Fifth Avenue: The ‘Street of Dreams’ for Over a Century
The reputation of the iconic New York City thoroughfare began with a competition to build lavish mansions that came crashing down with the advent of luxury apartment buildings.
In 1916, Marjorie Merriweather Post, heir to the Postum cereal fortune, moved into her new home, a five-story, 54-room mansion at the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street.
This was Millionaires’ Mile, a stretch of Fifth Avenue where the neighbors living in block after block of mansions were the richest, most powerful and socially prominent people in America. It could be a tough neighborhood. The social strictures were suffocating, while the reach for grandiosity knew no bounds.
Money had become more important than pedigree. And competition was fierce to build the biggest, most lavish home, borrowing English, French or Italian architectural styles while incorporating modern technology and dozens of servants.
Andrew Carnegie lived across 91st Street and Ms. Post’s neighbors included James Duke, F.W. Woolworth, the Astors, the Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Belmonts and Fishes.
Ms. Post was equal to the task of decorating a manse with 17 bathrooms, a wood-paneled dining room, a marble stairway, two elevators, a glassed-in breakfast room and a gown closet. She filled her mansion’s 54 rooms with Louis XVI furniture, Beauvais tapestries, Sèvres porcelains, Aubusson rugs, antique lace and paintings by Thomas Gainsborough.
“She wasn’t afraid to be rich,” as one of Ms. Post’s biographers put it. Ms Post, who was married to her second husband, E.F. Hutton, would eventually acquire the Birdseye frozen food business, turning her father’s company into the behemoth General Foods Corporation.
She was also not alone. For a relatively brief time during the Gilded Age in the late 1800s and early 1900s, there were anywhere from 182 to 400 of these flamboyant “statement homes” — above and below 59th Street — on what Mosette Broderick, a New York University art historian and the author of “Fifth Avenue,” calls “America’s Street of Dreams.”
Old-money families and newly minted railroad barons, mining tycoons, bankers, department store owners and industrialists from across the country all wanted a spot on Fifth. Andrew S. Dolkart, a Columbia University professor of historic preservation, estimates that “95 percent of the land on Fifth Avenue between 59th and 96th Streets was occupied by mansions.”
“Fifth Avenue pulled Manhattan northward,” Ms. Broderick said. “It dragged New York up with the rich in the middle. Everyone else was off to the side.”
But in the incredibly short life of the mansions on Fifth Avenue, north of 59th Street, Ms. Post’s house and most of the ostentatious private homes along Millionaires’ Mile would come crashing down after World War II to make way for private clubs, museums and the next big thing: luxury apartment houses like the one that now sits on the site of Ms Post’s mansion at 1107 Fifth.
Another century would go by before New Yorkers would see anything like it, though not on Fifth. Beginning in the 2010s, during what some historians have called the second Gilded Age, a handful of supertall towers along Billionaires’ Row — generally, the 57th Street corridor — became homes for the international superrich: tech giants, hedge funders, metal barons from Russia and tycoons from Latin American countries.
Through the decades, Fifth Avenue never lost its luster. It remains home to some of the most expensive and sought-after apartments on the planet.
Last month, New York City officials announced plans to make the avenue friendlier to pedestrians with the widening of sidewalks and the removal of two lanes of traffic between Bryant Park and Central Park.
The street that bisects Manhattan island was originally known as Middle Road. It provided access to the undeveloped land that the city fathers had ordered surveyors in 1785 to subdivide into five-acre parcels to be sold to support the local government.
Middle Road morphed into Fifth Avenue under a subsequent commission’s plan in 1811 for the city’s future expansion along (north-south) avenues and (east-west) cross streets.
Before that, most people lived downtown, a hub for finance, wholesale goods, and commodities that flowed from piers to warehouses and factories. The neighborhood was noisy, crowded and perfumed with eau de manure from the 40,000 horses hauling those goods around downtown, according to the first volume of “Gotham” by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace.
Very little development had taken place on the then rural land to the north, where there were some scattered wood-frame houses.
The march up Fifth began in 1834 when Henry J. Brevoort erected a three-story Greek Revival house with a large garden on his father’s farm at the west corner of Ninth Street. The Brevoorts and other farm owners began building houses that would serve as anchors for other houses to be built and sold on the vacant lots laid out along the avenue and radiating down the adjoining side streets.
“In the 1830s,” said Horatio Joyce, a former fellow at the New-York Historical Society, “you begin to see the estrangement of the elite from the rest of society and the development of class consciousness and the creation of these enclaves.”
In 1850, Hart M. Shiff built a house at the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 10th Street that had a grand staircase, hot and cold running water and central heating, topped off with what was possibly the first mansard roof in the city.
Federal rowhouses were replaced by tidy and relatively understated brownstones as development moved up Fifth at the rate of about a block a year.
In 1856, William Backhouse Astor Jr. and his wife, Caroline Astor, built a four-story brownstone at 350 Fifth Avenue and 34th Street (where the Empire State Building now stands). William was a businessman and yachtsman who died in 1892. But his wife became the reigning “Mrs. Astor,” presiding over high society in New York and Newport, R.I.
Edith Wharton, the novelist who chronicled the upper class life in Manhattan, bewailed the lack of towers, porticoes and fountains in a city studded with four-story brownstones enshrined in a “chocolate-colored coating of the most hideous stone ever quarried.”
