Park Avenue hadn’t always been fancy. It hadn’t always been Park. Initially, when the grid was devised, it was plain old Fourth Avenue. Like much of Manhattan, it had been wooded; roads were cut in the seventeenth century through primeval forests. But by the nineteenth century, the street was smoky and dirty, with railroad tracks stretching down the middle, and factories, breweries, and saloons lining the roads. (A newspaper reported workmen contracting cholera from eating green apples they picked along what is now Park.) But once the railroads (which had once been pulled by horses) were moved
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