Corner of the four jewels

Real Estate Weekly, April 4, 2001 by Faith Hope Consolo

Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue is often called the "corner of the four jewels." This used to be confusing, because although on three corners of Fifth and 57th are the jewelry establishments of Tiffany & Co., Bulgari, and Van Cleef & Arpels, on the fourth corner was the Warner Bros. store. Though most of us love Bugs Bunny, he is definitely a jewel of another kind.

However, Bugs has left and will be replaced by LVMH, Moet-Hennessy Louis Vuitton. That's more like it. Between Fifth and Madison Avenues is the most expensive stretch of retail space in the world. There, one finds Tiffany & Co., which is in the process of total renovation; Nike Town, and Tourneau Time Machine on the south side of the street. On the north side are the future LVMH, Chanel, Burberry, which is expanding to the old Escada space, a future Jil Sander, Christian Dior, and Christian Dior Joallerie.

But it wasn't always like this: before the Civil War, Fifth Avenue north of 48th Street wasn't much. It was devoted to charitable institutions, mostly orphanages and hospitals. The land was considered worthless, for no one believed that the city would ever extend that far. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese sold the property for St. Patrick's Cathedral for one dollar. Above 57th Street, Fifth Avenue became a dirt road through bogs and stone covered land that boasted a few trees and bushes. Squatters lived there in shanties and semi-wild animals, dogs, horses, goats, cattle roamed free. There were pigsties -- and the Arsenal, built there in 1848 so that the stored munitions wouldn't pose any threat to city residents. The Arsenal still stands, headquarters of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

From 1867 to 1869, Mrs. Isaac Jones, whose husband's family owned Chemical Bank and was Edith Wharton's aunt, disregarded all of the above and built a row of five marble houses, known as Marble Row, between 57th and 58th Streets, each with its own entrance. She lived in the one on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street and leased the others. Her home stood on the present LVMH location.

I'm sure she had a somewhat isolated life for a while, but eventually, others followed. On the northwest corner, in the 1880's, William K. Vanderbilt and his wife, Alice Gwynne, built the most imposing of all the Fifth Avenue Vanderbilt Mansions.

Bergdorf Goodman/Van Cleef & Arpels is there now. In 1892, Collis P. Huntington built his mansion on the southeast corner where Tiffany's is today. On the southwest corner was Frederic Stevens' mansion. He was a banker. The mansion was described as being decorated in a very "artistic" manner -- lots of Chinoiserie, tapestries, stuffed birds. It's Bulgari now. In 1916, a new zoning law was passed, allowing more commercial structures on the Avenue. The residential area of the Avenue had, for the most part, already moved farther uptown by then anyway.

Today, when one stands on the jeweled corner, it is impossible to imagine the wilderness of just over a hundred years ago -- completely impossible.