OTBKB loves Francis Morrone, and the articles he writes about New York buildings and history for the New York Sun.

After all these years and so many changes, Fifth Avenue from 34th to 59th Streets remains the city’s showplace thoroughfare. Walking north from the former B. Altman & Co. department store on the east side of the avenue between 34th and 35th Streets, one passes the Gorham Building, the old Tiffany Building, the former Knox Hat Building, the New York Public Library, the Scribner Bookstore, the Rockefeller Center Promenade, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Cartier store, St. Thomas Church, the Aeolian Building, the University Club, the Peninsula Hotel, and the St. Regis Hotel before reaching Grand Army Plaza and the Plaza Hotel.

Few cities can boast such an impressive sequence of buildings. I am reminded of why Arnold Bennett said in 1912 that Fifth Avenue was the most spectacular thing of its kind in the world. But the grand sequence also makes me angry at the unconscionable intrusions, the storefront modernizations, the banal office buildings, the glass facades, and the tawdry or vulgar stores and restaurants. What is it about New York that allows something so special and so beautiful to be trashed in the ways Fifth Avenue has been?