On an unseasonably warm evening in April, 1866, a well-tailored gentleman with a drooping mustache and a long, thin, face, obviously a member of the “upper ten,” stood at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street in New York City, watching the tangle of traffic where Broadway slants across Fifth Avenue. A wilder individualism than we know today prevailed among the horsecars and omnibuses, the struggling carriages, drays, vans, and butchers’ carts of New York. Every wheel was turned, of course, by horsepower.
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