New York Songlines: 5th Avenue

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369th Armory

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There is a walkway here that leads to the Harlem River Park, a waterfront greenway that stretches from 125th to 145th Street.

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2350 (corner): Global Community Charter School, founded in 2011, was built in 1923 as a Bordens Ice Cream factory. From 1970 through 1994, it was a industrial dry cleaning facility that used tetrachloroethylene, which led the state to declare it a Superfund site in 1998. It was declared decontaminated in 2015, which is when GCCS moved in. (It still has a sign reading "Harlem Self Storage," which is what it was in the interim.)

The exterior murals are by the youth program Creative Art Works.

W <===         141ST ST

2300 (block): This 16-story building, built in 1959, is part of Savoy Park, a 13-acre, seven-building complex whose footprint includes the site of the legendary Savoy Ballroom--recalled in the standard "Stomping at the Savoy."

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369th Infantry Regiment Memorial

This black granite obelisk, a replica of one in Sechault, France, was unveiled in 2006 to honor the 369th Infantry Regiment, aka the Harlem Hellfighters. It bears their coiled rattlesnake insignia.

Riverbend Houses

2331-2333 (corner): Middle-income public housing project completed in 1967, named for the turn in the Harlem River that marks the top of Fifth Avenue. It was designed by Davis, Brody & Associates, who emphasized "the design of circulation spaces and the sidewalk/street life to increase a sense of community."

The project introduced the "giant brick" (5-1/2” high x 8” wide) in an effort to make large-scale masonry more economical and attractive.

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Lincolnton Station

2266 (block): US Postal Service facility serving the 10037 zip code.

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2289 (block): More Riverbend Houses.

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Corner (10 W 138th): This seven-floor building from 1984 is called Chauncy Hooper Towers, memorializing the commander of Hooper's Troopers, the 369th Coast Artillery Regiment. Stationed in Hawaii during World War II, they were successors to the 369th Infantry, the Harlem Hellfighters. Hooper was a prominent member of city politics and Harlem society after the war.

2252 (corner): This 1920 building of six stories includes a Kennedy Chicken & Pizza outlet. Kennedy is not an actual franchise, but rather a name used by various owners—often Afghan-American—to describe a way of selling chicken.

W <===         137TH ST

2238 (block): Central Harlem Health Center was built by the city's Health Department in 1936.

W <===         136TH ST

PS 197 John B. Russwurm

2230 (block): Public elementary school named for John Brown Russwurm (1799-1851), a mixed-race abolitionist who edited Freedom's Journal, the US's first Black-owned newspaper. He was an advocate of resettling freed Blacks in Liberia, where he lived the last years of his life.

The building also houses the Democracy Prep middle school, a charter school that takes inspiration from the South Korean educational system, though the student body is overwhelmingly Black and Latinx.

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Riverton Houses

2265 (corner): A residential development opened in 1947 by the Met Life Insurance Company, designed to house returning World War II vets. While Met Life's Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village were initially whites-only, Riverton was intended for Black vets. Notable residents have included former Mayor David Dinkins, Reagan-era HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce and jazz pianist Billy Taylor.

2225 (corner): More Riverton Houses

West:

Lenox Terrace

Opened in 1958 as Harlem's first luxury residential development, it was called "Harlem's Best Address" by the New York Times. The six 17-story brick buildings have been home to notables like former Gov. David Paterson, DC powerhouse Charles Rangel, singer Mahalia Jackson, comedian Nipsey Russell and gangster Bumpy Johnson.

A plan by the complex's owners, the Olnick Organization, to replace the complex's low-rise retail buildings with five 28-story towers was rejected by the City Council in 2020. Olnick has threatened to go ahead with a scaled-down plan that would not requiring rezoning.

2210 (corner): Some of the low-rise retail Olnick wants to replace. One of the few tenants here is the Golden Deli Grocery.

2186: The Lenox Terrace highrises have individual names—this is the Buckingham.

2180 (corner): More low-rise retail—currently vacant.

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Corner: Abraham Lincoln Playground

Abraham Lincoln Houses

2199-2175: NYCHA housing project opened in 1947. In 2018, the Manhattan DA indicted 17 residents as alleged members of Lincoln Ova Everything, a street gang. (Media critics warn us to be skeptical of official narratives.)

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2152 (corner): The Greater Central Baptist Church was organized in 1933, and bought this property in 1939. The present building dates to 1955.

2150: Was Stingray's, restaurant. This building forms a more-or-less matched set of brownstones with 2144-48 to its south.

2144: Harlem Blues Cafe is in a brownstone less preserved than its neighbors to its north, having had its stooped removed to increase its ground floor commercial space.

2142: Used to house Vintage Treasures Thrift Shop. Presents a unified facade with 2140, but an aerial view reveals they were built as separate structures.

2140 (corner): Building with AJ Food Center is described as "rather battered...budget Beaux Arts" by the Landmark Branding blog.

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Corner (2 E 132nd): You can see from architectural details—e.g. the arches below the cornices—that the corner building that houses Mocha Deli Grocery was built at the same time as its neighbors to the south, though records claim that they were built in 1910, 1900 and 1920, from north to south. These buildings appear to be among the few on Fifth Avenue to be built as tenement apartments rather than single-family townhouses (per Landmark Branding).

There is a small community garden at what used to be 2155.

2151-53: These siblings of 2 East 132nd are distinguished by ferocious lion corbels.

Corner: A sweet (private) playground.

West:

Courtney Callender Playground

This small park is named for Courtney Callender (1937-1983), who became the first African-American Parks Department official in 1965; he established the Community Relations division that seeks to involve surrounding neighborhoods in park decisions. From 1969-72, he was deputy commissioner for cultural affairs, as which he organized the Harlem Cultural Festival. He died of cancer at the age of 43.

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PS 133: Fred R. Moore

2121 (block): Elementary school named for Frederick Randolph Moore, a mixed-race journalist and activist who was a protege of Booker T. Washington. He bought the New York Age in 1907 and turned it into the biggest African-American newspaper of its era. He helped found the Negro Protective League in 1892 and the National Urban League in 1910.

West:

2108-2118 (corner): These six rowhouses form a matched set, built c. 1909 in English Renaissance style.

2100 (corner): A three story post-modern structure from 1991 houses people with autism in a facility run by the organization Life's WORC.

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2105-2119 (corner): This stretch of 19th century brownstones is mostly intact, with one sad exception.

2113: The brutal defacement of this brownstone c. 2017 to add two stories on top highlights the need to create historic preservation districts to Harlem.

2105: The end of this row of brownstones houses the Mt. Horeb Holiness Church of God. Mount Horeb is the place where Moses got water from a stone for the Israelites—and in Deuteronomy it's where Moses received the Ten Commandments.

2099-2101 (corner): Though two separate buildings, a unified facade makes these addresses appear to be one glorious brick and brownstone mansion (built c. 1880). The New York Times ran a story on the travails of restoring 2099.

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Corner (2 W 129th): Grab & Go Food is in a seven-story building from 1921 with bay windows in its northeast corner.

2080-2084: The Collyers brothers' building looked like one of these.

Collyer Brothers Park

2078 (corner): This pocket park was built in the 1960s on the site of the brownstone that was home, from 1909-47, to Homer and Langley Collyer, famous hoarders. After Langley became blind in 1933, the brothers became increasingly reclusive. As their house filled up with newspapers and assorted junk, paths became tunnels, in which Langley constructed booby-traps to discourage treasure seekers. One such trap eventually killed Langley, which led to his brother's death from starvation. When cleared out, the house was found to contain a Model T chassis, human organs pickled in jars, eight cats, 14 pianos, 25,000 books and much else — some of which was later exhibited at Hubert's Dime Museum.

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2083-2087: Three beautifully preserved/ restored brownstones. The city says they were built in 1905.

2081: Once a match with its neighbors to the north, it's had much of its architectural detail stripped off. Has a plaque that says "All Saints Cooperative."

2077 (corner): Buildings don't come much blander than this seven-story effort from 2007.

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2068-2076 (corner): A row of handsome 1890s townhouses, red brick with rusticated brownstone. 2076 on the end features "a corner turret Rapunzel would find useful" ( Forgotten New York). The aluminum windows installed in 2068 really bug the AIA Guide.

2066: A philistine architect defaced the facade of a Renaissance Revival brownstone with an incongruous modernist approach, but left the original stoop.

2064: This 1880s mansion has a neo-Dutch Renaissance roofline and an abundance of detail.

Corner (1 E 27th): The Harriet, a 1914 apartment building with a striking corner bay.

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Corner (2-4 E 128th): An early apartment building designed to look like a single-family brownstone. The facade features rather fierce-looking green men.

2071: The Abingdon is a well-preserved Beaux-Arts apartment building dated 1921.

2069: Untapped New York calls this a "red-brick standout, with an off-center, dentillated pediment."

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church

2067 (corner): A Gothic Revival landmark designed by architect Henry M. Congdon. The building was originally erected on 127th Street between Park and Lexington in 1873, and was dismantled and rebuilt here c. 1889.

The church's congregation was largely or entirely white until 1942, when it stopped charging pew rental. Today its flock is largely Caribbean.

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2056 (corner): An attractive Beaux Arts building from 1917, orginally built as the Fifth Avenue Hall by the Finnish Socialist Party to serve as a Finnish Community Center. In the 1970s, it became the Gospel Temple Church. In 2005, it was converted to residences by BKSF Architects, who restored the cornice and added two stories in a complementary modern style. Branded as Rhapsody on Fifth.

2050: Was Mount Moriah Baptist Church, originally Mount Morris Church, built in 1888 with Romanesque Revival arches. (Moriah is the mountain where Abraham was supposed to sacrifice Isaac.) In 2011, it was bought by artist Ugo Rondinone for $2.7 million to serve as a studio and exhibition space.

2042 (corner): Also known as 1 West 127th, this orange brick Art Deco apartment building from 1940 was home to musical legends Eartha Kitt, Billy Eckstine and Della Reese.

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2053 (corner): The St. Andrews, a Beaux Arts apartment building unfortunately missing its cornice—the decorative ledge along the roofline.

2049: Built in 1921, this building is a bit better preserved than its neighbors to either side.

2041 (corner): A 40-unit Beaux Arts apartment building from 1921—a strong design, but again stripped of its cornice

West:

2040 (corner): West Harlem Deli Corp

2038: One of a set of four brownstones, built c. 1909, now in four assorted colors—mostly well-preserved, though this one is missing its stoop. Houses Fanta Hair Braiding.

2034: Macenta African Hair Braiding

2032: The last of the quad-colored brownstones.

Corner (1 W 125th): A two-story commercial building that dates to 1901. Now a Shake Shack outlet, opened in 2019, featuring art inside and out by the youth group Creative Art Works.

It was formerly an Applebee's, which closed in 2017; when it opened in 2009, it was the franchise's 2,000th outlet. In 1969, this was the Israeli School of Universal Practical Knowledge, a congregation of Black Hebrews$mdash;the movement that preaches that African Americans are the descendants of the 12 Tribes of Israel. The sects that descend from this school are today known as the One West Camp due to this address.

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2033-2037 (corner): This three-story building, which dates to 1940, was the original home of the Studio Museum in Harlem from (1969-82). It was later Nubian Heritage of Harlem and the Harlem Visitor Information Center. Most recently, the Elizabeth Dee Gallery was located here from 2016-18; its lease was not renewed because the building is slated to be demolished.

There is some striking street art on the 126th Street side of the building.

National Black Theatre

2031 (corner): Founded in 1968 by Barbara Ann Teer, this Off Broadway stage has featured the likes of Nina Simone, Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni. Plans are underway to replace the current building with a 20-story tower whose second through fourth floors would be occupied by the theater, (cc photo: Ajay Suresh)

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2018 (corner): Once a brownstone, at some point it was "given a PoMo facelift suitable for a downscale Long Island strip mall" ( Landmark Branding). The ground floor now has a Kennedy Chicken on the corner.

2012-2014: These well-preserved brownstones seem to date to 1882.

2010: St. James/St. Philip AME Church is in a brownstone built along with its neighbors to the north, but time has been less kind to it.

2004-2008: These gorgeous brownstones are some of the oldest row houses in Harlem, built in 1869 by developer Christian Brand. Note the mansard roofs.

2002 (corner): The newcomer on the block, this 2004 apartment building replaced a vacant hulk that had once been used a bus depot.

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2015-2017 (corner): A vacant lot that seems to be returning to forest.

2013: Like the rest of the brownstones on this block, this was "designed in 1878 by David and John Jardine for the developer Charles Wellde," according to Christopher Gray. This number was rebuilt as an apartment building in 1888, with the stoop replaced by a large Romanesque arch and a large shield with the name Marcella—a Roman saint—added to the facade.

2005: Converted to a bed & breakfast, the Urban Jem Guest House, in 1997.

2007: This brownstone was owned by Black feminist author Dorothy Pitman Hughes. In 2001 she sold it to the rapper DMX.

2001 (corner): The last of the Jardines' brownstone row.

West:

Corner (2 W 120th): A striking 1901 brick and terra-cotta apartment building by George F. Pelham. Ms. Bubble Laundromat is now on the ground floor.

1488: 5th Avenue Church of God

1484: Mt. Pisgah Methodist Church. Pisgah, also known as Mount Nebo, is the summit from which Yahweh showed Moses the Promised Land.

1480 (corner): New Ebenezer Baptist Church

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1489: Dressmaker Lena Himmelstein Bryant opened a shop here in 1904 that grew into the plus-size retail chain Lane Bryant. (The chain's name was based on a bank's misspelling of "Lena.")

1485 (corner): 5th on the Park, 28-story condo from 2008, designed by FXFowle Architects.

In front of the entrance is Friends, a sculpture of three voluptuous women by Nigerian-born sculptor Nnamdi Okonkwo. (cc photo: Jim Forest)

1483 (corner): Bethel Gospel Assembly was founded in 1916 by Lillian Kraeger (1884-1964), who began traveling to Harlem to minister to two African-American girls who had been rejected by her white church because of the color of their skin. Its current home is incorporated into 5th on the Park.

