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Mr. Morgenthau playfully refers to this picture as the Morgenthau dynasty

of the Siegel-Cooper Company, I modernized the block front from Seventeenth to Eighteenth Street, and we erected a new building on the corner of Nineteenth Street, and sold it to Andrew Alexander.

One evening Alwyn Ball, Jr., told me that Henry Parish wanted to sell his house at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Nineteenth Street. I suggested that I would buy the property if Mr. Parish would take in part payment the second mortgage of $100,000 that Alexander had given us on his corner. The Astor Estate held the first mortgage of $100,000. Ball looked aghast.

“Why,” he said, “that’s a preposterous proposition! The idea of offering a second mortgage on a leasehold for the fee of a first-class Fifth Avenue corner, and to make it to so conservative a man as Mr. Parish! He has never even had a telephone in the offices of the New York Life Insurance & Trust Company, of which he is president! You must want me to be kicked downstairs.”