A Herter Brothers library rediscovered.

The history of 634 Fifth Avenue, between Fiftieth and Fifty-first Streets, is a microcosm of the changing taste in architecture and interior design in New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the span of about sixty years, from the 1870s to the 1930s, this site, directly opposite Saint Patrick's Cathedral, was transformed from the sumptuous residence of Darius Ogden Mills (Fig. 1), decorated by Herter Brothers, to a component of Rockefeller Center, then the most ambitious and grandiose commercial enterprise in midtown New York. (1)

In the New York Times of October 30, 1910, the writer bemoans the demolition of some of the city's grandest private mansions and the transformation of Fifth Avenue north of Forty-second Street from a residential area to a commercial district. (2) In particular the author singles out the Mills house (see Fig. 3) and suggests that only a few years earlier the idea of demolition would have been unthinkable. Mills had died on January 3, 1910, at Happy House, his residence in Millbrae, California, south of San Francisco. However, the death knell for the neighborhood had been sounded in 1908 when the firm of W. W and T. M. Hall erected a twelve-story apartment house, itself an architectural innovation for Fifth Avenue, that replaced the private residence immediately north of the Mills house. The two houses to the south-632, occupied since 1902 by the philanthropist Mrs. Russell Sage (1828-1918), and 630, by Henry Clews (1834-1923), a banker--had both already been replaced by office buildings. Only the house at the southwest corner of Fiftieth Street, occupied by Benjamin Altman (1840-1913), a dry-goods merchant, remained in private hands after 1910.

The eight-story office building that replaced the Mills house was also built by the Hall firm and designed by George Provot (l869-l936) in a utilitarian, modern mode with broad bands of windows set in a limestone, brick, and terracotta facade. (3) The Provot building was, in turn, the victim of escalating real estate values in 1929, when John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874--1960) began to assemble the properties between Forth-eighth and Fifty-first Streets and Fifth and Sixth Avenues to erect Rockefeller Center. Today, the colossal bronze statue of Atlas stands on the site of the Mills house.

Mills was a self-made man who descended from a family of Scotch-English ancestry. Born in North Salem, Westchester County, New York, he began his career as a clerk in New York City after family financial reversals caused him to abandon hopes of higher education. In 1847, recognizing his aptitude for business, a cousin offered him a minor partnership in the Merchants' Bank of Erie County in Buffalo. After the discovery of gold in California, Mills secured financial backing and set off for San Francisco. He arrived there in June 1849 and used his capital to establish a trading company first in Stockton and later in Sacramento. The lively exchange of gold dust for goods proved profitable, and within a year he established the basis of his fortune--the bank of D. O. Mills and Company. Mills also held stock in the Comstock Mines, and in 1864 he, William C. Ralston (1826--1875), and others founded the Bank of California of which Mills was president until he retired in 1873. When the bank suffered reversal due to th e panic of 1873 and mismanagement, Mills stepped in again as president in 1875, retiring for the second time in 1878, one of the richest men in the United States.

In 1860 Mills purchased five hundred acres of an old Spanish colonial estate, Rancho Buri Buri on the peninsula south of San Francisco, and established a dairy farm. (4) In 1869, he resolved to build a new house and hired Diaper and Saeltzer (1869--1871), New York architects who formed a partnership in San Francisco, to erect a massive forty-room, three-story, French Second Empire style house. The appearance of what was christened Happy House is well documented by a series of formal exterior and interior photographs taken by Carleton E. Watkins (1829--1916) about 1871. (5) Herter Brothers executed the initial interior decoration of the main floor and second-floor picture gallery, as documented by the Watkins photographs. (6) Then in 1879 and 1880, the firm transformed the first and second floors into an elaborate interior in the aesthetic style, although they retained much of the original neo-grec furniture from the first decorating campaign. (7)

In 1880, Mills purchased 634 Fifth Avenue from the financier David P. Morgan (1831-1886) and again hired Herter Brothers to redo the interior. This site along Fifth Avenue was largely undeveloped until the Morgan house and the symmetrical, somewhat smaller, two-bay houses to the north and south were erected in 1872 by the architect Charles W. Clinton (1838--1910) and builder James Bogert. (8)

Prior to this first and last residential development, this block was part of the Elgin Botanic Garden founded in 1801 by Dr. David Hosack (1769--l835), a physician and botanist at Columbia College, to stimulate civic interest in horticulture and aid in medicinal studies at the college. The garden, which extended from Forty-seventh to Fifty-first Streets and from Fifth Avenue to within one hundred feet of Sixth Avenue, were too far north of the center of town to be a financial success, and in 1810 the state legislature purchased the land for $74,268.75. Four years later the state ceded the garden to Columbia College. By the 1820s an ...