Scribner’s Sons, and Dodd, Mead and Company, the last-named being the pioneer in the movement northward when it relinquished its corner at the Avenue and Twenty-first Street to try the slope of Murray Hill at Thirty-fifth Street on land that is now occupied by the Bazaar of Best and Company.  The international house of Brentano, before it moved into its present headquarters in the Brunswick Building at Twenty-seventh Street, was in Union Square.  Today Brentano’s is the largest shop of its kind in the city, while Scribner’s, on the east side of the Avenue at Forty-eighth Street, has been called “the most beautiful bookstore in the world.”

In the new shopping district beginning at Thirty-fourth Street and running along the Avenue almost to the Plaza, like the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, so the saying goes, exclusiveness for the masses, Altaian was the pioneer.  In view of what was then considered the prohibitively high price of real estate the projected invasion of the Avenue by the department stores was thought extremely hazardous.  In 1901 the street still suggested the time when it had been lined by the dull, monotonous high stoops.  Those old fronts had been knocked away, business had invaded many of the lower stories, but there still remained something of the former flavour.  But property holders were awake to their opportunities.  Inside lots twenty-five by one hundred feet on the Avenue were held at one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, and corner lots correspondingly higher.  Within two years these prices had doubled and trebled.  Altman’s, covering an entire block, eight stories in height, with an addition that rises twelve stories, is a stately guardian of the corner at which the Avenue becomes the Lane of magnificent commerce.  The building, of French stone, was designed by Trowbridge and Livingston.  Directly across the street is an entrance to McCreery’s, although that establishment faces on Thirty-fourth Street.  Above McCreery’s, opposite the corner where the New York Club once had its home, and on property part of which was formerly the house of the Engineers Club, is Best’s, once Lilliputian in more than one sense, but no more so.  Thereafter every block has its imposing monument to commerce.  Silverware is represented by Gorham’s at Thirty-sixth Street.  Furs in magnificent display fill the windows of Gunther’s Sons between Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh.  At the southeast corner of Thirty-seventh Street is Tiffany’s.  Information as to the nature of the merchandise in which the establishment deals would be superfluous, and the management is evidently of the opinion that the display in the windows tells the story to all the world, for the passer-by will look in vain for any lettering indicating the ownership.  Instead, there is a bronze figure of Atlas, bearing a huge clock on his shoulders, adorning the facade of the edifice.  The clock is the old Tiffany clock.  Of American make, dating from 1850, it was for many years in front of the original