Generations of East 72nd Street, Part II

By 1890, New York was largest city in the country with a population of more than 1.5 million. As it was expanding real estate was escalating. By the mid-1890s, the block of East 72nd Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues reflected this expansion grandly. In 1890, James Burden, whose father Henry had founded a very prosperous iron works company in Albany, New York, purchased a double lot on the southeast corner of 72nd and Fifth from the Lenox estate and built a mansion that was completed in 1893.