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1460 (block): Victory One, eight-story housing development from 1998.

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1473 (corner): Building with New York Paint & Floor Supplies features polychromatic brick. Built 2010.

1469: Juice bar with some seriously well-done murals.

1461 (corner): Prince Deli & Grocery is in a 1921 building.

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1432 (block): ArchCare Senior Life, 21 stories built in 1976.

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1441-1455 (block): A matched set of four-story brick rowhouses, built from 2000-2001. Apparently you can build 'em like they used to.

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1420-28 (block): Generic six-story building from 1983.

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1429 (corner): El San Juan, Puerto Rican restaurant. "City Island on Fifth Avenue." Building from 2004.

1421 (corner): Built c. 1911 by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish-American club, as a theater. As the Mount Morris Theatre, it showcased both vaudeville—a very young Milton Berle performed here—and silent films.

As East Harlem became increasingly Latino, the cinema began showing Spanish-language films under a variety of names: It was the Teatro Campoamor by 1934, Teatro Cervantes by 1936 and Teatro Hispano by 1940. From 1959-61 it was Teatro Santurce.

It's currently home to the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, part of the Oneness Pentecostal faith; the denomination's somewhat unorthodox theology rejects the Trinity in favor of a singular god (named Jesus) who manifests as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

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1400 (block): An eight-story "green" building built in 2003.

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1415 (corner): Empire Corner II, Chinese takeout. A customer was shot in the chest by a masked gunman here, December 5, 2015. "The eatery kept making deliveries as cops investigated," the Daily News reported.

1405: Furniture on 5th

1403: Cencerro Deli is in a 1930 building with interesting brickwork.

Corner (3 E 115th): Preferred Pharmacy

West:

King Towers

NYCHA projects opened in 1951 as the Stephen Foster Houses, named for the pre-Civil War New York songwriter who specialized in minstrel show tunes. It was renamed at the insistence of residents after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King.

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Taft Houses

1395: These NYCHA projects, inaugurated in 1962, were named not for President William Howard Taft but for his son, Sen. Robert Taft, Republican of Ohio who served briefly as Senate majority leader. He is remembered for the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, but it's presumably his support for the Housing Act of 1949, which funded projects like these, that made them his namesake.

1367: The Fire Factory, firehouse for Engine 58 and Ladder 26. Engine 58 was organized in 1893 and moved here in 1960.

1345: Another Taft house

West:

1330 (block): The Fifth Avenue, a six-story red-brick condo complex built in 1989. Harlem Academy, a private school founded in 2004 for "gifted children from disadvantaged backgrounds," was on the ground floor from 2005 through at least 2021, when it opened a new campus at 655 St. Nicholas Avenue; unsure whether it gave up this space or not.

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1325 (corner): More of the Fifth Avenue complex from 1989. Fifth Avenue Pharmacy is on the ground floor.

1325 (corner): Maxwell's Central Park, Harlem offshoot of a Tribeca gastropub, serving upscale comfort food. Opened 2016, replacing Ottomanelli's Wine and Burger Bar.

West:

1316 (corner): Six-story apartment building from 1915. Fifth Avenue Deli-Mart, Kennedy Fried Chicken on the ground floor.

A fenced-off lawn/parking lot along Frawley Circle is owned by the church next door, which hopes to build a 33-story mixed-use tower here.

Corner (3-5 W 110th): La Hermosa Christian Church, a Disciples of Church congregation founded in 1938 that moved here in 1960. Prior to that, the three-story building from 1940 was the Park Palace and Park Plaza, a catering hall and dance club that featured legends of New York Latin music like Tito Puente, Joe Cuba and Eddie Palmieri.

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The Heritage

1303 (corner): The northmost of a pair of 35-story octagonal apartment towers, which serve as bookends to the Sherry-Netherland and Pierre hotel towers at the southern end of Fifth Avenue's Central Park frontage.

These were built in 1974 to a Gruzen & Partners design as Arthur A. Schomburg Plaza, also known as Frawley Plaza, a mixed-income project under the Mitchell-Lama program. (Schomburg, 1874-1938, was an Afro-Puerto Rican historian and independence advocate.) The buildings were sold in 2005 and became market-rate housing, but were returned to rent regulation under a 2019 deal.

1295 (corner): The southern Heritage tower.

West:

Central Park

An 853-acre expanse of green in the middle of Manhattan, its 25 million annual visitors make it the most-visited public park in the world. Responding to calls from civic leaders like William Cullen Bryant, the city acquired the land in 1853 and held a design contest in 1857, choosing the Greensward Plan of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (rhymes with "Walks"). After the moving of 3 million tons of earth and the planting of 270,000 trees and shrubs, the park—almost entirely landscaped, despite its naturalistic appearance—opened to visitors in 1859 (though not officially completed until 1873).

Pioneers Gate

"It is fitting that a welcome should be extended to the men who devote their energies to making new discoveries that enlarge the field of human action and add to the value of civilized life... A glance at the numerous expeditions that have been undertaken by Americans within the experience of the present generation, is sufficient to establish the claim of 'Explorer' to a cordial recognition."

No doubt the assignment of "Pioneer" to this gate reflects the remote character of 110th Street in the mid-19th century.

Harlem Meer

Bernard Family Playground

Central Park's smallest playground, intended for toddlers and pre-school children, has a striking view of the Meer.

Conservatory Garden

The six-acre garden is divided in three parts with distinct styles. The northern third is in the French mode, noted for its spring tulips and autumn mums; it's centered on the Untermeyer Fountain, featuring Walter Schott's sculpture Three Dancing Maidens.

The center portion is Italianate, showcasing flowering crabapple and wisteria. Its focus is a geyser fountain known as the Conservatory Garden Center Fountain.

The southernmost section is an English-style garden with abundant magnolia and lilac. A pool here presents statues of Mary and Dickon from The Secret Garden.

The wrought iron Vanderbilt Gates mark the entrance to the gardens; originally designed by George B Post for the Vanderbilt mansion at 5th Avenue and 58th Street, they were salvaged and gifted to the park in 1939 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

Former Marion Sims Statue

A statue of J. Marion Sims, a pioneer of gyneco- logical surgery, stood here from 1934 until 2018. (The statue, by Ferdinand Miller, was first placed in Bryant Park, and was moved here during subway construction to a place opposited the Academy of Medicine.) Sims' surgical experiments were conducted on enslaved women, generally without anesthesia, a brutal history that led to the relocation of his statue to Green-Wood Cemetery, where Sims is buried. (photo: Charles Smith)

Girls' Gate

"The Boys’ gate and the Girls’ gate will convey the idea that ample opportunity for physical development is considered a necessary part of the free educational system of the city, and will recognize the fact that it is not thought sufficient for the young students of either sex to be liberally provided with schools, schoolteachers and schoolbooks, but that they must also be induced to study freely the works of nature."

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The Africa Center

1280 (block): The newest and furthest north institution on the Museum Mile is in a 2011 building designed by Robert Stern. Originally the Center for African Art and then the Museum for African Art, it was founded in 1984 on East 68th Street.

E 109TH ST         ===> E

1274 (corner): A six-story brown-brick building from 1935. A rare rental building on Fifth Avenue facing Central Park.

1270 (corner): A 14-story building put up in 1957 as the first middle-income co-operative apartment house in Manhattan. It served as the longtime home of Odetta, the legendary folk singer.

E 108TH ST         ===> E

1261 (corner): Vista on Fifth assisted living home, 14 floors built in 1998.

1255 (corner): This eight-story building was dedicated in 1927 as the Home of the Daughters of Israel, an old folks home. Now a co-op.

E 107TH ST         ===> E

1250 (block): Lakeview Apartments, a complex built in 1974 to provide affordable housing under the Mitchell-Lama program.

E 106TH ST         ===> E

Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Center

1240 (block): Originally built in 1938 as the Flower-Fifth Avenue Hospital, designed in Beaux-Arts style by York & Sawyer. The X-shaped hospital, run by the New York Medical College, broke with tradition by having no wards, only private rooms. In 1978, the College affiliated with the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, then led by Terence Cooke, whose namesake the facility now is.

E 105TH ST         ===> E

El Museo del Barrio

1230 (block): A museum of Latin American and Caribbean art, with a focus of Puerto Rico, located since 1977 in a neo-classical building built in 1921 by the Heckscher Foundation for Children as a shelter for abused and neglected children. The building's Teatro Heckscher was the first home of the New York Shakespeare Festival. (photo: Guy Dickinson)

E 104TH ST         ===> E

Museum of the City of New York

1220 (block): Founded in 1923 and originally housed in Gracie Mansion, this NYC-focused museum moved into this brand-new Georgian Revival building in 1932. Its collection includes Eugene O'Neill manuscripts, Jacob Riis' glass negatives and a dollhouse that features a miniature artwork by Marcel Duchamp.

The statues of influential New Yorkers Alexander Hamilton and DeWitt Clinton that flank the facade, installed in 1941, are by Adolph Alexander Weinman, who did Penn Station's eagles, among many other works.

E 103RD ST         ===> E

New York Academy of Medicine

1216 (corner): Founded in 1847 to advance medical practice in the city, the society was instrumental in making NYC a leader in public health. The neo-Renaissance landmark, completed in 1927 to a York & Sawyer design, is made from limestone and sandstone for an interesting checkerboard effect.

The Greek god of medicine Asclepius and his daughter Hygeia appear above the entrance, with a motto that translates as "They who shall be born a thousand ages hence shall not be barred from adding their contribution."

1215 (corner): Brisbane House, built by journalist Arthur Brisbane, who lived in a 30-room apartment on the top three floors. Another resident was Mayor Fiorella La Guardia, who made many of his radio broadcasts from his apartment here.

West:

Arthur Brisbane Monument

A memorial to Arthur Brisbane (1864-1936), whom William Randolph Hearst called "the greatest journalist of his day" and Damon Runyon said was journalism's "all-time No. 1 genius."

Starting out as the New York Sun and Pulitzer's New York World, he was hired away by Hearst to run several of his publications, including the New York Journal, Evening Journal, New York Mirror and Chicago Herald. Brisbane's syndicated column, "Today," reached 30 million readers. "If you don't hit the reader between the eyes in your first sentence of your news column, there's no need to write any more," was his writing philosophy.

Considered the era's highest-paid journalist with a salary of $260,000, Brisbane was also a real estate developer, backing such projects as the Ziegfeld Theatre, the Warwick Hotel and the Ritz Tower (as well as Brisbane House across Fifth Avenue). He provided PR advice to tycoons like Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and John D. Rockefeller.

His grandson, also named Arthur Brisbane, served as public editor of the New York Times from 2010-12.

This memorial, designed by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon with a bas relief portrait by Richmond Barthe, was dedicated in 1939.

Bendheim Playground

One of the perimeter playgrounds proposed by Robert Moses in 1936 and built with WPA support, in 1997 it became the first in the park to be accessible to children with disabilities. It's named for Robert Bendheim, a textile manufacturer and money-giver who was associated with nearby Mount Sinai. (photo: CaptainKidder)

East Meadow

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1212 (corner): A 1926 building of 16 floors by George and Edward Blum. Allen Dulles lived here before he headed the CIA. At some point Mount Sinai bought the building for nurses' housing, converting it to condos in 2012; Carmelo Anthony bought a unit in 2015 when he was playing for the Knicks.

1200 (corner): The Park View, 17 stories designed by Emory Roth in 1928. It was home to opera singer Marian Anderson from 1958-1975 (NNY).

E 101ST ST         ===> E

Mount Sinai Hospital

Corner (1440 Madison): Founded in 1855 as the Jews' Hospital, Mount Sinai moved to Fifth Avenue in 1904. Doctors here were the first to type blood to ensure compatibility for transfusions—and coined the term "pre-menstrual syndrome."

1170 (corner): A 16-story co-op by JER Carpenter, built in 1926. Clarence Day, author of Life With Father, lived here from 1928-1934 (NNY).

E 98TH ST         ===> E

This street marks the southern boundary of the Carnegie Hill Historic District.

1165 (corner): This 16-story building from 1925 by JER Carpenter is almost a twin of 1170 across the street. It was the childhood home of author George Plimpton (NNY).

1160 (corner): A six-story neo-Georgian apartment building from 1923, designed and built by Fred F. French.

West:

Bertel Thorvaldsen Statue

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1158 (corner): A 15-story apartment building from 1924, designed in French Renaissance style by C. Howard Crane and Kenneth Franzheim. Sports writer Grantland Rice, who gave us the phrase "win one for the Gipper," was living here at the time of his death in 1954 (NNY).

1150 (corner): Eleven-story building by JER Carpenter, built 1924. William Shawn moved here in 1951, just before he became editor of the New Yorker; he died here in 1992, five years after his involuntary retirement. (His son, actor Wallace Shawn, grew up here.) Masterpiece Theatre host Alistair Cooke lived here for many years, dying here in 2004; author Walker Percy stayed here in 1944 when he was a young medical student (NNY).

West:

Woodman's Gate

This gate was ill-placed to honor the folk of the woods, however, giving access as it does to the Reservoir to its left and the Meadows to the right. If you want woods, you're better off entering on the wilder west side of the park.

East 96th Street Playground

Created in 1935-36 as one of the perimeter playgrounds; restored in 1994.

Rhododendron Mile

The stretch of the East Drive between 96th and 85th Street was a problem for Frederick Law Olmstead, who complained in 1858 that the expanse of the Reservoir reduced the park to a “mere passage-way for connection," and it would therefore "be difficult to obtain an agreeable effect in this part of the design.” Landscape architect Samuel Parsons Jr., who refurbished the park from 1903-11, attempted a solution by planting thousands of rhododendrons here, donated by Olivia Slocum Sage, the philanthropist widow of Russell Sage. The original plantings did not last long, but in 2012, the Central Park Conservancy launched a recontruction of Parsons' landscaping. (photo: Gigi NYC)

Engineers Gate

It's also known as the Runners Gate, because this is where the Marathon enters the park for its final leg.

