses. South
of Twenty-third street everything is bust
ness. The artists are gathered about Union
square, and every calling which has any re-
lation to the arts is ensconcing itself in that
neighborhood. The wholesale trade is
making its centre in Broadway between
Tenth and Canal streets, and the lateral and
parallel thoroughfares in that part of the
city, but yesterday the haunts of vice, are
l..
palaces and factories But another change
this time in localities where ten years ago it
was deemed the character of the business
had become fixed, is inevitable. The erec-
ton of the new Post Office has made the
transfer of the money centre from Wall and
Broad streets to the neighborhood of the
City Hall Park necessity. Already the
banks and banking houses and insurance
offices are beginning to cluster in that To-
cality. From Chambers to Lispenard street
up Broadway at the demand for a new money
centre, while below Fulton street the inn
mense warehouses required by commerce
will have a splendid district contiguous
TO the harbor for the accommodation and de-
velopment of our foreign trade. This
York as a great commercial metropolis has
every reason to congratulate itself When
the change is effected, as it must be within q
comparatively short period, every line of
business and of trade will have locality
admirably suited to its peculiar necessities
I, ,o11 4Ho
and the Eighth, will be the centres of the
retail traffic The importers of foreign
goods and the metropolitan agencies for
American manufactures will have an ad-
mirable locality for their specialties in what
is becoming the new wholesale centre. Wall
street is the natural home of the ship
master and the shipping agent, and the neigh
borhood of the new Post Office the true fnan-
cial centre of the metropolis. With these
changes effected the fluctuations of business
centres will cease and the city will settle
into well defined and thorough marked busi-
ness localities. This will give q per-
manence to trade which it has never had,
owing to the tendencies to change arising
out of metropolitan growth, and it will also
give stability to real estate values which
has been wanting in the past, but is
especially desirable in the future. 1t is a
happy fact that these business fluctuations
are so nearly ended and it is especially for
tunate that the principles of natural selec-
ton which we have been applying to our
business localities have resulted in giving all
classes of trade centres peculiarly adapted to
their needs.