Viewed from the bay, the business part of the Borough of Manhattan presents a most extraordinary conglomeration of towering office buildings, varying from ten to twenty-five stories in height, huddled together in apparent confusion upon a strip of land less than a mile wide. Beginning at the Battery, the first building of importance is the Produce Exchange, a modern Renaissance structure of brick and terra cotta, with a fine tower 225 feet high. Opposite the Exchange, on Bowling Green, is the new Custom House, upon the site of the official residence built by the city for General Washington. From Bowling Green to Wall Street, Broadway is lined with immense business structures, each of them costing millions of dollars, occupied by the Standard Oil Company, the Manhattan Life Insurance Company, the Commercial Cable Company, the Union Trust Company, and other large corporations.

The Consolidated Stock and Petroleum Exchange is at Broadway and Exchange Place. From Trinity Church, running east to the river, is Wall Street, a narrow thoroughfare so completely lined on both sides with buildings from twelve to twenty stories high, used by banks and financial institutions, as to resemble more a canon than a street. Chief among the buildings here are the great banks, and the Sub-Treasury, a Doric building of granite, upon the site of the Old City Hall, from the balcony of which Washington was inaugurated as first President of the United States. In Broad Street, which runs south from the Sub-Treasury, is the new Stock Exchange, costing $2,000,000. Opposite the Stock Exchange is the Mills Building, erected twenty years ago at a cost of $4,000,000. It was the first of the luxurious office buildings in the financial district.

On the other side of Exchange Place is the Broad-Exchange, a twenty-story granite pile. Trinity Church, the most interesting of New York's churches, stands upon land granted by the English Government in 1697. The original plot embraced a tract of many acres running down to the Hudson River. The first church was completed in 1697, the present one in 1846.It is a Gothic structure of brown stone. In the churchyard are many monuments in memory of well-known persons. On Broadway, from Trinity Church to the City Hall, are some of the most imposing of the insurance buildings. That of the Equitable Life Assurance Society occupies a whole block.

Here also is the building of the American Surety Company, with a cornice 307 feet above the pavement and a foundation extending 72 feet below the street. On the opposite side of Broadway is the main office of the Western Union Telegraph Company. In Cedar Street, a few doors from Broadway, is the Clearing House, maintained by the associated banks of New York. It is a beautiful structure of white marble. In Liberty Street is the palatial home of the Chamber of Commerce. At the junction of Broadway and Park Row stands the Post Office, a large and imposing composite structure, of Doric and Renaissance, upon a triangular plot. Opposite the Post Office is Saint Paul's Chapel, where Washington's pew is shown.

Across the way is the old Astor House, a granite hotel which fifty years ago was considered the most luxurious establishment of its kind in the country. Above the Post Office is the City Hall, in City Hall Park. Near by are the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, the great buildings of the WORLD, TRIBUNE, and TIMES on the east, and the lofty structures of the Postal Telegraph Building and Home Insurance Company on the west. To the south is the Park Row Building, one of the tallest in the country, twenty-five stories high, not counting the towers. 

The City Hall is the most beautiful of New York's earlier buildings. It was begun in 1803 and finished in 1812 at a cost of $500,000. White marble was used for the front and sides, but brown stone for the back, as it was supposed that the city would not extend beyond it. Back of the City Hall is the County Court House, a marble building in Corinthian style, and almost opposite, at the corner of Chambers and Centre Streets, is the new and palatial Hall of Records. The Criminal Courts Building, a superb structure on Centre Street, is connected with the Tombs prison by a covered bridge. The Tombs, a nickname of the city prison, suggested by its original gloomy architecture in Egyptian style, rebuilt in 1898 and much enlarged, is now, architecturally, one of the finest of modern prisons.

Broadway, from Chambers Street to tenth, is largely given up to wholesale trade, one of the most prominent features along the route, however, being the massive building of the New York Life Insurance Company. West of Broadway, below Canal Street, lies the great wholesale dry goods centre of the United States, and farther uptown are the wholesale dealers in straw goods, millinery, feathers, and ready-made clothing. Where Broadway changes its direction at Tenth Street, the character of business changes.

Here is Grace Church, one of the most attractive ecclesiastical edifices in New York. It is an ornate Gothic structure, built of white limestone. There are other buildings connected with the church, the whole forming a striking group. In this neighborhood are the Astor Library, long the most important library in the city, the Mercantile Library, and at Fourth Avenue and Eighth Street, Cooper Union (q.v.), a brownstone building erected in 1857. Union Square, once the limit of the retail business of the city, and until 1860 surrounded by private houses, is now wholly given up to business. At the lower end of Fifth Avenue, in Washington Square, stands the Washington Arch, erected by popular subscription at a cost of $128,000, and completed in 1892. It is 70 feet high. On the east side of Washington Square is the large building of New York University, housing the schools of Law and Pedagogy and the Graduate School, and various business establishments. It occupies the site of the celebrated Gothic collegiate structure pulled down in 1894-95. 