While most of the entrances to the park, in keeping with Olmsted and Vaux's wishes, are simple gaps in the perimeter wall, the Engineers Gate is a striking Neo-Classical structure, designed by Thomas Hastings (co-architect of the NYPL) and Donn Barber in 1926 as part of the John Purroy Mitchel memorial.

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1148 (corner): This 1923 building by JER Carpenter, 13 stories tall, successfully fought a 75-foot height limit imposed on Upper Fifth Avenue two days after plans to build it were filed.

Future governor and Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey was living here in 1935 when he was made a special prosecutor to target mobsters. Dutch Schultz did not appreciate being targeted, and had a hit man stake out Dewey here in preparation for an assassination. This reckless move prompted Lucky Luciano to have Schultz killed—though Dewey would soon send Luciano himself to Sing Sing.

1140 (corner): A 15-story building in a Renaissance style, built in 1922 by Fred F. French.

E 95TH ST         ===> E

1136 (corner): A 15-story apartment building from 1925, designed by George F. Pelham Jr.

1133: A 1927 16-story building by Emery Roth, built by Bing & Bing. Fashion designer Hattie Carnegie (nee Henrietta Kanen- geiser), described in her Times obituary as "one of the fabulous characters of Paris," died in her duplex here in 1956. The apartment was bought by Ann Woodward, who killed herself here in 1975 after an excerpt from a Truman Capote novel that depicted a thinly veiled version of her murdering her husband with a shotgun.

1130 (corner): This neo-Georgian mansion, built in 1915 to a Delano & Aldrich design, was "one of the last grand private homes completed on Fifth Avenue" (All Around the Town). Its original owners were Willard and Dorothy Whitney Straight, wealthy liberals who founded the New Republic and the New School for Social Research. (Willard died in the influenza pandemic while helping to arrange the peace conference in Paris.) In 1927, Dorothy sold the house to Elbert Gary, chair of US Steel and namesake of Gary, Indiana, who died here soon after the purchase.

From 1952-71, it was Audubon House, headquarters of the Audubon Society. The International Center of Photography had a museum here from 1974 to 2000, but sold it to hedge fund chair Bruce Kovner, who turned it back into a private single-family residence—one of only three on Fifth Avenue.

E 94TH ST         ===> E

1125 (corner): This 14-story Italian Renaissance building, put up in 1925 to an Emery Roth design, has been home to numerous celebrities, including Bette Midler (who owned the penthouse), Jon Bon Jovi, Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, and Disney chair Bob Iger.

1120 (corner): A JER Carpenter building from 1924. Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert Jr. moved here in 1925, when his mansion across the street was demolished, and lived here until his death in 1939 (NNY).

E 93RD ST         ===> E

1116 (corner): Here was the mansion of beer magnate Jacob Ruppert Sr. (1842-1915), built in 1883 in an eclectic style, with a rathskeller paying tribute to his German forebears.

His son Jacob Jr. (1867-1939) moved here as a teenager, eventually inheriting the house in 1915, the same year that he purchased the Yankees. He hired Babe Ruth, built Yankee Stadium, added numbers to uniforms; the team won seven World Series championships under his ownership.

When the Marx Brothers were boys living on 93rd Street, they used to sneak over the fence here to steal fruit.

1115 (corner): A 15-story apartment building by JER Carpenter from 1926, a near-twin to his building across the street. Writer John O'Hara was living here in 1938 when he started writing the stories that became the musical Pal Joey. New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger moved here in 1951 and died in his sleep here in 1968.

The Jewish Museum

1109 (corner): Built in 1908 for financier Felix Warburg (1871-1937), it was designed by CPH Gilbert in the French Renaissance style. Warburg's widow donated it in 1944 as a permanent home for the Jewish Museum, which opened here in 1947.

The museum's collection includes works by Marc Chagall, Andy Warhol, Alfred Steiglitz and Man Ray. The building was expanded in 1963, and again in 1993 by Kevin Roche.

E 92ND ST     ===> E

1107 (corner): This 1925 building is "one of the grandest pre-war apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue," according to Carter Horsley—notable for its 54-room triplex penthouse built for General Foods' Marjorie Merriweather Post, who owned (with her stockbroker husband EF Hutton) the townhouse this building replaced. Gore Vidal lived with his father here in 1945 as a 20-year-old budding novelist (NNY).

Convent of the Sacred Heart

1100 (corner): Founded in 1881 by the Catholic Society of the Sacred Heart, it's the oldest private school for girls in the city. It moved here in the 1930s, to a mansion built for financier Otto Kahn in 1918 (co-designed by CPH Gilbert).

Prominent alums include Stefani Germanotta (later known as Lady Gaga), Broadway star Elaine Stritch and several Kennedys.

E 91ST ST         ===> E

Cooper-Hewitt Museum

1095 (block): This four-story brick mansion—the first residence in the US to have a steel frame—was built for steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, who lived here from 1902 until his death in 1919. (His widow lived on here another 27 years.) The structure was given to the Smithsonian to house the design museum founded by three sisters who were daughters of Mayor Abraham Hewitt and granddaughters of inventor Peter Cooper.

West:

Fred Lebow Statue

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Church of the Heavenly Rest

Corner (1 E 90th): This church was founded in 1865 by Civil War veterans as a tribute to their fallen comrades. Originally meeting at Fifth and 45th, the church moved here in 1929, onto land that Andrew Carnegie's widow had bought in 1917 to prevent an apartment building from being built there. The neo-Gothic limestone church was designed by Mayers, Murray & Phillip.

1083: This was the townhouse of Archer Milton Huntington, founder of the Hispanic Society of America, and his wife, sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington; the present facade dates to a 1913 redesign by Ogden Codman. They donated the property to the National Academy of Design in 1940, though Anna kept an apartment in the building until her death in 1973 at the age of 97. The Academy ran a museum here that closed in 2016; they sold the building in 2019.

1080 (corner): Twenty-one story white brick building from 1961.

E 89TH ST         ===> E

Guggenheim Museum

1071 (block): A museum built to house mining tycoon Solomon Guggen- heim's collection of Modern art, featuring works by Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Paul Klee and Joan Miro. Guggenheim asked Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943 to design the structure; the resulting "inverted ziggurat," surely Wright's most recognizable work, did not open to the public until 1959.

Will Smith encounters an alien here for the first time in the original Men in Black.

E 88TH ST         ===> E

Corner (2 E 88th): A 14-story building from 1927, distinguished by its rooftop watertank disguised as a Meso- potamian temple.

1067: Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II lived in this 1917 building from 1930-32 (NNY).

1060 (corner): This 1928 14-story apartment building was designed by JER Carpenter. Earlier on the site was the mansion of Henry Phipps, a partner of Andrew Carnegie.

E 87TH ST         ===> E

1058 (corner): The former address of the James Speyer mansion, here c. 1912-47. Though left by Speyer to the Museum of the City of New York, it was sold and torn down to make way for...

1056 (corner): A 19-story building from 1951, designed by George F. Pelham. Lena Himmelstein Bryant Malsin, founder of the Lane Bryant womenswear chain, died at her home here in 1951. Comedian Mel Brooks lived here in the late 1950s (NNY).

1054: Financier Bernard Baruch, an advisor to presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, lived here from the 1920s until 1946 (NNY). His friend Winston Churchill would sometimes stay with him here. Torn down to make room for...

1050 (corner): A 19-story beige-brick apartment building from 1960. In addition to Baruch's home, this building also replaced the 40-room mansion, built in 1917, of Sarah Mae Caldwell Manwaring Plant Hayward Rovensky, who lived here with three of her four husbands.

E 86TH ST         ===> E

This street marks the southern boundary of the Carnegie Hill Historic District.

Neue Galerie

1048 (corner): This six-story Louis XIII-style townhouse was designed by Carrere and Hastings for William Starr Miller (1856-1935), a lawyer and industrialist who married Edith Warren (1866-1944), the sister of architect Whitney Warren, who lived on the same block. Their daughter was Edith Starr Miller, a far-right conspiracy theorist who married Almeric Paget, Lord Queenborough, here in 1921.

After Edith Warren Miller's death, the house was bought by Grace Vanderbilt (1870-1953), widow of Cornelius Vanderbilt III and grand dame of New York society, who had been forced to sell her palatial mansion to the Astors, and referred to this place as "the gardener's cottage."

The house next became the home of YIVO, the world's largest Yiddish-language archive, now located on West 16th Street.

In 1994, it was purchased by cosmetics tycoon Richard Lauder, who opened the Neue Gallerie New York here in 2001, a museum of early 20th century German and Austrian art, featuring works by artists like Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and George Grosz. When Lauder purchased Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I for the museum in 2006 for a reported $135 million, it set a record for the highest price paid for a painting. The museum is a tribute to Lauder's late friend, the art dealer Serge Sabarsky. (cc photo: Mark Hinchman)

1046: Landmark Branding calls this 1967 Modernist apartment building "a brash and ugly intrusion into the district" with "all the style of a discarded pair of cheap sunglasses." Harry Hopkins, a top advisor to FDR, moved to an earlier house here in 1945 and died a year later (NNY).

1040 (corner): A 17-story apartment building built in 1930; designed by Rosario Candela, it's noted for the picturesque collection of arcades and chimneys on its roof. Its most famous resident was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who lived here from 1964 until her death in 1994; from her full-floor 15th floor apartment, she had a view of the Temple of Dendur that she helped bring to New York, and the Reservoir that now bears her name. Other notable residents include fascist-friendly publisher Generoso Pope, Nazi-coddling Gen. Lucius Clay, Vietnam war criminal Robert McNamara and US Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

Previously on the lot was the mansion of financier James Clews, as well as that of architect Whitney Warren, co-designer of Grand Central Station.

West:

Ancient Playground

An adventure-style playground designed in 1973 to resemble an ancient city, inspired by the Temple of Dendur. The Osborn Gates feature bronze animals by Paul Manship; they're dedicated to Henry Church Osborn, president of the Met.

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1035 (corner): A 16-story building from 1926, designed in Italian Renaissance style by JER Carpenter. Earlier on this spot were the Fifth Avenue Apartments, a seven-story building that was seen as an unwanted intrusion into an elite neighborhood when it went up in 1890.

1030 (corner): Another JER Carpenter building, this one from 1925. There's just 16 apartments in this building, including a penthouse once owned by movie star Robert Redford and later, from 2001-07, by journalist Diane Sawyer and director Mike Nichols.

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Metropolitan Museum of Art

(1000 5th Ave): The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City's premier art institution, was incorp- orated in 1870 and moved to this location in 1880. (The city's gift of Central Park's land to the museum is why New Yorkers can pay whatever they wish here.) The original building was designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould in a red-brick High Victorian Gothic style, already seen as dated at the time. This became the rear central portion of the museum, engulfed by the Beaux Arts facade now associated with the Met, which was designed by Richard Morris Hunt and completed in 1902 by his son, Richard Howland Hunt, and George B. Post.

The facade sculpture by Karl Bitter includes caryatids representing Sculpture, Painting, Architecture and Music, as well as portraits of the artists Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, Dürer, Rembrandt and Velázquez. The blocks of stone atop the pillars were intended to become representations of Egyptian, Greek, Renaissance and Modern art, but were left unfinished for financial reasons.

The north and south wings were added by Charles Follen McKim from 1906-18. The Modernist rear wings were added by Kevin Roche from 1978-87.

Among the masterpieces in the Met's collection are Vincent Van Gogh's Wheat Field With Cypresses, El Greco's View of Toledo, Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, Vermeer's Young Woman With a Water Pitcher, Picasso's Gertrude Stein, Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, John Singer Sargent's Madame X, Breugel's The Harvesters, Valasquez's Juan de Pareja and Jacques Louis David's Death of Socrates.

The 2,000-year-old Temple of Dendur, rescued from the rising waters of the Aswan Dam and relocated here in 1963, is the only complete Egyptian temple in the Western Hemisphere. It's housed in the Sackler Wing, named for the family that played a major role in the opioid crisis that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

The Period Rooms, featuring complete interiors from various eras, were used as a hiding place by the kids in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The title character in 1999's The Thomas Crown Affair plots an art theft at the Met, while the crew in Ocean's 8 runs a jewelry heist at the Temple of Dendur—which is also featured in When Harry Met Sally and 2007's I Am Legend.

On February 4, 1963, the Met welcomed its most famous visitor — the Mona Lisa, loaned to the US by special request of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. After a million art lovers paid their respects, the painting went back to France on March 7 and hasn't left to Louvre since.









Fragment of a monumental statue of Alexander the Great.




















Grapevines by Tiffany.
























El Greco's Saint Jerome.



















Perseus with the head of Medusa—by Antonio Canova.




















August Saint-Gaudens' Diana, formerly atop Madison Square Garden (when it was on Madison Square).

The Met's extensive collection of armor includes a suit made for Henry VIII.















Pharaoh Hatshepsut, stepmother of the pharaoh to whom the Obelisk is dedicated.
















Among the Met's European paintings are one-seventh of all the Vermeers in existence.

Unidentified Object

Friedman Playground

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1028 (corner): What appears at first glance to be one palatial mansion is actually three separate structures: On the corner is a Beaux Arts townhouse designed in 1901 by CPH Gilbert for leather manufacturer Jonathan Thorne. Next door, formerly No. 1027, was built in 1903 for financier George Crawford Clark, and No. 1028 was first occupied in 1906 by William and Mary Kingsland. The latter two buildings were skillfully designed by Van Vleck & Goldsmith to form a harmonious whole with their neighbor to the north.

After Thorne's death in 1920, his home was purchased by Florence Vanderbilt Burden, Commodore Vanderbilt's great-granddaughter. She sold it to the Order of the Sacred Heart of Mary, which opened a school for girls here "in connection with Marymount College," which promised to protect young ladies from "socialism and chaos."

The school acquired the house next door in 1936, and the Kingsland house in 1950—the year the school started admitting boys—making the illusion of the three houses' unity a reality.

