Mr.Crimmins's father was a contractor and at one time in the employ of Thomas Addis Emmet, whose country-seat was on the Boston Post Road near Fifty-ninth Street.
[Illustration: SOUTH OF WHERE "ST.

GAUDENS'S HERO, GAUNT AND GRIM, RIDES ON WITH VICTORY LEADING HIM," MAY BE SEEN THE FOUNTAIN OF ABUNDANCE, AND, IN THE BACKGROUND, THE NEW PLAZA HOTEL] Says Mr.Crimmins: "In the immediate vicinity were the country-seats of other prominent New Yorkers, such as the Buchanans, who were the forebears of the Goelets, the Adriance, Jones, and Beekman families, the Schermerhorns, Hulls, Setons, Towles, Willets, Lenoxes, Delafields, Primes, Rhinelanders, Lefferts, Hobbs, Rikers, Lawrences, and others.

A little farther to the north were the country-seats of the Goelets, Gracies, and the elder John Jacob Astor.

With all these people, who were practically the commercial founders of our city, my father had an acquaintance.

The wealthy merchants of New York at that period frequently invested their surplus in outlying property and left its care largely in the hands of my father, who opened up estates, as he did the Anson Phelps place in the vicinity of Thirtieth Street, which ran north and extended from the East River to Third Avenue.