New York’s spectacular growth was propelled by the unrelenting flow of immigrants and migrants from other states, with the population jumping from 60,515 in 1800, to 515,547 in 1850, to 3.4 million by the end of the century. But Fifth Avenue’s prominence was also a matter of geography and topography. The avenue was far from the piers on the East and Hudson Rivers that served brick yards, breweries, lumberyards, factories and machine shops. The land sat on bedrock and was relatively easy to clear.
As department stores (Altman’s, Lord & Taylor), hotels and office building also moved onto Fifth Avenue, wealthy families continued moving farther north, finally breaching 59th Street in the 1890s as the ostentatiously grand mansions became the fashion. Middle class townhouses lined the side streets as well as tenements and working class housing closer to the piers.
Private schools like St. Bernard’s, Brearley’s also moved to new homes on Fifth Avenue and the Upper East Side, as well as the elite University, Union, Harmonie, Knickerbocker and Colony clubs.
By 1880, The New York Times was reporting that certain “capitalists and builders” were buying up land at low prices between 50th and 80th Streets, in particular, the Vanderbilts. In what was sometimes referred to as Vanderbilt Alley, William K. Vanderbilt and his wife, Alva Vanderbilt, built their mansion, a break with the brownstone trend and an adaptation of the Château de Blois, in 1882, decorating it with tapestries, armor and Renaissance and medieval furniture.
William Henry Vanderbilt bought the block between 51st and 52nd Streets and built brownstone palaces for himself and for each of his daughters, Emily and Margaret. Still, Edith Wharton found the Vanderbilt mansions distasteful.
Nevertheless, Alva Vanderbilt used her palatial home as a sledgehammer to break Mrs. Astor’s position as the imperial arbiter of high society and the exclusive “Four Hundred” on its roster. Soon after completion Alva sent invitations out to new- and old- money families, but not Mrs. Astor, whose young daughter Caroline had her heart set on attending. In the end, Caroline went to the ball and Mrs. Astor’s grip on high society gradually melted away.
The push northward along Fifth continued, as wealthy families overcame their initial reluctance to move opposite the newly created Central Park. By 1915, palatial mansions covered most of the avenue frontage as far north as 96th Street.
Henry Flagler, a Standard Oil Mogul, took the southeast corner of 54th Street and Fifth, while William Rockefeller built his mansion on the northeast corner. Andrew Carnegie plunged farther north, buying a broad swath of land centered around 91st Street and Fifth, where he built a 64-room Georgian Revival mansion at 91st Street, while evicting shantytown residents and selling his remaining sites to those worthy enough to be his neighbors.
The lure of Fifth Avenue proved irresistible for William A. Clark, the “Copper King” of Montana and a newly elected U.S. Senator. Mr. Clark bought a vacant parcel at the northeast corner of 77th Street in 1897 and spent the next 14 years building what was regarded as the most expensive home in the world. It was a feat that entailed buying a granite quarry in Maine, a bronze foundry in Manhattan for the metal fittings and importing marble from Italy, oak from Sherwood Forest and pieces of a château from France.
Mr. Clark’s mansion comprised 120 rooms, four art galleries, a marble swimming pool, Turkish baths, one of the largest pipe organs in the world and an underground rail line to shuttle in coal.
But the flamboyant mansion-building craze on Fifth Avenue was nearing an abrupt end. The introduction of an income tax, the cost of land and maintaining a small army of servants had grown burdensome, while luxury apartment buildings, once eschewed by the rich, grew increasingly attractive.
By 1924, Marjorie Merriweather Post had become weary of the noisy street traffic, the fumes and the Fifth Avenue Coach Company double-decker buses roaring past her limestone and red brick mansion. She was also building a 115-room home in Palm Beach called Mar-a-Lago.
She was approached by the George A. Fuller Company about buying the property so it could erect a more profitable 14-story luxury apartment house on the site. She and her husband had no intention of giving up their Manhattan address, according to her biography, “American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post.”
So Ms. Post cut a deal: The builder could buy the 19 year-old house and demolish it. But, she insisted, the builder had to recreate her 54-room home in a triplex atop the new apartment house. Further, she wanted a private entrance for her exclusive use at 2 East 92nd Street.
She got her wish, which included a wraparound terrace, 12 wood-burning fireplaces, 17 bathrooms and two kitchens. Thus was born a new and enduring signifier of wealth and prestige: the penthouse.
Senator Clark, the copper king, lived in his 12-story mansion for only 14 years, the same amount of time it took to build it. He died at home in 1925 of pneumonia. A year later, the house was sold for less than $3 million and quickly demolished, replaced by a 12-story luxury co-op designed by Rosario Candela.
The “relics” on Fifth Avenue today mostly serve as museums. Andrew Carnegie’s house at 2 East 91st Street is now home to the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Willard and Dorothy Whitney Straight’s house at 1130 Fifth Avenue, which was completed at the northeast corner of 94th Street in 1915, was the International Center of Photography and is now a private residence. And the Payne Whitney House at 972 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 79th Street, serves as the Cultural Services Center of the French Embassy.
Charles Bagli has been a reporter at The Times for more than 20 years, covering the intersection of real estate and politics. More about Charles V. Bagli