It actually dates to 1831.
Among the merchants who built in that year were Thomas Suffern, Saul Allen, John Johnston, George Griswold, James Boorman, and William C.
Rhinelander.

It was their type of house that was accepted for the neighbourhood as the first streets began to open to the right and left of Fifth Avenue.

That northern stretch of the Square, first invaded in fiction by Henry James, has ever been a favourite background of the story-spinners, who never tire of contrasting its tone of well-bred aristocracy with the squalor, half-Bohemian and half-proletarian, that faces it from across the Park.

In fiction one does not necessarily have to be of an old New York family in order to inhabit one of those north-side dwellings.

Robert Walmsley, of O.Henry's "The Defeat of the City," lived there, and the boyhood to which he looked back was one spent on an up-state farm; while another erstwhile tenant in the exclusive row was the devious Artemas Quibble, of Mr.Arthur Train's narrative, who began life humbly somewhere in grey New England, and ended it, so far as the reader was informed, in Sing Sing Prison.