1025: This address is just an entrance arcade to two 1955 co-ops on 83rd and 84th streets, which share only a lobby and this prestigious address. To make room for this gimmick, developers demolished a 1906 townhouse designed by Ogden Codman for Lloyd S. Bryce.

1020 (corner): This 1925 building by Warren & Wetmore is "one of the supreme residential buildings of New York," and one of its "grandest pre-war apartment buildings," according to Carter Horsley. It has 14 floors but only 13 apartments—some of which have ceilings up to 18 feet high.

Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton moved here in 1926 when she was 14, and stayed into the 1930s (NNY). Samuel Kress, who ran a competing chain of dime stores, lived here with his collection of Italian Renaissance masterpieces. Republican fundraiser Georgette Mosbacher lived here from 1992-2017, where she threw parties attended by royalty, presidents and movie stars.

Previously at this address, from 1906-24, was the mansion of financier William Salomon, filled with old masters and antique tapestries. It had in turn replaced the grand house of Richard Arnold, founder of the Arnold & Constable dry goods store.

E 83RD ST         ===> E

1016 (corner): A 15-story building from 1926, designed by John B. Peterkin. Legendary acting teacher Stella Adler had been living here for many years by the time of her death in 1992. (NNY)

1014: This townhouse sandwiched between two much larger apartment buildings was built in 1907, originally one of a matched pair with No. 1015. Its first owner was stock broker JAF Clarke, who in 1926 sold it to his next door neighbor, James Watson Gerard (1867-1951), whose own home was being torn down to make way for 1016.

Gerard, a lawyer and politician, had served as ambassador to Germany in the years leading up to World War I. Eleanor Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were frequent visitors to his home here.

After his widow died in 1956, the property was bought by the West German government, which opened it to the public in 1961 as Goethe House, a center to promote German culture. It served that role until 2008, when the FDNY pointed out that the building's graceful six-story open staircase would turn the building into a blast furnace in the event of a fire. It's been unoccupied since then.

1010 (corner): A 15-story co-op built in 1928 by Fred F. French. Wall Street lawyer Wendell Willkie (1892-1944) spent the last 15 years of his life here, including his unsuccessful 1940 Republican challenge to FDR. New York Times publisher Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger was living here at the time of his death in 2013.

This was also home to Julia Meade, an actor who became famous in the early days of TV as a pitchwoman for Lincoln cars, and to JFK's sister Patricia Kennedy Lawford after her separation from actor Peter Lawford.

E 82ND ST         ===> E

1009 (corner): A Beaux Arts townhouse built in 1901. It was owned by various members of the Duke family, whose wealth derived from the tobacco monopoly, until 2006. Real estate billionaire Tamir Sapir owned it from 2006-10; he planned to display his ivory collection here, an idea that was scuttled when he was caught illegally importing it on his yacht. Since then it's been owned by Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim; when he bought it, he was the world's richest person.

1001: Developer Peter Kalikow tore down townhouses at 1006, 1007 and 1008 to put up this 23-story post-modern design by Philip Johnson in 1979. The architecture has been widely mocked, from the horizontal moldings that resembled "sliced-off Tootsie Rolls" to the "ersatz mansard roof."

998 (corner): This Italian Renaissance-style design by McKim Mead & White, described by Carter Horsley as "one of the world’s grandest apartment buildings," went a long way toward making apartment living acceptable to the very wealthy when it went up in 1912. Its 12 stories comprise 18 units. Early tenants included Sen. Elihu Root, former Vice President Levi Morton and mining tycoon Murry Guggenheim.

E 81ST ST         ===> E

The Stanhope

995 (corner): This 16-story building designed by Rosario Candela opened in 1927 as the Stanhope Hotel, one of New York's most prestigious hotels. Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco stayed here when they visited New York, as did Golda Meir, the Agha Khan, Maria Callas and Ringo Starr. Charlie Parker was visiting a friend here, Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswater, when he died here March 12, 1955, at the age of 34 (NNY). Socialite Kiki Preston jumped to her death from her fifth floor apartment on December 23, 1946.

The Rembrandt Room here featured pianist George Feyer from 1968 to 1980, and singer Greta Keller through 1964.

993: This 19-story building, with a distinctive red-tile roof concealing its watertower, was designed by Emery Roth in 1930; it has just 17 apartments, whose occupants have included songwriter/performer George M. Cohan, who died here November 5, 1942 (NNY); financier/art collector Arthur Altschul; and PR consultant Howard Rubenstein.

Previously on this site was the manstion of Louis Stern, co-founder of Stern Bros. department store, built in 1887 to a Schickel & Ditmars design.

American Irish Historical Society

991: A five-story Beaux Arts townhouse from 1901, originally built for Mary Augusta Leroy King, a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant. After her 1905 death, it was owned by banker David Crawford Clark, who hired Ogden Codman to redesign the interiors.

US Steel president William Ellis Corey bought it in 1918 with his wife, the former Broadway star Mabelle Gilman; he had scandalized society by leaving his first wife to marry her in 1911. This marriage, too, ended in divorce in 1923; William Corey died here in 1934.

Corey's son by his first marriage sold the building in 1939 to the American Irish Historical Society, which would occupy it for the next 80 years. Battered by charges of nepotism and mismanagement, the society put the townhouse on the market in 2021.

It serves as the townhouse of billionaire Logan Roy on the TV show Succession.

990 (corner): A 14-story building from 1927, designed by Rosario Candela and Warren & Wetmore. It contains only six apartments—five duplexes and a triplex penthouse. Actor Peter Lawford and his wife, the former Patricia Kennedy, bought an apartment here in 1964, though the couple soon split.

Previously on the site was the CPH Gilbert-designed Woolworth Mansion, where dime store tycoon Frank Woolworth lived from 1901 until his death here in 1901. He was living here when he built (and paid for) the Woolworth Tower in 1913. His granddaughter, Barbara Hutton, stayed here briefly after her mother's suicide at the Plaza Hotel in 1917 (NNY).

E 80TH ST         ===> E

988 (corner): A 1926 Italian Renaissance building by JER Carpenter holds 12 apartments on 14 floors&mdashcondos, not Fifth Avenue's usual co-ops. Actor Grace Kelly moved here in 1954, her last New York apartment before marrying Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956.

985: A 26-story yellow-brick apartment tower that went up in 1968. It's the main residence of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, whose family owns the building.

It replaced two townhouses built in 1907 by garment manufacturer Isaac Brokaw for his sons—one at this address, the other at No. 984. They were built in a style that matched Brokaw's own mansion on the corner of the block.

The current building and its neighbor to the south are considerably taller than most area buildings because they took advantage of a zoning rule that granted additional height for buildings that had plazas in front. The value of a plaza on a building that faces Central Park is dubious.

980 (corner): A 26-story co-op from 1966 that replaced the French Renaissance Brokaw mansion, built in 1888—featuring turrets, gables and almost a moat, in what came to be known as the Fifth Avenue style. Its destruction, along with that of Penn Station, compelled Mayor Robert Wagner to sign a landmarks preservation law.

West:

Miner's Gate

One of the 20 gates named by the Commis- sioners of Central Park in 1862—though the names were not actually inscribed until 1999. The names were intended to reflect the democratic intentions of the park. The term "miner" was intended to "include the workers in coal, and the different ores, and also the quarrymen or miners of stone."

As discovered by the website PopSpots, this was the location of the pretzel vendor featured on the cover of the Steely Dan album Pretzel Logic.

Cedar Hill

The Glade

James Michael Levin Playground

This perimeter playground, built in the 1930s, was dedicated in 1987 to James Michael Levin, a three-year-old killed by a hit-and-run driver in 1959, when his mother Janice Levin funded its renovation. It's designed to appeal to toddlers.

The playground features the Sophie Irene Loeb Fountain, which portrays characters from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, including Alice, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat. It was sculpted by Frederick Roth, who also made Central Park's Balto and Mother Goose, as well as the dancing bear and goat at the Central Park Zoo.

Sophie Irene Loeb (1876–1929), the fountain's namesake, was a journalist for the New York Evening World and the first president of the Child Welfare Board. One of the many reforms she campaigned for was the addition of playgrounds to Central Park.

Alice in Wonderland

This 1959 sculpture by José de Creeft, featuring Alice on a giant mushroom surrounded by characters from the Lewis Carroll book, is designed to be climbed on by children. The statue was paid for by George Delacorte, who is the model for the sculpture's Mad Hatter.

Conservatory Water

West of the pond is a statue of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), sculpted by Georg John Lober in 1955. (Lober also made Times Square's George Cohan.) It's the site of a summer reading program.

The Conservatory Water is a prime spot to watch for Pale Male— maybe the world's most famous bird, and at 31 years old in 2021, the oldest hawk ever recorded in the wild.

On the eastern shore of the Conservatory Water is the Kerbs Memorial Boat House, where model boats are stored and rented (cc photo: Ajay Suresh). The building was built in 1954 with a donation from Jeanne Kerbs in honor of her parents; her father, Edward Kerbs, was a wealthy cigar manufacturer.

Pilgrim Hill

Another popular sledding hill, it's named for the statue of a pilgrim by John Quincy Adams Ward, given to the park by the New England Society in 1885. (Ward sculpted Indian Hunter, William Shakespeare and the 7th Regiment Memorial elsewhere in the park, and George Washington and the Stock Exchange pediment, both on Wall Street.)

Waldo Hutchins Bench

A sundial above the bench—which is an hour off during daylight savings time—bears a bronze figure by sculptor Paul Manship, as well as another Latin motto, which means, "Do not let time destroy it" (cc photo: Gigi NYC).

A whisper on one end of the bench can be easily heard on the other, due to the curved bench's acoustics.

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Ukrainian Institute

Corner (2 E 79th): A five-story townhouse built in 1899 to a CPH Gilbert design, decorated with sea life. The first owner was coal tar magnate Isaac Fletcher; after he died in 1917, it was bought by Harry Sinclair of Sinclair Oil, who spent a year in prison in connection with the Teapot Dome scandal. In 1930, the house was bought by Augustus van Horne Stuyvesant, the last patrilineal descendant of Peter Stuyvesant. Two years after his death in 1953, it became the headquarters of the Ukrainian Institute of America.

French Cultural Services

972: This five-story townhouse was built as a wedding present for William Payne Whitney and Helen Hay, given to them by Whitney's fabulously wealthy uncle, Oliver Payne. (Hay, the daughter of diplomat John Hay, was a poet and children's book writer.) The house was designed by Stanford White in Italian Renaissance style; it is considered one of his finest houses. It included a fountain with a statue White had purchased in Italy, which turned out to be by Michelangelo; it's currently on display at the Met. The architect was murdered shortly before the house was completed in 1906.

When Payne Whitney died in 1927, the place seems to have been inherited by his son John Hay "Jock" Whitney, though his mother lived here until her death in 1944. The son was a very successful investor; two of his successful ventures were the Broadway hit Life With Father and the film Gone With the Wind. (Rumours that a scene from Gone With the Wind was shot in the house are unconfirmed.) Jock Whitney was the last publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, from 1961-66 (NNY).

Corner (1 E 78th): Built in 1912 for James Buchanan Duke (1856-1925), a founder of the tobacco trust, to a design by Horace Trumbauer, who emulated the Hotel Lobottiere in Bordeaux. His widow Nanaline and their daughter, Doris Duke, donated the house in 1958 to NYU to house its Institute of Fine Arts.

The building has been used for such films as Arthur, The Greatest Showman and The Goldfinch.

E 78TH ST         ===> E

969 (corner): This 1926 building designed by Joseph L. Raimist has 16 stories and 12 apartments. City Realty dismisses it as "bland" and "not remarkable," but I find it rather handsome. Playwright Edward Albee reportedly lived here.

965: Built in 1941, 19 stories. It replaced the 1901 Jacob Schiff mansion designed by Freeman & Train.

On October 30, 2007, Linda Stein, former manager of the Ramones, was found murdered in her apartment here. Stein had become a real estate agent with many show biz clients, including Madonna, Sting, Angelina Jolie, Billy Joel, Christie Brinkley, Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford, Sylvester Stallone, Jann Wenner, Andrew Lloyed Webber, Michael Douglas, Steven Spielberg and Elton John. Her former personal assistant bludgeoned her to death because, she claimed, Stein "just kept yelling at her."

962: The address of the William Clark House, an ornate Beaux-Arts mansion designed by Lord, Hewlett & Hull for William Clark, a former senator from Montana who was at first denied a seat because he had bribed state legislators to get it. "I never bought a man who wasn't for sale," he insisted. The house was torn down in 1927 to make way for...

960 (corner): This luxury apartment building, 15 stories completed in 1928 by Warren & Wetmore with assistance from Rosario Candela, is considered one of the three finest residences on Fifth Avenue. Time founder Henry Luce and his wife Clare Boothe Luce were living here until his death in 1967 (NNY). Other notable former residents include billionaire Edgar Bronfman, suspected wife-murderer Claus Von Bulow and poet Louis Untermeyer.

E 77TH ST         ===> E

956 (corner): This apartment building designed by Isaac Newton Stoke Phelps was built in 1926 with eight stories, in conformance with restrictive zoning limits; when the Appellate Court overturned the zoning rule, six more stories were added by architect Nathan Korn.

Previously this was the site of Temple Beth-El, built in 1899. It's now merged with Tempel Emanu-el at Fifth and 65th.

955: An 18-story building from 1938 with 30 apartments, it was designed by Rosario Candela; the lack of detailing reflects Depression-era constraints as well as aesthetic trends. Actor Robert Redford owned the duplex penthouse here from 1985-2002.

953: This slender 15-story building was designed by Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes in 1925 in Neo-Renaissance style. It has seven apartments, one of which was claimed by the architect.

952: Built with only eight stories in 1923, to conform to a short-lived 75-foot limit on Fifth Avenue apartment buildings. At some point another three stories were added on top in a Modernist style. This is one of the very few buildings on the east edge of Central Park where you can rent and not buy a unit.

