Then, at the north-west corner of Fifty-fourth Street, is the University Club, to the mind of Mr.Arnold Bennett, the finest of all the fine buildings that line the Avenue.

"The residential blocks to the north of Fifty-ninth Street," he wrote in the book that on this side of the North Atlantic was known as "Your United States," "fall short of their pretensions in beauty and interest.

But except for the miserly splitting, here and there, in the older edifices, of an inadequate ground floor into a mezzanine and a narrow box, there is nothing mean in the whole street from the Plaza to Washington Square.
Much mediocre architecture, of course, but the general effect homogeneous and fine, and, above all, grandly generous....

The single shops, as well as the general stores and hotels on Fifth Avenue, are impressive in the lavish spaciousness of their disposition.

Neither stores nor shops could have been conceived, or could be kept, by merchants without genuine imagination and faith." Bennett, though not in an unkindly spirit, was looking for aspects, not to praise, but to abuse.