James Gordon Bennett's city residence was on the Avenue at Thirty-eighth Street.

In fact, with a few notable exceptions who still clung to their downtown homes, such as the Astors and the Vanderbilts, all the great money kings of the decade were gathering in the upper stretches of the ripening thoroughfare.

But the descendants of the Patroons held to the sweep from Washington Square to Fourteenth Street, or to lower Second Avenue, which, to the eyes of its "set," embracing a number of old-school families of Colonial ancestry, was the "Faubourg St.Germain" of New York.
In every other memoir touching on the New York of the sixties will be found an allusion to the Flora McFlimseys.

For example, Mr.W.D.
Howells, in "Literary Friends and Acquaintances," told of his first visit to the city at the time of the Civil War.

After Clinton Place was passed, he wrote: "Commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kind dwelt unmolested in the brown-stone stretches of Fifth Avenue." There are two poems linked with the story of New York.