"THE HEART OF GOTHAM." Intersection of Twenty-third Street, Broadway and Fifth Avenue, New York City. Looking Down from the Flatiron" Building.

I

Na humorous sketch in Lee Fairchild's now defunct "Thistle Magazine," that entertaining writer with ponderous levity commented on the moving of New York's business center from its old-time home around Park Place and the Brooklyn Bridge to the vicinity of Madison Square, by means of a parable suggested by the moving of the "Times" from Park Row to Longacre Square. He suggested that New York was wildly excited by the news that the New York "World" meant to have a house-moving time and that the huge, golden-domed building was to be moved on gigantic rollers up Broadway to a new home to the northward, widening and wakening Broadway as it passed along, or something to that effect. Whatever the original meaning of the nonsensical little sketch may have been, there is no doubt of its truth when it intimated that to keep up with the times, the worldNew York's business world (and therefore, in many people's estimation, THE world) had to pick itself up bodily and move northward. So now its activity swirls around the

vortex of which Twenty-third Street and the Flatiron Building, with its interesting breezes, is the important center.

From the Battery to Twenty-third Street there are but four other streets that run entirely across the island, from North River to East River. They are: Fulton, Grand, Thirteenth and Fourteenth streets. Each of these streets has, in its turn, been the center of business activity, each in turn yielding the palm to its northern neighbor, then fading into the ordinary, humdrum monotone of a steady routine, leaving it to the latest center to be the exciting center of the whirlpool. This is within the memory of at least one old New Yorker whose grandfather lived in a palatial mansion on Bowling Green, when the center of things pertaining to business was around the Battery. In its upward move, it lingered long and fondly around Park Place and the Brooklyn Bridge, loath to leave its old historical home for streets that were mere pastures or cabbage gardens not so long since. A few years ago Fourteenth Street, then Union Square, deserved the term of

LOOKING SOUTH FROM THE TIMES BUILDING. Broadway and Forty-second Street.

Seventh Avenue.