Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 May 1901 — Tearing Down to Build Up. [ARTICLE]

Tearing Down to Build Up.

Wreckers are at present employed upon the A. T. Stewart palace, at Fifth avenue and Thirty-fourth street, New York. The material of which the magnificent dwelling was composed is being carted away to all parts of Manhattan island. Much of it will be used in the construction of smaller buildings. The marble of which the exterior walls were built is being sold to stonecutters. Great pieces of the finest Carrara marble, beautifully polished, which lined the dining-room and the ballroom, as well as those used in the wainscoting of the corridors, are to be transformed Into shafts, headstones, tombs, urns, broken columns and pillars to mark the resting places of the dead.

The annihilation of this beautiful pile is suggestive of the fate that has overtaken nearly all of the great merchant s achievements. The princely fortune that he left is scattered. His great store on Tenth street was long ago eclipsed by others a mile farther up town. His working women’s hotel has been converted to other uses. Aside from the identity of his name with one or two benevolences, there will be nothing left in a few years to remind the city of which A. T. Stewart was for years the greatest merchant that he ever lived. He did not build as wisely as some of the rich men of a later day. Commercialism entered into nearly all of his undertakings, and with the removal of his personality the monuments he created ceased to have life. Of all his investments, only those which were made to benefit others have any vitality today. These, unfortunately, are neither numerous nor conspicuous in a city and a country which in our time abound in great philanthropies.

Mrs. Margaret Deland, the novelist, has begun a series of flower sales at her Boston home for the benefit of the poor of that city.