“The carriage, a light swift phaeton, clattered north on to Broadway, and north again on to Fifth Avenue where the street widened suddenly and generously, a fat ribbon of macadam as much breathing room as road between the stone and marble palaces that faced the world and each other with fierce implacable splendor.

The phaeton gathered speed.  It shot past Delmonico’s, the handsome dinner crowd thinned to a trickle; past the Manhattan Club and the churches of the Presbyterian and the South Dutch Reformed; past the dazzling lights of the Fifth Avenue Hotel; past Madison Square, the Hotel Brunswick and Stevens House, where monied families lived in flats that some called “mere shelves under a common roof.”

At the northwest corner of Thirty-fourth Street, the new residence of the merchant prince Stewart sat unoccupied, and the horses snorted and pawed at the pavement, as if finally awed, either by the mansion’s magnificence or perhaps by its ghostliness.  Further down, at Forty-third Street, the phaeton slowed again as the driver, the tall man dressed in black, stood to tip his hat at the home of “Boss” William Tweed, Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall.”