It was a far different neighbourhood forty-five years ago.

Henry James, writing in 1873, in "The Impressions of a Cousin" (Tales of Three Cities), said: "How can I sketch Fifty-third Street?
How can I even endure Fifty-third Street?
When I turn into it from the Fifth Avenue the vista seems too hideous, the narrow, impersonal houses with the hard, dry tone of their brown-stone, a surface as uninteresting as that of sandpaper, their steep, stiff stoops, their lumpish balustrades, porticos, and cornices.

I have yet to perceive the dignity of Fifty-third Street." Besides being a stretch of clubs it is a stretch of churches.

Shrinking back from the sidewalk on the east side of the Avenue between Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Streets is the Church of the Heavenly Rest.
So inconspicuous in appearance is it that once a passer-by commented: "I can perceive the Heavenly, but where is the Rest ?" Two blocks to the north, at the corner of Forty-eighth, is the Collegiate Church of St.
Nicholas, occupying the block between Fiftieth and Fifty-first is the Cathedral, and at Fifty-third is Saint Thomas's.

Once the tract from Forty-seventh to Fifty-first Street was occupied by the Elgin Botanical Gardens.