In 1827 the Astor hand reached up to this then remote section, William B.Astor purchasing a half-interest, including Fifth Avenue from Thirty-second to Thirty-fifth, for twenty thousand five hundred dollars.

While other real-estate investors who considered themselves astute were planning for the future by gobbling up stretches of land along the shore of the East River the Astors were buying across what was primitively known as the backbone of the island.
The sharp rise to what was the old summit and to the modified hill of the present does not begin until Thirty-third Street is reached.

But there is perceptible a grade of a kind as soon as the Avenue leaves the northern line of the Square.

Today it is a slope in transition.

Here and there the change has been wrought.