Mourning on Fifth Avenue

Since 1875 Fifth Avenue Bank has sat, like a portly, dignified oldster, at the corner of Fifth Avenue & 44th Street, Manhattan.* When it was founded most bankers hesitated to accept women's accounts because bank lobbies were usually crowded with male customers "among whom it is not agreeable for a lady to penetrate." Fifth Avenue Bank thought differently. It built a handsome parlor where ladies could "cut coupons and eat bonbons with equal relish." Off the parlor was a room furnished with manicuring scissors, hairpins, violet water, lavender salts, scented soap. In the coupon rooms the directors thoughtfully provided threaded needles. Black-bonneted dowagers drove their carriages up to the bank by the hundreds to enter their names in the big ledger book which the bank still uses. In 44 years Fifth Avenue Bank has never omitted dividends on its stock, which sells today for $1,000 per share.

Sentimentally loyal to all its employes, Fifth Avenue Bank was saddened last fortnight by the death of one of its oldest directors, Alfred Erskine Marling, 76, chairman of Horace S. Ely & Co. (real estate). Once head of the Union League Club, a director or trustee in 16 corporations, Mr. Marling made national news in 1919 by proposing a $5,000,000 housing corporation to move 20,000 New Yorkers from grimy tenements into modern low-cost apartments. Characteristic was the tribute which Fifth Avenue Bank devoted to Director Mailing's memory last week in a paid advertisement in the New York Times:

The Board of Directors of THE FIFTH AVENUE BANK OF

NEW YORK

are called upon, in the relentless march of time, to add to the roll of their departed associates the name of

ALFRED E. MARLING

His decease, after a long life of rare and complete accomplishment, arouses a sense of tragic sadness in the passing of a still vigorous personality so richly endowed with clarity of mind and warmth of heart.

An associate since the close of 1911, he brought to the service of the Bank an unremitting and loyal attention to every duty, a breadth of contact and experience that proved increasingly valuable, an exact and candid judgment dominated by principle and a crystal conscience. . . .

Far beyond meriting esteem, he ever won affection. . . . Seldom can a man have preserved for a lifetime so many and so varied lasting contacts, always regardless of self and for the good of others, as adorned this life of loyal service.

"By his death life is poorer, By his life memory is richer." Adopted June 5, 1935.

Theodore Hetzler, President.

*In 1931, Fifth Avenue Bank followed the uptown trend of the residential district by establishing its first and only branch at Madison Avenue & 73rd Street.

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