In the district north by east of Union Square lies Gramercy Park, and, at Second Avenue, Stuyvesant Square, on which stands Saint George's Church, with its lofty spires. At Eleventh Street and Second Avenue is the old home of the New York Historical Society, built in 1857. The new building of the society, at Seventy-sixth Street and Central Park West, will cost $1,000,000. The new Lying-in Hospital at Second Avenue and East Seventeenth Street is one of the handsomest structures of its class in the city. Bellevue Hospital, founded in 1826, occupies two blocks extending from Twenty-sixth to Twenty-eighth street on First Avenue to the East River; the City Morgue is situated in the grounds at the foot of Twenty-sixth Street. Broadway from Ninth Street to Thirty-fifth Street, Sixth Avenue, and Fourteenth and Twenty-third streets, contain most of the great retail shops of the metropolis. When the HERALD Building, copied after a Venetian Palace, was built at Thirty-fifth Street and Broadway in 1894, there were but few large retail stores in the neighborhood.

To-day the vicinity of Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street bids fair to become the centre of retail trade. One of the largest department stores in the country occupies the block on the west side of Broadway between Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth streets. Along the line of Broadway, from Twenty-third to Fifty-ninth street, are situated a number of important hotels, apartment houses, and the leading theatres of the city. At the angle of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, upon a triangle, 87 by 190 feet, stands a twenty-story wedge-shaped building known as the "Flatiron," visible for miles, and presenting a striking architectural contrast with the Madison Square Garden. The graceful tower of the latter copied from the Giralda of Seville, is surmounted by a gilded statue of Diana. On the east side of Madison Square is the handsome office building of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Another beautiful and imposing marble building is the Court House at Twenty-fifth Street and Madison Avenue, used by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court.

Saint Patrick's Cathedral (Roman Catholic) on Fifth Avenue, between Fiftieth and Fifty-first streets, ranks among the most imposing Gothic edifices in this country. It is built of white marble in the form of a Latin cross, and its two beautiful spires rise to a height of 332 feet. It cost $2,000,000. The corner-stone was laid in 1858, and the church was dedicated on May 25, 1879. At Forty-second Street and Fourth Avenue is the Grand Central Station. Above Fifty-ninth Street, on Broadway, apartment hotels are the great feature of this thoroughfare. The first hotels of this character, in which the tenants furnish their own apartments, but take their meals in a common dining-room, appeared in 1888.

To-day there are more than one hundred apartment hotels in Manhattan, each housing from 40 to 200 families, and many more are being built. One of the largest groups of apartment houses is that known as the Navarro, at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, built about sixteen years ago at a cost of $5,000,000. Another noted building of this type is the Dakota, at West Seventy-second Street, facing Central Park . One of the largest of the new apartment hotels is the Ansonia, at Seventy-fourth Street and Broadway, which covers a plot of land 200 X 400 feet, and is 16 stories high.

At 116th Street are the buildings of Columbia University, including a magnificent library, costing about $1,000,000. Near by are Saint Luke's Hospital and the beginnings of the great Protestant Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. The building stands upon a rocky bluff overlooking the Harlem plains on the east. Various estimates of from thirty to fifty years as the time required to finish the building have been made, and the cost may be anywhere from ten to twenty million dollars. In vastness of dimensions and beauty of design it will take its place among the great cathedrals of the world. 

On Amsterdam Avenue, between 109th and 110th streets, the new building of the National Academy of Design is approaching completion, the well known Venetian-Gothic building, formerly occupied by the Academy, at the corner of Twenty-third Street and Fourth Avenue, having been demolished in 1901. Facing Central Park on the west side of Seventy-seventh Street is the Museum of Natural History, one immense wing of which, the southern facade, is already complete. On the east side of the park, and within it, facing on Fifth Avenue at Eighty-second Street, is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

The Lenox Library occupies a massive limestone building fronting Central Park, between Seventieth and Seventy-first streets. Farther up Fifth Avenue at one Hundredth Street is the new Mount Sinai Hospital, one of the largest and most perfectly appointed in the country. At 123d Street and Riverside Drive is the tomb of General Grant, a mausoleum in classic style, covering an area about 100 feet square and rising 160 feet from the ground. It stands upon a bluff overlooking the Hudson . The cornerstone was laid in 1892 and the building was dedicated on April 27, 1897. The bodies of General Grant and his wife lie in twin granite sarcophagi in the crypt under the dome. Farther north, in the Borough of the Bronx, are the handsome library and other buildings of New York University.