In spite of rubber-neck wagons and personally con- ducted tours, the best way of seeing Fifth Avenue remains the cheapest —the upper deck of a stage. And the least observant tourist, viewing the street from this dizzy platform, must notice the sudden transformation at Thirtyfourth Street…

From ten o’clock to six, it is as though twenty matinees were letting out at once —in winter a dark, rich mosaic of fur coats; in May, a rippling flower-bed.

You are entering by its main gate the Woman’s City, the Ladies’ Acre, the eight or ten square blocks of New York which the spending sex holds as its very own. For here, after the last nervous northward movement, settled the more ambitious department-stores and the larger specialty shops. The business of ministering to woman’s more expensive wants is massed in this district as definitely as the theaters are massed between Times Square and Columbus Circle. A few stragglers have settled in the region of Thirty-fourth and Broadway; one daring establishment, as though anticipating the future, has erected its new building at Fiftieth Street just opposite St. Patrick’s Cathedral; the oldest of all has held the fort for fifty years at Astor Place. These, I think, are the only important exceptions.

In the Woman’s City — eight blocks of Fifth Avenue with spurs running westward along the cross-town arteries of Thirty-fourth and Forty-second —the rest have erected their eight or ten story buildings with ground areas of half a block.…Your grandmother, middleaged madame, bought her crinolines and basques in Canal Street; your mother her shirt-waists and brush braid in the Ladies’ Mile between Union Square and Madison Square; you purchase your transparent hose and your sport sweaters in the Woman’s City above Thirty-fourth Street. And it is not unlikely that your greatgranddaughter will shop for her synthetic diamonds and her Tibetan sandals in this identical spot.…

The street is smartest at about ten or eleven in the morning, when the rich, taking advantage of their leisure, shop early and avoid the rush.…

So at this time of day gleaming limousines and imported berlines line all the curbs, and correct chauffeurs, guarded by equally correct and important chows or police-dogs, gaze impersonally on the distance. Presently madame emerges, usually in the expensive simplicity of clothes that are all lines and a hat that is all shape.…

Before the war there may have been some excuse for a woman’s going to Europe for the purpose of adorning her person or her house. But since New York became by a capricious gift of the gods financial capital of the world, her only excuse is the excitement of the trip.

Abercrombie & Fitch Company