Lower Second Avenue in Its Well-Behaved Youth Lower Second Avenue isn't much these days, a honky-tonk collection of East Village tenements, not to be mentioned in the same breath as Fifth Avenue, and for a century and a half just another number. But before the 1850s, Fifth Avenue was barely a notch above its easterly colleague, and today the observant may scrape up the few traces of gentility amid the falafel and the fraternity crowds. Second Avenue opened after the adoption of the grid plan in 1811, and wealthy families put up comfortable brick Greek Revival houses, like the Isaac Hopper house at 110 Second Avenue, nearly intact from the 1830s. That the diagonal of Stuyvesant Street ran right into Second at 10th Street didn't hurt - the grand 1804 Stuyvesant-Fish house is just west of Second. Indeed, the Stuyvesant family courses all through this section: Peter Gerard Stuyvesant's 1845 house stood at the northwest corner of Second and 11th Street. It soon went to Lewis Morris Rutherfurd (sometimes spelled Rutherford), another member of the clan, and he put an observatory in the backyard, from which he observed eclipses and other heavenly phenomena. Another town house from the 1840s is 149 Second Avenue; it still has its stoop and is comparatively little altered, although there's a big skylight on the roof that must give some apartment plenty of sun. The 1870 census records the occupants as Edward Jaffray, a socially prominent dry goods importer, his family of five and nine servants. Two years later, Jaffray advertised his "extra-sized house" for sale. Thirty-three feet wide, it had three bathrooms, six water closets and the property included a stable on Ninth Street. A subsequent owner was Alexander Major, a founder of the New York Yacht Club, who lived there with his family of five and seven servants. According to Vanessa Cameron, the archivist of the club, George Steers, who designed the cup-winning America, also did Major's yacht. But the precincts of Second Avenue were tarnishing, and as early as 1853, Gerard Stuyvesant and others had to protest the extension of a surface railway along Second, which a later map shows. And in the financial panic of 1873, a plumbing contractor who was a member of the Tweed ring, John H. Keyser, fed 1,000 people a day out of his house on Second Avenue. Public-spirited, yes, but perhaps he was also out to untarnish his image. Simultaneously, German immigrants took over the old houses, converting them to apartments and later, tearing some down for tenements and night spots. 138 Second Avenue, a house which boasts a very nice surviving brownstone doorway with a Gibbs surround, had by 1885 become the Association for Befriending Children and Young Girls. In 1912, The New York Times noted that a longtime Second Avenue resident, Alice Keteltas, "drove away one afternoon in her coach from the aristocratic mansion on the northwest corner of St. Marks Place, never to return there." According to the newspaper, "the neighborhood, teeming with a mixed Jewish, Italian, and Hungarian population, has never seemed to bother the old lady." But in the end she was persuaded by her friends to decamp to East 79th Street and presumably, continued to vacation at her house in Newport, R.I. Maria Major, the widow of Alexander, died in 1917 in her house, 149 Second Avenue. A year later, The Eagle reported that it had been "the only private residence remaining in this once fashionable avenue." In the 1930s the house was occupied by the Yiddish Workers Culture Chorus. There is still some of the old egg-cream-ethnic left on Second Avenue, but now the chief cultural group is 20-something singles, who spill onto the sidewalks like a giant fraternity party, more ebullient than disorderly, even with plenty of beer. Any of them of a mind to put down the iPhone and search out traces of the old, old Second Avenue - that is, the mansion period - will be hard put to find it. Besides the Gibbs surround at No. 138, a rare find, there's a row of brick houses at the southwest corner of Third Street sitting in prim rectitude among the tumult. Some of the houses are badly mangled by two-story storefronts, but a few conceivably contain old pier mirrors or what's left of elegant double parlors with twin columns. The Hopper house at No. 110 is in this group. There is also New York Marble Cemetery, hidden away on the west side, from Second to Third Streets. Its interment roster is redolent of a New York so long gone it is a foreign country: Abeel, Anthon, Devoe, Hosack, Luqueer, Vandervoort. Despite a ragged storefront, the old Major house at No. 149 prevails, the soft, worn red brick of the upper floors like some beautiful stones smoothed for decades in a mountain stream. The Greek Revival ironwork on the stoop is damaged, but if you mount the stairs you will be rewarded by a real madeleine of old Second Avenue. There, through a fuzzy pane of scratched glass, the idler can see a broad set of wooden stairs trailing away up to the second floor, which has a wide midlevel landing. Around the ceiling of the vestibule runs a confectionery of cove molding, delicate little free-standing plaster flowers, impossibly fragile, but impossibly intact, at least in most places. According to a tenant, the interiors have been much altered, but these fragments were here on Maria Major's final trip from the Second Avenue of a much, much earlier time. An earlier version of this article included a picture caption that misstated the perspective from which an 1865 stereoscopic view of the avenue was taken. It was from First Street, not from Third Street.