950 (corner): A JER Carpenter design from 1926, this Italian Renaissance building has seven apartments on 14 floors. The penthouse triplex was bought by Time Warner chair Steven Ross in 1971, and later sold to publisher Mort Zuckerman. Other tycoons who have lived here include Blackstone's Stephen Schwartzman and Loews Hotel's Jonathan Tisch.

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945 (corner): A 1949 building by Emery Roth & Sons has 107 units on 19 floors. The octagonal water tower on top "conjures the aesthetics of Mayan temples or battleship leviathans," according to Carter Horsley.

Previously on this site was the grand-domed Temple Emanu-el, built in 1891. It merged with Temple Beth-el and moved down to 65th Street in 1939.

944: A 1925 Italian Renaissance building designed by Nathan Korn; it has 14 stories and 15 co-op apartments. A white-glove co-op where the doorman actually wears white gloves, it's been home to TV personality Barbara Walters.

Commonwealth Fund

Corner (1 East 75th): This was the mansion of Edwin Harkness, an early investor in Standard Oil and at one point the sixth-richest person in the US. Completed in 1908 to a James Gamble Rogers design, the marble house reflects what passes for modesty in a multi-millionaire; for example, it has seven stories but appears to only have four, as two are underground and the top floor is hidden in the cornice. Harkness insisted that it bear a 75th Street and not a Fifth Avenue address, forcing his neighbor to cover up the "1" carved on the house next door.

Harkness was a supporter of the Met, with a particular interest in Egyptology; he gave the museum its famous blue hippo. He and his wife Mary not only funded the exploration of King Tut's tomb, they visited it a year after its rediscovery.

After the deaths of Harkness and his wife, in 1940 and 1950, respectively, the house was left to the Commonwealth Fund, founded by his mother Anna Harkness in 1918 "to enhance the common good," with a particular focus on healthcare.

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936 (corner): An 18-story building by Harmon Associates, completed in 1955 with 32 units. Replaced a 1907 townhouse designed by Carrere & Hastings for arts patron Grace Rainey Rogers, as well as a 1910 Warren & Wetmore house for S. Reading Bertron.

French Consulate General

934: This Italian Renaissance townhouse was built in 1926 for Charles E. Mitchell, president of National City Bank. His architects were Walker & Gillette, who also designed Rye Playland. Mitchell was a pioneer in retail banking and an informal advisor to presidents Harding and Hoover. His wife Elizabeth hosted evenings here with musical stars, most notably George Gershwin. Ruined by the stock market crash and subsequent investigations into financial irregularities, Mitchell was forced to sell the house in 1933. The French government bought it in 1942 to serve as consulate.

930 (corner): A 1940 building by Emery Roth of 19 stories, viewed as transitional between Italian Renaissance and Art Deco. Filmmaker Woody Allen lived in the penthouse with his children's sister, Soon-Yi Previn; another resident was pizza maker Mario Sbarro.

This building replaced houses owned by Gordon S. Rentschler, Jacob Schiff and Simeon B. Chapin.

E 74TH ST         ===> E

927 (corner): This 12-story building with 12 apartments was built in 1917 to a Warren & Wetmore design. The building has been home to such notables as TV star Mary Tyler Moore, CNN anchor Paula Zahn, financier Bruce Wasserstein and shoe seller Kenneth Cole.

But the most remarkable resident of this building might be Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk and possibly the world's most famous bird. He arrived in Central Park in 1991, at a time when redtails were an uncommon site in cities. In 1993, he built a nest on 927 with his mate at the time, a hawk known as Chocolate; the nest was initially removed, but was allowed to remain when the hawks rebuilt it. Since then, Pale Male and a series of partners have raised numerous hawk chicks here.

In 2004, the co-op board voted to remove the nest once again; after an international outcry, the board backed down and allowed Pale Male and his mate at the time, Lola, to rebuild. But there hasn't been any successful hatchings at the nest since then.

Pale Male was still alive as of 2021, making him at least 31 years old and one of the oldest hawks on record. (cc photo: Dave Hensley)

926: One of a pair of townhouse survivors, both built in 1899 to designs by CPH Gilbert. In 2008, the lease on this house was bought by Loews Hotel chair Jonathan Tisch for $21 million—purchasing the right to rent the place for $37,000 a year.

925: The smaller of the pair of Gilbert townhouses was originally built for John W. Simpson, founder of the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, which helped KKR take over RJR Nabisco and assisted in the IPOs for Google, Tesla, Facebook and Alibaba.

923 (corner): A 21-story white-brick apartment building from 1951, one of the first post-war structures on Fifth Avenue. The address used to belong to a Neo-Classical marble townhouse designed by Robert Maynicke for Randolph Guggenheimer, a lawyer, real estate developer and one-time acting mayor.

The entire first floor was a grand entrance, and the roof was supported by caryatids. In 1928, the house was leased to drug maker Nicholas Partos, who successfully fought off a burglar here in 1928, but was himself convicted of fraud two years later (as related by Daytonian). The building was demolished along with four buildings to left and right in 1945 to make way for the present building.

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920 (corner): A 14-story Italian Renaissance apartment building from 1922. It was designed by JER Carpenter, who lived here himself until his death in 1932. Other residents have included actor Gloria Swanson, composer Igor Stravinsky, director George Roy Hill, designer Sister Parish and comedian Robert Klein.

912: A 15-story building from 1925, built by Schwartz and Gross. Mobster Arnold Rothstein was living here when he was fatally shot at the Park Central Hotel in 1928 (NNY). Rothstein, who famously fixed the 1919 World Series, inspired the character Meyer Wolfsheimin The Great Gatsby and is depicted under his own name in Eight Men Out and Boardwalk Empire; he appears in Damon Runyon's stories as The Brain.

910 (corner): Originally built in 1925 by the Fred F. French Company with 12 limestone-clad stories in the Italian Renaissance style. In 1959, the limestone and all personality was stripped off and replaced with generic white brick, in the course of adding four stories and jamming in more units. Father-and-son architects Sylvan and Robert L. Bien are blamed for the desecration.

West:

Inventor's Gate

One of the 20 gates named by the Commis- sioners of Central Park in 1862—though the names were not actually inscribed until 1999. The names were intended to reflect the democratic intentions of the park. The "inventor" was described as one "whose labors are devoted to the study of natural laws, and to a searching analysis of the various mechanical possibilities that are within the scope of human effort, with a view to combine the results of the knowledge thus obtained in such a way as to confer fresh benefits on the race. To this class of minds we are indebted for the printing-press, the steam-engine, the electric telegraph, and for a thousand other but little less important discoveries."

There was an idea that the named gates would each be accomanied by a statue of a represent- ative figure. But the only one that seems to have happened was Byron Pickett's statue of Samuel Morse, unveiled on April 27, 1871, the telegraph inventor's operator's 80th birthday (cc photo: Peter Roan). Morse is the only person honored with a Central Park statue while still alive—a rule was passed soon afterwards making being dead a prerequisite.

East 72nd Street Playground

Built in 1936 and redesigned in 1970 as an adventure-style playground, it underwent subsequent renovations in the late 1990s and in 2015. It was voted the best play space in Central Park in 2016.

Richard Morris Hunt Memorial

Built into the perimeter wall is a monument to Richard Morris Hunt (1827-95), a prominent Beaux Arts architect. Dedicated in 1898, the memorial features a statue of Hunt, along with figures representing Architecture and Art, by Daniel Chester French, who also did the statue of Lincoln in his memorial in DC.

Hunt designed the entrance of the Metropolitan Museum as well as the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. His proposal for a Classical entrance to Central Park at 60th Street and Fifth Avenue prompted the resignation of the park's designers, Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, until the proposal was dropped.

Dene Summerhouse

This rustic structure visible from 5th Avenue sits atop Dene Rock and overlooks The Dene, a winding valley laid out by Olmsted that connects the Children's Zoo to East Green. It's a popular spot for weddings.

107th Infantry Memorial

A powerful sculpture, completed in 1927, featuring seven U.S. soldiers fighting in World War I. The sculptor, Karl Illava, was himself a sergeant in the 107th and able to depict the trauma of war from first-hand experience.

The 107th descends from a New York State Militia unit formed in 1806 in response to skirmishes with the British Navy off the coast of Sandy Hook. As the 7th Regiment, it helped to put down the Astor Place Riot in 1849, the Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys in 1857 and the Draft Riots in 1863. Known as the Silk Stocking Regiment because of its ties to New York's social elite, it was based at the impressive Park Avenue Armory.

Billy Johnson Playground

Also known as the Rustic Playground, it features play equipment made of wood and other natural materials, as well as a 45-foot slide coming down off Dene Rock.

Students' Gate

One of the 22 named entrances to Central Park—it seems to be the only one without its name carved in the perimeter wall.

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907 (corner): This 12-story apartment building was designed by JER Carpenter in 1916, the first of his many Fifth Avenue projects; the architect lived here for a time.

This was also the home of eccentric heiress Huguette Clark, who grew up at No. 962 up the avenue; when her father William Clark died in 1925, she moved to the 12th floor here with her mother. She kept that apartment for the next 86 years, though she spent the last 20 years of her life in hospitals by her own choice.

Other residents have included William C. Durant, co-founder of GM and Chevrolet; composer Samuel Barber; and Tali Farhadian Weinstein, who ran unsuccessfully for Manhattan DA in 2021.

This replaced the house of James A. Burden, built in 1893 to an RH Robertson plan—the first time a Fifth Avenue mansion above 59th Street was torn down for an apartment development.

900 (corner): A 1960 20-story white-brick apartment building by Sylvan Bien. It actually looks fairly stylish, thanks in part to the large bay windows on the Fifth Avenue facade. The Landmarks Commission made the right call, telling the building that it had to stick with white when it had to be reclad in 2009. Most white brick buildings still look hideous, though—including the architect's extreme makeover at 910 up the street.

E 71ST ST         ===> E

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Frick Collection

Block (1 E 70th): This was the Neo-Classical mansion of Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), completed 1914 to a design by Thomas Hastings of Carrère and Hastings. (The architect also designed the entry to the Manhattan Bridge and Arlington's Tomb of the Unknowns.) Frick was a robber baron, a manufacturer of coke—baked coal used in steelmaking—who was Andrew Carnegie's partner in founding US Steel. He was responsible for the anti-union Homestead Massacre as well as (through his hunting club's ill-maintained artificial lake) the Johnstown Flood, which killed over 2,000.

In accordance with Frick's will, after his wife's death in 1931, the house was turned into a museum to display his extensive art collection, opening in 1935. The truly remarkable assemblage includes three of the world's 34 Vermeers, three Rembrandts, portraits by Hans Holbein of the great rivals Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More, and paintings by El Greco, Goya, Velazquez, Bruegel, Titian, Renoir, Turner and Whistler. Children under 10 are not allowed into the museum—a rule that required special dispensation from the city's Commission on Human Rights.

From 1871-1912, this was the site of the Lenox Library, designed by Richard Morris Hunt. It housed the book collection of fanatical bibliophile James Lenox, which along with the Astor and Tilden libraries formed the nucleus of the New York Public Library.

In the universe of Marvel comic books, the Avengers Mansion is located here—it has the address 890 Fifth Avenue, which would be the Frick's address if it faced west.

E 70TH ST         ===> E

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884 (corner): A 13-story building, built in 1927, by the master of apartment design, Rosario Candela. AKA 2 East 70th Street. The penthouse here sold for $40 million in 2012.

880 (corner): There are 162 residential units in this 20-story Art Deco building from 1948, designed by Emery Roth and built by the Uris brothers.

Residents have included Mitch Leigh, who wrote the music for Man of La Mancha and the Sara Lee jingle, and John Hertz, founder of the rental car company. Earlier on this site was the home of railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman.

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875 (corner): A 19-story apartment building from 1941, designed by Emery Roth in the Moderne style. Three mansions were knocked down to build it, including the home of Ogden Mills, Herbert Hoover's last Treasury secretary, designed by Roth's mentor, Richard Hunt. Among the notables who have lived here are Phil Donahue and Marlo Thomas.

871: Site of the home of Stanford White in the Gout Rothschild style, including the installation of a 60-foot ballroom from a French chateau. Gertrude was a sculptor and the founder of the Whitney Museum.

870 (corner): A 21-floor beige-brick building with curved bays, designed by William I. Hohauser and built in 1949.

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860 (corner): This 20-story 1950 co-op, designed by Sylvan Bien, sits on the site of an 1895 mansion designed by William Schickel for cable car and tobacco magnate Thomas Fortune Ryan, as well as a RH Robertson house designed for subway financier Charles Yerkes (replaced by a garden by the time the present building came along).

The Kittredge family in the film Six Degrees of Separation lives here.

857 (corner): Described by critic Carter Horsley as "one of the city's most stylish white-brick apartment buildings"—which sounds like damning with faint praise—this 1963 building has 21 stories but only 17 apartments. It was designed by Robert Bien, whose father Sylvan designed the building taking up the rest of the block.

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Future Prime Minister Winston Churchill looked the wrong way before stepping into the street at this intersection on December 11, 1931. The car that hit him broke two of his ribs.

Corner (2 E 67th): This 13-story Rosario Candela building went up in 1926 on the site of Temple Beth-El, an 1891 synagogue designed by Brunner & Tryon that merged with Temple Emanu-El. It's home to New York Observer founder Arthur Carter, cosmetics billionaire Leonard Lauder and Loews Hotels CEO Jonathan Tisch, who paid $48 million for an apartment here in 2008.

Serbian Mission

854: This Beaux Arts townhouse, a survivor of what was once a row of mansions along Fifth Avenue, was built in 1905 for R. Livingston Beeckman (later governor of Rhode Island) to a design by Warren & Wetmore, architects of Grand Central Terminal.

It was bought by the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946 to serve as its permanent mission to the UN; the mission was more permanent than the multiethnic nation, which was whittled down to just Serbia by 2006. A 1975 bombing broke windows in the mission; the perpetrator, Serbian nationalist Bosko Radonjic, became leader of the Irish-American crime gang The Westies after being released from prison in 1982.

