Streetscapes - A Woman With an Architectural Appetite - NYTimes.com Office for Metropolitan History Marble Row on Fifth Avenue, looking south from 58th Street, with Mary Mason Jones's house at the far right, at the 57th Street corner, about 1899. ONE of the most memorable passages in Edith Wharton's 1920 book, "The Age of Innocence," concerns the character Mrs. Manson Mingott, who builds a house at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, at that time mostly open land. "It was her habit," Wharton wrote, "to sit in a window of her sitting room on the ground floor, as if watching calmly for life and fashion to flow northward to her solitary door. ... She was sure that presently the quarries, the wooden greenhouses in ragged gardens, the rocks from which goats surveyed the scene, would vanish before the advance of residences as stately as her own. Wharton was drawing from childhood visits to a distant relative, Mary Mason Jones, who lived in a trendsetting white marble house she had built at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. In her novel, she does not mention that Mrs. Jones had an architectural appetite taking in not just a single house, but an entire gleaming row running from East 57th to 58th. In society in the 19th century, Jones was a grand name of the first order. The daughter of the president of Chemical Bank, Mrs. Jones was considered remarkable in her day: she was an early traveler on the Erie Canal, voyaged through Europe on a sketching tour, and in 1818, after her marriage to Isaac Jones, had the first bathtub in New York installed in her house on Chambers Street. She and two sisters had a triple house on Broadway near Waverly Place; the houses could be thrown together for entertaining. In 1868, Mrs. Jones began work on another unusual house, at the northeast corner of Fifth and 57th, a part of the city then still on the drawing board, with streets laid out and little more. The New York Times noted that the two-story mansard roof was carried to "a fabulous height." That was not the only distinctive aspect: Mrs. Jones also built a neighborhood, an entire row of houses taking up the rest of the block on Fifth Avenue. She had her architect, Robert Mook, clad them in brilliant white marble. Numbered 741-753 Fifth, they were quite a spectacle in brownstone New York. The marble set off the green grass in the front gardens, the gray slate of the mansard and the green copper trim. In 1871, a writer for The New York Evening Telegram found the year-old row reminiscent of a church, with Mrs. Jones's grand house as the front, facing 57th Street, and the rest of the row, stretching back along Fifth, like a nave. Four years later, The Real Estate Record and Guide, while admiring the whole, was able to find fault, saying, "The poverty of the deck cornice spoils the whole when you look more closely." Apparently this referred to the simplicity of the projection where the main wall meets the mansard. Mrs. Jones rented out the row, and the 1870 census indicates that her tenants were her equals, at least financially. One was Cyrus Clark, later to be important in developing the Upper West Side, and another was Henry Havemeyer, the sugar merchant, who went on to build a grand house at Fifth and 66th. Things became more complicated in the 1880s. Some of the houses were still single-family residences, like Dr. Charles Leale's. As a young surgeon, he had been the first doctor to reach Lincoln after he was shot. But there were over a dozen boarders - albeit well-to-do boarders - in 741 and 749 Fifth. The 1880 census found Mrs. Jones living in her mansion with her daughter, granddaughter and five servants. Censuses going back to the beginning of the 19th century show another intriguing aspect of the Jones family. Although elite districts were generally lily-white, servants included, the Joneses traditionally employed African-American help. In 1880, three of Mrs. Jones's servants were black: Susan Price, 30; Estelle Williams, 30; and Maria Williams, 50, all born in the South. The Williamses could neither read nor write; could they have been former slaves? A year after the 1880 census, when President James A. Garfield was assassinated, The Times reported that Dr. Leale's house, 745 Fifth, was virtually covered with a large American flag. By 1890 a furniture dealer had taken over No. 751 and a tailor was in No. Mrs. Jones died the next year. A bank took over the 58th Street corner in 1892. In 1908 The New York Herald reported on the wedding reception of Lydia Jones at Mrs. Jones's house. Miss Jones, the paper informed its readers, was her great-granddaughter, and the choice of location was "a matter of sentiment," since after the marriage the house was "to be dismantled at once." Here, too, a bank took over. Gradually what was sometimes called Marble Row was chewed up by conversion and demolition. The final blows came in the late 1920s when the New York Trust Company, on the site of the Jones house, and the Squibb Building, at the 58th Street corner, rose on the remainder of Mrs. Jones's unique vision. Something does live on, however: the architects of a string of later buildings, from Bergdorf Goodman at 57th to the Metropolitan Club on 60th Street, chose to build in white - the white with which Mary Mason Jones made such a startling statement in 1870.