D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A un-Loire Valley mansion on the lot next to her parents on 79th Street. You could build a massive mansion in the city for that sum in those days. All four Brokaw houses were still standing, three quarters of a century later. That’s quite a record for any edifice in Manhattan real estate above 14th Street. This was hot property in the budding metropolis and, amazingly, it has remained so, though almost all of the real estate built then has long since been demolished and replaced. The world of Fifth Avenue at the turn of the century was all brand new with palaces being erected on the wide boulevard, streaming with the most
fabulous new invention for the rich: the horseless carriage. It was probably in the early springtime at the time the photo was taken. (I’m guessing as much because of the leafless trees on the west side of the avenue, the open roadster traveling south, and the woman on the corner with the young boy and the dog.) It was, indeed, early springtime for New York society in the early 20th century! The great economic boom after the Civil War had raised the city’s population (which included the boroughs) to more than 4.5 million. Half had come from Eastern and Western Europe. The section of Fifth Avenue in this pho-
tograph had been newly developed out of barren, almost treeless land of occasional farmhouses and even shacks in the last quarter of the 19th century. Brokaw’s mansion was one of the first in the area. A year later, across the street from Brokaw and on the right side of the photo, Isaac and Mary Fletcher arrived to construct a mansion on the southern corner of 79th Street, which was completed in 1891. The block across the street from Brokaw, where Fletchers built his mansion, was originally owned by a businessman named Henry H. Cook, who made his fortune in banking and (like many other millionaires of the day) in railroads.
Cook knew this was where the city’s rich were going to want to live—and how right he was. In 1880, he purchased the entire block between Madison and Fifth avenues and 78th and 79th streets. In 1883, he built himself a large five-story mansion on the corner of 78th Street and Fifth Avenue. He also had made up his mind that no commercial structures or apartment houses were going to occupy his block— ever. There was a codicil in the deeds he sold forbidding anything but the building of private-family houses—again, forever. Furthermore, Cook expected those houses to be mansions and nothing less. Because he was already wealthy
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