Corner (1 E 66th): This 19-story Rosario Candela apartment building was one of the architect's last, built in 1948. Vera Tucker, who lived here more than half a century, made headlines in 1986 when, as an 87-year-old, she knocked a pursesnatcher off his bicycle here by whacking him with her umbrella.

Previously on this was the mansion of Henry Havemeyer, founder of Domino Sugar, who with his wife Louisine amassed an amazing art collection, featuring important works by the likes of Rembrandt, El Greco, Manet, Degas and Monet (many of which ended up in the Met). The house where these were displayed was itself a masterpiece, with an interior designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. It was torn down in 1930, a year after Louisine's death.

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Children's Zoo

The petting zoo portion of the Central Park Zoo, featuring rabbits, ducks, sheep, goats, llamas, etc. Opened in 1961, its sculpted gates featuring a boy dancing with goats were designed by Paul Manship, who did Rockefeller Center's Prometheus. It's formally known as the Tisch Children's Zoo, for media mogul Laurence Tisch, who gave $4.5 million to complete a 1997 renovation after Edith and Henry Everett, reneged on their promise to fund the project, upset that their names on the zoo wouldn't be in big enough type.

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845 (corner): This 12-story apartment building, designed by JER Carpenter and put up in 1920, started the midrise multi-unit boom on Fifth Avenue. It ruffled feathers by overshadowing the Astor mansion next door, resulting in a 75-foot height limit for buildings on the avenue from 60th to 96th Street—a restriction that lasted only until 1923. The building's wealthy inhabitants have included oil baron Sid Bass, Bear Stearns CEO Ace Greenberg and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who bought both the entire 11th floor and the 12th floor penthouse.

Temple Emanu-El

840 (corner): The Congre- gation Emanu-El ("God Is With Us") was founded by German immigrants on the Lower East Side in 1845, occupying synagogues on Chrystie Street, East 12th Street and East 43rd Street before moving here in 1929, merging with Temple Beth-El. Emanu-El, an influential Reform congregation, introduced such innovations as the use of vernacular language, the introduction of music to accompany services and the end of gender segregation.

The present building, designed by Robert Kohn, seats 2,500, making it the largest synagogue in the world. Also on the grounds is Chapel Beth-El, commemorating the co-parent congregation.

This was formerly the site of the mansion of Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, built in 1893 to a French chateau–inspired design by Richard Morris Hunt.

West :

The echo-y archway connecting the Central Park Zoo to the Children's Zoo is named the Denesmouth Arch.

Delacorte Music Clock

Every half hour from 8 am until 5 pm, the bronze animals on this musical clock whirl into action, playing one of the 44 songs in their repertoire. The clock was a gift from George Delacorte, founder of Dell Publishing, who also gave Central Park the Delacorte Theater and the Alice in Wonderland statue. Andrea Spadini was the sculptor.

Central Park Zoo

The zoo dates back to the earliest days of the park, when people used to donate miscellaneous animals which were displayed near the Mall. It was chartered by the New York Assembly in 1864, making it the second-oldest public zoo in the country (after Philadelphia's), and the oldest zoo in New York.

In 1865, around the time it acquired a trio of Cape buffalo General William Sherman had picked up during his march through Georgia, the menagerie was moved to the Arsenal. Against the opposition of Central Park architects Olmsted and Vaux, permanent enclosures were built on the site of the present Zoo in 1870.

In 1934, new enclosures for the animals were designed by Aymar Embury, who designed hundreds of projects for Robert Moses. Some of his neo-Georgian brick and limestone buildings, arranged in a quadrangle around the sea lion tank, still remain, but the depressing menagerie-style cages were eliminated in a 1988 redesign by Kevin Roche, Dinkeloo, after the New York Zoological Society took over the facility.

The zoo's best-known resident was Gus the polar bear, whose psychological issues stemming from captivity, and his keepers' efforts to treat his neuroses, made him his species' most famous individual--the subject of books, a play, even a song by The Tragically Hip. He died in 2013, at the advanced age of 27, one of very few bears to get a New York Times obituary. His enclosure now holds grizzly bears, who seem to fare better in captivity.

Other zoo notables include Roy and Silo, a same-sex chinstrap penguin couple. (They have since broken up.) Also on view are sea lions, snow monkeys, red panda and dozens of species in an indoor rainforest. Since 2009, the zoo has been home to three rare snow leopards.

A perfect symbol of wildness captured by civilization, the zoo features in such films as Madagascar, The Day After Tomorrow, Jack Nicholson's Wolf and Woody Allen's Alice; books like Mr. Popper's Penguins and Catcher in the Rye; and the Simon & Garfunkel song "At the Zoo."

Children's Gate

In the original naming scheme, the commissioners noted: "The Park is already used freely and enjoyed heartily by troops of young children, and the Children's Gate will help to keep in mind the fact that, in the course of the next 20 years, the whole army of industrious workers, who are now vigorously laboring for the general welfare, must have received large reinforcements from the band of little ones who are today so tender and helpless."

This gate is well-placed opposite 64th Street, as it leads to the Central Park Zoo, many a child's favorite part of the park.

The Arsenal

One of only two buildings in Central Park that are older than the park itself, The Arsenal was, as its name suggests, originally used to store arms for the New York State National Guard. It replaced a former repository located in what's now Madison Square Park; it was constructed between 1847 and 1851 in a project overseen by state comptroller Millard Fillmore, who later became president. It was designed by architect Martin E. Thompson to look like a medieval fortress, with a crenulated cornice.

In 1857, it was bought by the city and turned into an administrative office and police station for the nascent park. In 1859, it began to accumulate a collection of animals donated by notables like PT Barnum, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and August Belmont—a menagerie that was evicted in 1871 as unsafe and smelly.

From 1869 to 1877, it was a temporary home for the American Museum of Natural History, as well as a dinosaur reconstruction studio. It also served as an art gallery and the site of Central Park's weather station, relocated to Belvedere Castle in 1918.

Wien Walk

It's named for Lawrence Wien, a real estate lawyer who once owned the Empire State Building and the Plaza Hotel. He gave millions of dollars to Central Park and other nonprofit causes, particularly Columbia University.

Freedman Plaza

Doris Freedman, the plaza's namesake, was the city's first director of cultural affairs, the founder of the Public Arts Council and president of the Municipal Arts Society. Appropriately enough, her plaza is home to a series of temporary sculptural installations.

Scholar's Gate

The commissioners original naming declared that the term "scholar" "includes the Poet, the Divine, the Statesman, the Lawyer, the Author, the Editor, the Teacher, the Physician, the man of Science, and all, in fact, whose contributions to the welfare of the community are of a specially intellectual character."

This was intended to be and is the busiest entrance to the park. The architect Richard Morris Hunt proposed a grand Classical gateway here, a proposal that seemed so contrary to what they saw as the park's democratic spirit that designers Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux resigned until the idea was dropped.

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838 (corner): Built in 1950 as an 11-story office building for the Union of American Hebrew Congregations—which explains why it has "Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself" inscribed across its facade. It gained a story when it was converted into a condo building in 1999. Seagram co-chair Charles Bronfman bought a penthouse here at the time for $18 million.

834 (corner): This 16-story Rosario Candela apartment building, completed in 1931, has been called "the most pedigreed building on the snobbiest street in the country's most real estate-obsessed city." Residents have included Laurance Rockefeller, John DeLorean, Harold Prince, Henry Kravis, Robert Wood Johnson, Charles Schwab, Elizabeth Arden and Robert Bass. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch bought the penthouse from Rockefeller for $44 million, the most ever paid for a co-op apartment.

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828 (corner): Built 1893–1902 for Edward Berwind, then the world's richest coal tycoon. His house later served as Institute of Aeronautical Sciences before becoming an apartment building in the 1970s, when it became home to disco queen Donna Summer and feminist sex writer Shere Hite.

820 (corner): A 1916 apartment building by Starrett & Van Vleck. The AIA Guide calls this and its southern neighbor "two of the great eclectic apartment houses of New York." Former New York governor and defeated presidential candidate Al Smith lived here from the late 1930s until his death in 1944. Herbert Lehman, New York governor from 1933-42, made this his home-away-from-Albany. CBS founder William Paley was a 25-year resident when he died in his 20-room duplex here in 1990. Other residents have included ballroom dancer Arthur Murray and designer Tommy Hilfiger.

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817 (corner): A George B. Post condo building from 1925. Cranky millionaire Abe Hirschfeld tried to sell his apartment here to ex-President Richard Nixon in 1979; when other residents blocked the sale, Hirschfeld kept Nixon's $92,500 deposit. Among those who did get approved were casino billionaire Steve Wynn and actor Richard Gere. In the film Scent of a Woman, Al Pacino visits a lady friend here.

814: Sleazy financier Serge Rubinstein was found strangled to death in his mansion that used to be here on January 27, 1955. The murder was never solved; it's said that the victim was hated by so many that the police had trouble narrowing down to a single suspect.

812: Nelson Rockefeller lived in a triplex here with his second wife, Happy, from 1963 (when this 19-story building was new) until his death in 1979.

810 (corner): Nelson Rockefeller and his first wife Mary moved here in 1931 and were living here when he became governor in 1958. He moved out in 1961 when he fell in love with Margaretta "Happy" Murphy, who would become his second wife. Richard Nixon moved here in 1963 after losing his bid to be governor of California and declaring that we wouldn't have Nixon to kick around anymore. He moved from here to the White House after winning the election of 1968.

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Knickerbocker Club

Corner (2 E 62nd): A Georgian revival clubhouse completed in 1915; Delano & Aldrich, architects. The club was founded in 1871 by former members of the Union Club who felt their old club's admission standards were slipping. Franklin Roosevelt and David Rockefeller were members; JP Morgan quit to form the Metropolitan Club when a friend he sponsored was blackballed.

800 (corner): This 1978 33-story apartment building was designed by Ulrich Franzen & Associates to match the height of the Knickerbocker Club with a three-story limestone screen wall facing the avenue. Singer Dolly Parton, designer Pierre Cardin, and Donald and Ivana Trump have called this home.

The building replaced the neo-Georgian townhouse of Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge, a Standard Oil heiress who married into the Phelps Dodge and Remington Arms fortunes. Torn down in 1977.

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Hotel Pierre

795 (corner): A slender 41-story tower built in 1930 for acclaimed chef Charles Pierre, whose restaurant had just been replaced by the New York Central Building. The hotel didn't take off, however, until it was bought in 1938 by millionaire J. Paul Getty, whose "smart set" friends began staying here.

French director Rene Clair moved here when he fled the Nazi invasion in 1940; Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor lived here when they were married in the 1940s.

Dashiell Hammett started writing The Thin Man here; he checked out without paying his bill, wearing all his clothes. John O'Hara wrote his first "Pal Joey" story here, after telling his wife he was going to Philadelphia and instead going on a two-day binge at the Pierre.

Woolworth's heiress Barbara Hutton had a suite, leading striking clerks to picket the hotel, chanting, "Is 18 dollars a week too much?" Other notable guests and residents: Jimmy Stewart, Audrey Hepburn, Tom Jones, Claire Trevor and Charles Bronson.

On January 2, 1972, armed robbers took over the hotel to rob its safety deposit boxes of as many as $10 million in jewels. Two of the crooks were soon caught; the rest got away with the bulk of the loot.

Al Pacino, Robert Redford, Lee Iacocca and George Steinbrenner were a few of the devoted customers of the hotel barber, Gio Hernandez, who died in 1989.

On Mad Men, the relaunched Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce ad agency temporily does business out of a suite here.

Metropolitan Club

Corner (1 E 60th): A club founded in 1891 for the rich and powerful who weren't yet blue-blooded enough for older, snootier clubs, with J.P. Morgan as its first president and Cornelius and William K. Vanderbilt among its original members. The clubhouse was built in 1894, designed by Stanford White, with an east wing with a majestic semicircular gateway added in 1912.

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Grand Army Plaza

This plaza, technically a part of Central Park but really a distinct entity, is bifurcated by Central Park South, a layout inspired by Paris' Place de la Concorde. It honors the Grand Army of the Republic, the powerful post–Civil War veteran's organization, comparable to the American Legion.































The northern half of the plaza is dominated by Augustus St. Gaudens' gilded statue of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who marched through Georgia and declared that "war is Hell." The female figure leading Sherman, said to represent Peace, is modeled on St. Gaudens' mistress Davida Johnson.

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787 (corner): A 10-story luxury apartment building, built in 1903 to a Henry J. Hardenbergh design, was torn down and replaced by...

785 (corner): Parc V Apartments, 18 white-brick stories designed by Emery Roth & Sons and completed in 1963. "Would be unattractive even in a slum"—City Review. Nevertheless, it's been home to billionaire David Geffen.

Sherry-Netherland Hotel

781 (corner): Opened in 1927 by ice cream magnate Louis Sherry and Waldorf-Astoria manager Lucius Boomer. The 38-story building was designed by Schultze & Weaver (who also did the Waldorf-Astoria) in a neo-Romanesque/ Renaissance style with Gothic touches, including griffons guarding the front entrance. The lobby was modeled after the Vatican Library and includes friezes salvaged from Cornelius Vanderbilt's mansion. Guests included many show biz notables like George Burns, Danny Kaye, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Diana Ross; Francis Ford Coppola lived here long enough to make it his daughter Sophia Coppola's childhood home, as depicted in New York Stories.

Stock market speculator Jesse Livermore, one of the few to make money in the Crash of 1929, shot himself outside the men's room here on November 28, 1940.

Cipriani's is the restaurant here, founded by Harry Cipriani and patterned after his Harry's Bar in Venice. Also in the hotel since 1961 is A La Vieille Russie, an antique business founded in 1851 with a specialty in Faberge eggs (Malcolm Forbes was a frequent customer), and Dominico Vacca, men's clothing.

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Pulitzer Fountain

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General Motors Building

767 (block): This was the site of the Savoy Plaza Hotel, an elegant skyscraper hotel from 1892 that was home to Trader Vic's. The 50-story white-marble office tower that Edward Durell Stone designed for the car maker, completed in 1968, contrasts starkly with the decidedly non-Modern look of most of its neighbors. From 1986 to 2015, the north lobby was home to the beloved toy store FAO Schwarz, where Tom Hanks frolicked in Big. More recently the once-sunken plaza here is the glass-cubed entrance to the 24-hour Apple Store, occupying a space that was once the car-themed Autopub. CBS's Early Show is also based here.

