Murray Hill building ornaments

Some neighborhoods in NY have all these handsome old houses, many with distinctive ornamentation...

Wonder when this house dates from. Probably the 1860's.

Internet on Murray Hill:

Nineteenth century

During the 19th century, this neighborhood was "uptown" with the city ending with the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street covering what today is the New York Public Library and Bryant Park. To the north was for the most part farmland. In the bitter winter of 1808 during the embargo that closed New York harbor, an innovative work relief program kept out-of-work dock workers busy reducing the height of Murray Hill;^[10] between twenty and forty feet were sliced off its summit and used for fill.^[11] In 1833 the railroad cut was begun, to carry the New York and Harlem Rail Road through Murray Hill; the route under the most prominent obstacle in its right-of-way was opened 1 May 1834;^[12] then the locomotives, which had met the horse-cars that ran through the city's streets at the station at 27th Street, could pass the reduced hill; by an act of 1850 the city pemitted to roof over the cut for the passage of steam locomotives. This Park Avenue Tunnel, enlarged and relined, is devoted to automobile traffic since 1937.^[13]
In mid-century the rich, temporarily, and the upper middle class more permanently filled the brownstone row houses that filled Murray Hill's streets, the Brick Presbyterian Church followed its congregation; selling its site facing City Hall Park, it rebuilt in 1857 closer to its congregation, on the smoothed brow of Murray Hill, at Fifth Avenue and 37th Street.^[14] But when J. P. Morgan built his conservative brownstone free-standing mansion in 1882 on Madison Avenue at 36th Street, which is today a part of The Morgan Library & Museum, it was considered a fashionable but slightly old-fashioned address,^[15] as the rich were filling Fifth Avenue with palaces as far as Central Park. Instead stylish merchandising was changing the neighborhood; Madison Square Park, at this time considered a part of Murray Hill, was bordered by the fashionable ladies' shops of the day on Fifth Avenue.

[edit] Twentieth century

For much of the 20th century, the neighborhood was a quiet and rather formal place, with many wealthy older residents. Since the late 1990s, many upper-class young professionals in their twenties and thirties have begun to move into the area.^[16] On weekends, the raucous restaurant-and-bar scene along Third Avenue, beyond the traditional eastern limits of Murray Hill, particularly reflects this change.
The community is also home to the CUNY Graduate Center which share the landmark former B. Altman Building with the New York Public Library Science, Industry and Business Library or SIBL and Oxford University Press. The neighborhood is also home to Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University, The Morgan Library & Museum and Scandinavia House - The Nordic Center in America, The Mexican Cultural Institute of New York and a historically notable private institution, the Union League Club of New York. On January 29, 2008, the Whitney Museum of American Art branch gallery at what had been the Philip Morris headquarters opposite Grand Central Terminal closed after a 25-year run. For around fifty years the neighborhood has been home to National Review, the conservative journal of opinion founded by William F. Buckley, Jr., most of that time at 150 East 35th Street, currently at 215 Lexington Avenue at 33rd Street. 150 East 35th Street was purchased by Yeshiva University.

Highrise condominiums

 Twenty-first century

Though housing in the neighborhood is slightly cheaper than in fashionable nearby parts of Manhattan, prices for apartments here rose a great deal during the boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s—as much as 500 percent in a decade.