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Fifth Avenue
Fifth Avenue has been the haughty patrician face of Manhattan since the
opening of Central Park in 1876 lured the Carnegies, Astors,
Vanderbilts, Whitneys and other capitalists north from lower Fifth
Avenue and Gramercy Park to build their fashionable residences on the
strip alongside. Once unthinkable, upper Fifth Avenue addresses not
only became acceptable but stylish. To this day the address remains so
prestigious that buildings with no Fifth Avenue entrance to speak of
call themselves by their would-be Fifth Avenue addresses instead of the
more accurate side-street address, the latter being much too common.
Gazing out over the park, these buildings went up when Neoclassicism
was the rage, and hence the surviving originals are cluttered with
columns and classical statues. A great deal of what you see, though, is
third- or fourth-generation building: through the latter part of the
nineteenth century, fanciful mansions were built at vast expense, to
last only ten or fifteen years before being demolished for even wilder
extravagances or, more commonly, grand apartment blocks. Rocketing land
values made the chance of selling at vast profit irresistible.
Museum Mile and beyond
As Fifth Avenue progresses north, it becomes Museum Mile, New York's
greatest concentration of art and exhibitions – several of them housed
in a few remaining mansions. Henry Clay Frick's house at 70th Street is
marginally less ostentatious than its neighbors and is now the
deliciously intimate and tranquil home of the
Frick Collection, one of
the city's musts – even the lush gardens that surround it are a treat.
Along the avenue (or just off it) are the
Whitney Museum of American Art ,
the National Academy of Design, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art (the
"Met"), the
Guggenheim Museum
(twentieth-century painting housed in
Frank Lloyd Wright's helter-skelter mustard pot), the
Cooper-Hewitt
Museum, the International Center of
Photography and, pushing
further north, the
Museum of the City of New York
and El Museo del
Barrio. There's more than enough to keep you busy for a week at least.
Take away Fifth Avenue's museums and a resplendent though fairly
bloodless strip remains. Immediately east is Madison Avenue, a strip
that was entirely residential until the 1920s. Today it is mainly an
elegant shopping street, lined with top-notch designer clothes stores,
some of whose doors are kept locked. At 699 Madison (63rd Street) is
the tiny home of the Margo Feiden Galleries, which represent the work
of the great New York caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, famous for his swirly
portraits of Broadway stars. It's fun to admire the wedding dresses in
Vera Wang's bridal boutique at 991 Madison Avenue (between 77th and
78th sts). One notable exception to the demure commercialism here is
the stately St James' Church at 865 Madison Ave, between 71st and 72nd
streets, with its graceful Byzantine altar. A block away, Park Avenue
is less extravagant, yet still as stolidly comfortable and often
elegant. In the low 90s, the large black shapes of the Louise Nevelson
sculptures stand out on the traffic islands, and just above 96th Street
the neighborhood abruptly transforms into Spanish Harlem at the point
where the subway line emerges from underground. One of the best
features of this boulevard is the sweeping view, as Park Avenue coasts
down to the New York Grand Central and Met Life (originally Pan Am)
buildings.
Architectural gems and homes of the rich and (in)famous nestle in the
side streets. The Wildenstein family, premier art dealers now under
attack for handling art stolen by the Nazis, and beneficiaries of
bizarre plastic surgery, have both their gallery and private mansion on
East 64th Street between Park and Madison. Andy Warhol spent the last
thirteen years of his life, from 1974 to 1987, in a surprisingly
conservative and extremely private narrow brick house at 57 E 66th St:
no friends were allowed inside, and when Warhol died he left behind
oddities like a massive collection of cookie jars. While you're here,
have a look at no. 64 across the street, an elegant sandstone house
with a green copper bay window and stained glass. At Park and East 66th
Street are several stables, built a few blocks east of Fifth for use by
the mansions, and now transformed into expensive art galleries (no.
126, with its Romanesque facade, is especially handsome).
Dominating a square block is the
Seventh Regiment Armory (Park Ave
between 66th and 67th sts), built in the 1870s with pseudo-medieval
crenellations and, inside, a grand double stairway and spidery wrought
iron chandeliers – the only surviving building from the era before the
New York Central's railroad tracks were roofed over and Park Avenue
became an upscale residential neighborhood. There are two surviving
Aesthetic Movement interiors inside, executed by the firm which
included Louis Comfort Tiffany and Stanford White – the Veterans' Room
and the Library; call ahead for a tour (tel 744-8180; times vary).
Frequent art and antique shows provide an opportunity to gawk at the
enormous drill hall inside. Down the street from the armory's rear, on
East 67th Street and Lexington Avenue, is a remarkable ensemble of
fanciful Victorian buildings which narrowly escaped destruction and now
resemble a movie set: the baby blue-trimmed local Police Precinct, the
Fire Station with its bright red garage doors, and the whimsical ochre
Park East Synagogue, with its
Moorish arches, floral stained glass and
campanile. Further north, The Asia Society (725 Park Ave between E 70th
and 71st sts; tel 288-6400) has a permanent display of the Rockefeller
Collection of Asian art and often hosts symposia, lectures,
performances and film series and has a well-stocked bookstore on the
ground floor.