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Bergdorf Goodman

754 (corner): Starting out as the tailor shop where Edwin Goodman went to work in 1899 for Herman Bergdorf, the fashionable department store moved here in 1928. The building was originally designed as a series of shops by Buchman & Kahn; Bergdorf Goodman, one of the original tenants, eventually bought and expanded into the whole set except for the Van Cleef & Arpels store at the southern end of the block. The penthouse atop the store, once the Goodman family's private residence, was converted to a spa in 1997, not long after the store was bought out by Neiman Marcus.

744 (corner):
Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry store was built on the site of the mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, designed by George B. Post and built from 1882-94; it was demolished in 1927 to make way for the row of shops. (Its gate was salvaged and placed at Central Park's 103rd Street entrance.) This Cornelius was the grandson and namesake of Commodore Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon.

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Old Squibb Building

745 (corner): This 1930 office tower designed by Eli Jacques Kahn, replaced part of Marble Row, a string of white marble buildings built by Mary Mason Jones, Edith Wharton's great-aunt, who appears in The Age of Innocence as Mrs. Mingott. When Marble Row was built, in 1867-69, the neighborhood was largely unpopulated, and the white marble material flew in the face of the ubiquitous fashion for brownstone. Though the houses have all been torn down--this end of the block went in 1929--they still echo in the white and/or marble used in their replacements and in surrounding buildings.

The street-level facade here, unfortunately, was redone in colored marble in 1988--originally to honor Kahn's supposed original intentions, thwarted by Depression Era cutbacks, then, when it turned out Kahn very much wanted a white building here, just because the owners didn't like white marble.

The lobby features a ceiling mural by Arthur Covey featuring stylized airplanes flying over Manhattan.

The Squibb Building was for many years home to the magical toy store F.A.O. Schwartz, which later moved next door, and now houses Bergdorf Goodman's Men's Store.

743: Gilan jewelry

Corner (1 E 57th): Louis Vuitton is on the site of Mary Mason Jones' own home on Marble Row. It was replaced in 1931 with the New York Trust Co. Building, by Cross & Cross, which followed the white-marble tradition that Jones had set. From 1993-2001, this was home to the whimsical Warner Brothers Store. The handbag company came in with a remodeling that replaced much of the white marble with a glossy green plastic-like substance. "Every dog and every cat and every people has Louis Vuitton" --Shonen Knife.

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Crown Building

730 (corner): Built in 1921 as the Heckscher Building to a Warren & Wetmore design, it was one of the first office towers put up after the 1916 Zoning Resolution, which mandated setbacks. Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos secretly bought the building in 1981. The Museum of Modern Art's first home was here on the 12th floor; its Modern Architecture--International Exhibition show in 1932, curated by Philip Johnson, established the International Style as the reigning architectural fashion. The American Mercury, edited by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, opened here in 1923. Now houses the jewelry stores Bulgari (in the space that used to be I. Miller), Piaget and Mikimoto, as well as Playboy Enterprises.

724: Prada opened this four-level store in 1998 in an effort to sell its elite brand to the hoi polloi. There used to be a 24-hour branch of the pancake chain Childs here, which featured "evening togs by the cab-load," according to 1931's New York After Dark.

720 (corner): Aber- crombie & Fitch, a four-story flagship opened in 2005. Before being repositioned as a "casual luxury" brand noted for its scantily clad young models in 1988, it was a sporting goods store, founded in 1892, that provisioned the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Amelia Earhardt and Ernest Shackleton. Ernest Hemingway is said to have bought the gun he killed himself with from Abercrombie & Fitch.

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Tiffany & Co.

727 (corner): Where Holly Golightly has breakfast. Tiffany & Co. was founded as a stationery store in 1832 by Charles Lewis Tiffany (and co.); by 1853 it had become the noted jewelry store that it is today. On Charles' death in 1902, his son, the glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, became the firm's artistic director. Tiffany's is largely responsible for establishing the carat as the standard unit of measurement for diamond size.

The company moved here in 1940 to a not particularly distinguished building by Cross & Cross. It replaced the Collis P. Huntington mansion, built 1892 to a George B. Post design. The nine-foot Atlas holding a clock above the entrance has graced Tiffany's main store since 1853; it's wood painted to look like bronze, made by a sculptor of ship figureheads.

Previously on this site lived Cole Porter with his wife Linda Lee Thomas.

Menken's, the fictional department store on the show Mad Men, was located on 5th Avenue next to Tiffany's.

Trump Tower

721 (corner): A 68-story bronze-glass residential tower with a saw-toothed facade designed to create as many "corner" apartments as possible. Completed in 1983, it's been home to stars and celebs like Johnny Carson, Steven Spielberg, Dick Clark, Sophia Loren, Fay Wray, Paul Anka, Pia Zadora, Martina Navratilova and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley had their honeymoon here. Featured in The Devil's Advocate, I'll Take Manhattan and Spider-Man. Gucci's flagship superstore moved here in 2008.

Formerly on the site was Bonwit Teller, department store founded in 1897 and moved here in 1930, to an Art Deco store designed by Warren & Wetmore and almost immediately redesigned by Eli Jacques Kahn. Surrealist Salvador Dali smashed the window here on March 15, 1939, furious that the store had altered the display he had designed. The company folded not longer after Trump forced one last move. On Mad Men, Joan worked as a manager here after leaving the ad agency.

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Harry Winston

718 (corner): A prestigious jewelry firm established in 1932. Winston owned the Hope Diamond for 10 years, then donated it to the Smithsonian. He cut the 69-carat diamond that Richard Burton gave to Elizabeth Taylor in 1969. Marilyn Monroe exclaims in "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," "Talk to me, Harry Winston, tell me all about it." Edward Norton sings to Natasha Lyonne here in Everyone Says I Love You.

Henri Bendel

714: This half of the famed store (the "Bendel bonnet" was immortal- ized in "You're the Top") was the Rizzoli Building, built in 1909. The store, founded in 1896, moved here in 1990.

712: Also part of Bendel's is the Coty Building (Woodruff Leeming, 1909), whose sparkling glass was installed in 1912 by Rene Lalique and rediscovered when Bendel moved in. A 52-story office tower was added on top in 1990.

Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church

Corner (7 W 55th): The congregation moved here from 19th Street in 1875. The brownstone neo-Gothic structure was designed by Carl Pfeiffer. Rev. Dr. John Bonnell, the pastor here from 1935 to 1962, introduced Dial-a-Prayer.

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719: George Gustave Heye lived at this defunct address; his collections became the core of the Museum of the American Indian.

Corning Glass Building

717 (corner): Mirrored green glass tower is a 1959 design by Harrison & Abromowitz & Abbe, the first glass-walled building on Fifth Avenue. The distinguished entrance was a 1994 remodeling by Gwathmey/Siegel. The Hugo Boss clothing store is here, replacing a Steuben glass store (a division of Corning).

715: Escada clothing

711 (corner): A graceful 1927 office building, once known as the Columbia Pictures Building and later as the Coca-Cola Building. (Coke until recently had a retail space on the ground floor and I believe still has offices upstairs.) The Disney Store opened in 1996, taking the space that used to be the Cote Basque, and is now one of the few remnants of some 800 stores Disney once owned. Alfred Dunhill clothing is also here.

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The Peninsula

700 (corner): The 23-story Beaux Arts hotel was built in 1905 as the Hotel Gotham--and bankrupted in 1908 because it was too close to the Presbyterian church to sell liquor. (The laws have since been reinterpreted.) Damon Runyon, Tallulah Bankhead and Alexander Woolcott all stayed here. Redesigned in 1987 by Pierre Cardin; renamed the Peninsula New York in 1988. Wempe jewelry, Sergio Rossi clothing and Lindt Chocolatier are on the ground floor.

684: Florence Adele Vanderbilt and husband Hamilton McKown Twombly lived in a mansion built here for them by her father William Henry Vanderbilt.

University Club

Corner (1 W 54th): A 10-story "Florentine super-pallazo beyond the Medicis' wildest dreams" (AIA Guide), designed by Charles McKim, a member (along with Meade and White). 1899. The City Review calls it "the city's grandest clubhouse." The club was founded in 1865 to promote art and literature; members were required to have college degrees, hence the name. Women were not admitted until 1987.

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St. Regis Hotel

703 (corner): Built in 1904, designed by Trowbridge & Livingstone, and named for St. Regis Lake, an Adirondacks resort. One of the city's most elegant hotels, it may have been the first in the world to be air-conditioned, and originally boasted 47 Steinway pianos. The hotel's King Cole Bar is named for its Maxfield Parrish mural, moved here from the bar of the same name in the old Knickerbocker Hotel. This bar introduced the Bloody Mary to America. The hotel was formerly home to the Seaglades and La Maisonette nightclubs.

Among the St. Regis' many famous guests and residents are Joseph Pulitzer, John Jacob Astor, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Alfred Hitchcock, Rex Harrison, Humphrey Bogart, John Huston and Marlene Dietrich. Diana Vreeland was "discovered" in the hotel's ballroom and made a fashion columnist for Harper's Bazaar. When Marilyn Monroe stayed here during the filming of The Seven Year Itch, her fight with soon-to-be ex-husband Joe DiMaggio over the famous subway grate scene reportly woke up the whole floor.

Robert De Niro picks up Cybill Shepherd here in Taxi Driver; Mia Farrow is a cigarette girl here in Radio Days; Michael Caine and Barbara Hershey tryst here in Hannah and Her Sisters.

DeBeers, the most powerful diamond company in the world, has a store on the ground floor.

701: Pucci clothing

697-699: Bottega Veneta handbags

693: Takashimaya, fascinating Japanese department store--founded 1831 as a Kyoto kimono store, on 5th Avenue since 1958, here since 1993, when "the best Post-Modern building in the city" was built for it by John Burgee with Philip Johnson.

Aeolian Building

691: Elizabeth Arden salon is in this 14-story Warren & Wetmore building, built in 1926 for the piano company. Arden and her red door have been here since 1930.

689 (corner): Zara clothing is also in the Aeolian Building, in a space tastefully redesigned in 1970 for Gucci.

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684 (corner): William Henry Vanderbilt built a pair of mansions here in 1879, both designed by John Butler Snook. The one at this corner was built for his daughter Florence and her husband Hamilton Twombly.

680: Florence's sister Eliza (Lila) and her husband William Seward Webb got this mansion. The address, now the corner, is today Buchman Tower.

St. Thomas Church

Corner: The Episcopal congregation, established in 1823, moved here from Broadway and Houston in 1870. The original church on this site was designed by Richard Upjohn in the Gothic style. After a fire destroyed it in 1905, it was rebuilt "as medievally as was possible in early Twentieth-Century New York" (Fifth Avenue), reopening in 1916 (Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson, architects).

Former President Benjamin Harrison was married here on April 6, 1896; Consuelo Vanderbilt married the Duke of Marlborough here November 6, 1895. Thomas Dewey married June 16, 1928. The church is affiliated with the St. Thomas Choir School.

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685 (corner): Gucci moved here from the Aeolian, then went to Trump Tower. Becoming Hugo Bass.

681: Fortunoff jewelry is on the site of Dodworth's Dancing Academy, elite school that became the first home of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1872. Founded in 1922, Fortunoff was on the edge of bankruptcy in 2008, with Lord & Taylor offering to buy them out.

677: Fendi clothing

675: Nine West shoes

673 (corner): Blanc de Chine ("China White"), Hong Kong fashion

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Tishman Building

666 (block): This was the address of the mansion of William Kissam Vanderbilt Jr., great-grandson of the Commodore, an auto-racing enthusiast who founded the Vanderbilt Cup. The 1905 mansion, designed by McKim, Meade and White, was the last of the Vanderbilts' Fifth Avenue mansions.

In 1957, an alum- inum-clad office building with an apoca- lyptic address was put up here with a million square feet of space; the lobby waterfall was designed by Isamu Noguchi. Brooks Brothers, founded 1818, is on the ground floor, along with Hickey Freeman and the NBA Store. Top of the Sixes, the top-floor rest- aurant, is now the Grand Havana Room, a private cigar club. In the Marvel Universe, an evil cult known as the Left-Hand Path had its headquarters at the top of this building.

660 (corner): William Kissam Vanderbilt Sr., son of William H., grandson of the Commodore, and "the" Vanderbilt after the death of his brother Cornelius II, was one of the first Vanderbilts to live on Fifth Avenue, living in the Petit Chateau, a mansion designed by Richard Morris Hunt and built from 1879-82 and demolished in 1926.

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665 (corner): The Rolex Building was built in 1924 as Georg Jensen, Scandinavian department store. Modernized in 1977 when the watch company moved in. The Swiss consulate is located here; St. John clothing is on the ground floor.

663: Ermengildo Zegna clothing

657 (corner):
Here were the opulent mansion and offices of Madame Restell, New York's leading abortion-provider from the 1840s until 1878, when she committed suicide after being arrested for selling birth control by Anthony Comstock of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Now Salvatore Ferragamo clothing.

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Corner (2 W 52nd): Formerly the site of the mansion of Emily Vanderbilt and her husband William Douglas Sloane, paid for by Emily's father William Henry Vanderbilt. It was part of the Triple Palace, three Vanderbilt mansions designed by John Butler Snook and built from 1879-82, all paid for by Emily's father William Henry Vanderbilt.

650 (corner): This building was put up by the Pahlavi Foundation, a non-profit started in 1973 by the Shah of Iran--whether as a genuine charity or as a financial scam is unclear to me. In any case, it was taken over after the Iranian Revolution by pro-Khomeini types, who changed the name of the group to the Alavi Foundation and use it to promote Islamic culture. They apparently still get most of their money from the rent on this building from businesses like Mexx clothing and Travelers Fine Jewelry.

Replaced the DePinna Building, a nine-story 1928 structure.

