The New York of Yesterday

After being arrayed in battle panoply for five years in an effort to have the name affixed to some location within its confines, it is with unfeigned pleasure that the announcement is made that the Board of Aldermen passed an ordinance which was approved by Mayor McClellan and became a law on the 9th day of January, 1907, designating the triangular plot at the junction of Broadway, West End Avenue, 106th and 107th Streets, "Bloomingdale Square."

In the good old days, sometime after the settlement of this island by our Holland ancestors, the middle west section thereof received from the place of that name near Haarlem, in Holland, the name "Bloemendael." Its earliest history is lost in tradition. Indian trails led over and across it. Where the tepees were located, how the wild creatures which prowled through its woods disappeared, and how and when the territory, densely covered with the denizens of the forest, became denuded, we are left to conjecture. At a later date its pastoral scenes were apostrophized by Irving, whose magic pen has immortalized the "River of the Mountains," as "a sweet and rural valley, beautiful with many a bright wild flower, refreshed by many a pure streamlet, and enlivened here and there by a delectable little Dutch cottage, sheltered under some sloping hill and almost buried in embowering trees."