At the northernmost part of this stretch, as the museums keep rolling
by, is Carnegie Hill, an historic district bounded by 86th and 99th
streets and Fifth and Lexington avenues. This well-tended and
well-policed area retains the air of a gated community without the
gates, and is largely inhabited by the more recently riche; you might
catch a glimpse of celebrity tenants such as Bette Midler or Michael J.
Fox, and their bodyguards, jogging down to Central Park. Aside from art
and celebrity-sightings, the highlight here is the Russian Orthodox
St. Nicholas Cathedral (15 E
97th St), most notable for its
polychromatic Victorian body and five onion domes on top. Get too much
past here, and the upscale living quickly fades.
Southern Fifth Avenue
Grand Army Plaza is the southernmost point of introduction to all this,
an oval at the junction of Central Park South and Fifth Avenue that
marks the division between Fifth as a shopping district to the south
and a residential boulevard to the north. This is one of the city's
most dramatic public spaces, boasting a fountain and a recently
replated gold statue of Civil War victor General William Tecumseh
Sherman, and flanked by the extended copper-lined chateau of the Plaza
Hotel, with the darkened, swooping television screen facade of the
Solow Building behind. Across the plaza, the imposing marble-faced
lines of the General Motors Building offer six stories of toys inside
at F.A.O. Schwarz, the building's main commercial tenant. Two more
hotels, the high-necked
Sherry- Netherland and
Pierre, luxuriate nearby.
Many of the rooms here have permanent guests; needless to say, they're
not on welfare.
Fifth Avenue and its environs are dotted with the (traditionally men's)
clubs which serviced, and still cater to, its mainly wealthy
population. When J.P. Morgan, William and Cornelius Vanderbilt, and
their pals arrived on the social scene in the 1890s, established
society still looked askance at bankers and financiers, and its
Downtown clubs were closed to Morgan and anyone else it considered less
than up to snuff. Never to be slighted or outdone, Morgan commissioned
Stanford White to design him his own club, bigger, better and grander
than all the rest – and so the
Metropolitan Club at 1 East 60th
St was
born, an exuberant confection with a marvelously outrageous gateway.
Just the thing for arriving robber barons.
Another unwelcome group, affluent Jews, founded the elegant Harmonie
Club in the 1850s and erected its home at 4 E 60th St around the same
time. So many parvenus caused alarm, and in 1915 the
Knickerbocker
Club, a handsome brick
Federal-style building on the corner of Fifth
Avenue and 62nd Street, was erected in response to the "relaxed
standards" of the
Union Club (101 E 69th St), which
had admitted
several of Morgan's and Vanderbilt's friends. Before even the thought
of admitting women to these hallowed bastions of old guard maleness
occurred, there was the
Colony Club on Park Avenue at
62nd Street,
founded in 1903, and is the city's earliest social club organized by
women for women. In 1933, Delano & Aldrich, the firm which had designed
the Knickerbocker Club, constructed an elaborate Colonial building with
extensive gymnasium and spa facilities as the Cosmopolitan Club, at 122
E 66th St. This was originally a place where rich women sent their
governesses, but they eventually reclaimed the building for themselves.
It's a strange apartment-block-like building, with white ironwork
terraces reminiscent of New Orleans, and a private garden in the back.
On the corner of 65th Street and Fifth Avenue, America's largest reform
synagogue, the
Temple Emanu-El, strikes a more sober
aspect, a brooding
Romanesque–Byzantine cavern that manages to be bigger inside than it
seems out. The interior melts away into mysterious darkness, making you
feel very small indeed (Mon–Fri & Sun 10am–5pm, Sat noon–5pm; tel
744-1400 for special high holy day schedules). To get your fix of
things Gallic go to the Alliance Française (22 E 60th St; tel
355-6100), the French cultural institute that hosts a number of
noteworthy lectures as well as a Ciné Club series of classic and
contemporary French films.
The rest of the East 60s are typical Upper East Side, a trim mix of
small apartment houses and elegant town. One of the most beautiful
private homes up here is the turn-of-the-century
Edith and Ernesto
Fabbri House at 11 E 62nd St,
built for a Vanderbilt daughter in a
Parisian Beaux Arts style with curving iron balconies. The
Sara Delano
Roosevelt Memorial House at 47 E
65th was commissioned by Sarah Delano
Roosevelt as a handy townhouse for her son Franklin, no. 142 belonged
to Richard Nixon, and no. 115 is the US headquarters of the PLO. Quite
a neighborhood.
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