642: This was the address of the middle section of the Triple Palace, belonging to William Henry's daughter Margaret and her husband Elliott Fitch Shepard.

640 (corner): First National City Bank of New York; H & M. This was the address of William Henry Vanderbilt's own piece of the Triple Palace. (Actually, he got half of the bifurcated structure, which is only fair since he paid for it.) William, who headed the railroad empire after the death of his father, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, was at his death the wealthiest person in the world. Though noted for his quip "The public be damned!" he was reportedly much nicer than his father. Henry Clay Frick leased the house from 1905-14 before moving to the mansion that is now the Frick Collection.

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Cartier

651 (corner): This entire block was the site of the Catholic Orphanage until 1900. The Vanderbilts bought up most of the land in 1902 to prevent a hotel from being built on this corner, which instead became the Morton F. Plant House (Robert W. Gibson, 1905). Plant sold it to Cartier in 1915 for $100 and a million-dollar pearl necklace. The store was restored to its Renaissance-style glory in the 1990s (cc photo: Kevin Coles). The jewelry house, founded in 1847, is credited with inventing the first practical wristwatch in 1904.

Versace

647: Versace store was George W. Vanderbilt House (Hunt & Hunt, 1905); George, a younger son of William H., was the one who built Biltmore, a 125,000-acre estate in North Carolina. It and the house at No. 645 were known as the Marble Twins, though they were actually faced with limestone. It was leased to real-estate magnate Robert Goelet, then to art dealers Rene Gimpel and Nathan Wildenstein. Eventually it was sold to American Express. It later served as Olympic Airways' ticket office. Versace leased it in 1995; it's now the only surviving Vanderbilt building on 5th Avenue (cc photos: Wally G, Aqualung1981).

645 (corner): This was the address of Lila Vanderbilt Sloane, granddaughter of William H. Vanderbilt, and her husband William Bradford Osgood Field. It was torn down in 1945 for Best & Company, high-end children's store, which in turn was torn down for the present building, Olympic Tower (1977), which houses Gant and Armani Exchange clothing, H. Stern jewelry.

641 (corner): The Union Club was based here from 1903 to 1933. The club, founded in 1836, is the oldest men's club in New York City; the Union League, Knickerbocker, Brook and Metropolitan clubs are all spin-offs.

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Rockefeller Center

The land that is now Rockefeller Center was once the Elgin Botanic Garden, 20 acres of mainly medicinal herbs established by Dr. David Hosack, the physician who attended Alexander Hamilton after his fatal duel with Aaron Burr. The Lewis and Clark expedition sent plants here for identification.

The garden was sold to the state in 1810, which granted it to Columbia University, which allowed the garden to be developed. In 1929, the land was leased to John D. Rockefeller, who built on it an Art Deco masterpiece that is one of New York City's crowning architectural achievements.

International Building

636 (corner): Completed in 1935 as part of the original Rockefeller Center complex, this is a reduced-scale (41 stories) version of the RCA Building. Its north wing was originally going to be a German counterpart of the Italian, French and British buil- dings to the south, but with Nazism on the march the idea was dropped and the building was generically internationalized. Attilia Piccirilli's Youth Leading Industry and Commerce and Industry with a Caduceus adorn the entrance; symbols of the continents are atop the building.

Lee Lawrie's Atlas, between the two wings, can be seen from St. Patrick's altar. It's one of the sites the sailors see in the movie On the Town; it also features in Gentleman's Agreement, Bonfire of the Vanities and Hercules in New York (where it's said to be not a good likeness).

626 (corner): The Palazzo D'Italia is taken up entirely by Banana Republic's flagship store--what does that say about Italy? The entrance bronzes The Italian Immigrant and Italia by Giacomo Manzu were given to Rockefeller Center by Fiat.

Department store owner Benjamin Altman died at this address on October 7, 1913.

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St. Patrick's Cathedral

Begun in 1858 and dedi- cated in 1879, St. Pat's is seen as symbol- izing the ascension of New York's Catholic community, as the archbishop's seat moved from the Lower East Side to the heart of New York's elite district (though the neigh- borhood wasn't all that elite back then). Designed by James Renwick, Jr.--the architect of Grace Church--who modeled it on the Cologne Cathedral. Here's an aerial view.

Pope Paul VI said mass here on October 4, 1964, during the first papal visit to America. Funerals were held here for Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman (1891), Gov. Alfred E. Smith (1944), slugger Babe Ruth (1948), conductor Arturo Toscanini (1957) and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (1968). F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre were married here on April 3, 1920--but in the cardinal's residence, not in the cathedral itself, because it was a mixed marriage.

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British Empire Building

620: A 1933 building meant to showcase British culture and commerce, but aside from Crabtree & Evelyn, there's not much anglophilia in evidence. It does have upscale shops like Cole Haan shoes, Coach handbags and Teuscher Swiss chocolates. Over the entrance is Carl Paul Jennewein's bronze Industries of the British Commonwealth. This building has a beautiful rooftop garden, not usually open to the public but featured in the Spiderman movie.

616: Bergdorf Goodman was here from 1914 to 1928.

Channel Gardens

As the Channel separates Britain and France, they separate Rockefeller Center's British and French buildings. The Gardens form a promenade that leads to the Center's sunken plaza.

La Maison Francaise

610 (corner): This 1933 building used to house the French Consulate, and it still has the Librairie de France bookstore, L'Occitane, a Provencal beauty products store, and Movado, a Swiss watch company. Kenneth Cole shoes has the 5th Avenue side. Over the entrance is Alfred Janniot's bas-relief, The Friendship of France and the United States, a work of art perhaps more necessary today than ever.

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Corner: Site of the New York Institute for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, the first such school in the U.S. when it opened in 1852.

Saks Fifth Avenue

Block: Launched in 1924 by Horace Saks and Bernard Gimbel, partners in Gimbel's on 34th Street, it brought upscale shopping to what was then a largely residential neighborhood. The building replaced the Democratic Club and the Buckingham Hotel.

See a 360-degree panoramic photo taken in front of Saks Fifth Avenue opposite the Channel Gardens.

West:

608 (corner): The Goelet Building, a 1932 building of marble, limestone and stainless steel, houses the Swiss Center.

604: The TGI Fridays here was originally the Childs Restaurant Building (''Now they watch her flipping flapjacks at Childs''--Wonderful Town), built in 1925, and it was designed by William Van Alen, better known for the Chrysler Building.

600 (corner): This building is technically part of Rockefeller Center, though its neighbors to the north are not. It had a Barnes & Noble branch--the chain's third ever--that closed in 2006.

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609 (corner): American Girl Place, a store, cafe, photo studio and theater-- all revolving around the popular historically themed doll line.

601: Was the Dahesh Museum of Art

597: The Sephora store was the long-time offices and store of Charles Scribner's Sons, a landmark designed in 1913 by Ernest Flagg (Charles Scribner's brother-in-law). From here were published some of the great American novelists, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Thomas Wolfe and Ring Lardner. It became Brentano's, arguably the city's best bookstore, which closed in 1983. (Patti Smith worked here when she first came to New York.) It later reopened under the same name, but as a division of K-Mart's Waldenbooks--sort of like coming back from the dead as a zombie.

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592 (corner): This Modernist white prism with black window-slits started out in 1913 as a neo-Classical design by Carrere & Hastings (of NYPL fame) for the Black, Starr & Frost jewelry company. It was radically reclad in 1964. Once the National Bank of North America, it's now a Fleet Bank branch.

On this corner in 1859 was built the Collegiate Reformed Church, aka the Church of St. Nicholas, for the congregation established by the Dutch in New Amsterdam.

580 (corner): The Diamond Dealers Club, located here, is the governing body of the Diamond District; disputes between dealers are settled here rather than in civil court. This building is also home to the Gemological Institute of America, which established the "four Cs" system for grading diamonds.

578 (corner): From 1870 to 1882, this was the address of financier Jay Gould, a director of the Erie Railroad whose 1869 attempt to corner the gold market sparked the panic known as Black Friday.

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579 (corner): Jay Gould moved across the street to this address in 1882. An insomniac, he paced in front of his house each night with two bodyguards. After his death here on December 2, 1892, the house went to his daughter Helen Miller Gould Shepherd, an eccentric philanthropist. In 1942, it was leased by Gimbel Brothers, whose Kendel Galleries held art and jewelry auctions here. In 1952, when it was demolished, it was perhaps the last Fifth Avenue brownstone in Midtown.

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Diamond District

Corner: Jewelers on Fifth on this corner is the eastern edge of a block almost entirely devoted to selling diamonds--as featured in the movie Marathon Man.

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575 (corner): This 1985 Emery Roth & Sons design absorbed the former Korvette's, originally W & J Sloane.

565: The address of the Windsor Hotel, opened 1874, home to John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and a favorite dining spot for Jay Gould; other notable guests included writers Oscar Wilde and Matthew Arnold, and King Kalakaua of Hawaii. On March 17, 1899, during the St. Patrick's Day parade, the hotel burned to the ground, killing 33. Isadora Duncan, leading a dance class in the hotel at the time, managed to get her students to safety.

This was later the address of WNEW, the "World's Greatest Radio Station," which pioneered the disc jockey and the hourly news break. It featured pop standards and big bands, championing the music of Frank Sinatra. Launched in 1934 with the merger of two earlier stations, it moved here in 1946, where its golden call letters on the building were a Midtown landmark for decades. The station became WBBR, a financial news station owned by Bloomberg, in 1992.

Corner: HMV Records; the British chain's name stands for "His Master's Voice."

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556: The art dealer M. Knoedler & Co. had a gallery here designed by Carrere & Hastings. When he moved to East 57th Street in 1925, it became a popular Schrafft's restaurant until c. 1950. The building, greatly altered, is now the Philippine Center, housing the consulate, U.N. mission, trade board and tourist office.

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Before 5th Avenue was built up, the city's slaughterhouse district lay between 5th and 4th (Park) avenues from 46th to 44th streets.

551 (corner): The Fred F. French Building, Polychromatic headquarters of the company that designed and built Tudor City, built in 1927. This was previously the address of the Church of the Heavenly Rest, built in 1868 to an Edward Tuckerman Potter design. The congregation was formed by Civil War vets to honor their fallen comrades; President Chester Arthur's funeral was held here in 1886. The church moved in 1929 to Fifth Avenue and East 90th Street.

West:

Corner: The site of the Church of the Divine Paternity, where on December 4, 1872, the funeral of Horace Greeley, owner of the New York Tribune, was held. President Grant was among the many notable attendees.

530 (block): Bank of New York

Corner: The Fifth Avenue Bank opened in a former townhouse here in 1890, specializing in serving wealthy society women.

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Corner: This was the uptown site of Delmonico's, long New York's most prestigious restaurant, from 1898 until 1923. This location introduced smoking in the dining room--designed to prevent men from deserting the ladies after dinner--and an orchestra that played background music rather than a concert that people were expected to pay attention to.

West:

522 (corner): This building, a Stanford White design, was from 1898 until 1919 Sherry's Hotel, a symbol of Gilded Age excesses featured in Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie. It was the scene of notorious parties: At one held by C.K.G. Billings in 1903 to celebrate the opening of his stables, the guests sat on horseback and the waiters dressed as jockeys. James Hazen Hyde, vice president of Equitable Life Insurance, spent $200,000 of his company's money here at a party meant to recreate Versailles; public outrage forced Hyde to flee the country and prompted reform of the insurance industry.

Site of the Colored Orphan Asylum

Block: An orphanage housing hundreds of African-American children here was burned to the ground on August 1, 1863 during the Draft Riots. While most of the orphans escaped out the back, a young girl who was found hiding under a bed was lynched.

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Corner: This was the site of The Willow Inn, owned by Tom Hyer, ''a noted pugilist and brawler more violent out of the ring than in'' (Fifth Avenue: The Best Address). When it was torn down in 1905, it was said to be ''the last bar on 5th Avenue.''

Corner: Here was Temple Emanu-El, built in 1867 for the first Reform congregation in New York City. It was designed by Leopold Eidlitz in the Moorish style. The congregation moved in 1927.

West:

512 (corner): This was the address of the Hotel Renaissance, home to notables like architect William Rutherford Mead (of McKim, Mead and White) and German-American publisher and politician Carl Schurz. Naturalist Ernest Thomas Seton had a suite here decorated with animal skins.

510: St. Bernard's School was founded here in 1904.

500 (corner): The Transportation Building originally housed offices of national railroads; later it became a center for international airlines. Nat Sherman, tobacconist to the world, is on the ground floor. This building appears in the 1946 film noir The Dark Corner as the "Grant Building," where a character is thrown from a dentist office on the 31st floor--where, in fact, a dentist office can be found today.

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511 (corner): At this defunct address was the brownstone residence of William "Boss" Tweed, the famously corrupt leader of Tammany Hall, New York's reigning political machine. When Tweed was arrested for graft in 1876, he was allowed to return here to get clothes for jail-- but instead fled from here to Florida, Cuba and Spain. Spain extradited him back to New York, where he died in jail in 1878.

In 1882, Richard T. Wilson, a former Confederate cotton merchant, built a house at this address; he was noted for his attractive children, who married into the Astor, Vanderbilt and Goelet families. The house was demolished in 1915.

509: The address of Elizabeth Arden's first cosmetic shop.

505 (corner): A glassy 27-story building from 2004, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox. There was a Bickford's cafeteria at this address in the mid-20th Century.

501: Peck & Peck, an elite men's wear shop, moved here from the Flatiron district in 1910, one of the first major retail outlets to move above 42nd Street.

West:

New York Public Library

Tech- nically, this is just one of four research libraries --the Hum- anities & Social Science Library, to be specific--but this is the heart and soul of the NYPL. One of the world's greatest libraries, the NYPL was formed in 1895 by combing the Astor, Lenox and Tilden libraries. From 1902 to 1911, this Beaux Arts architectural masterpiece designed by Carrere & Hastings was constructed to house the collection. The Main Reading Room, restored in 1998, is con- sidered one of the city's great interiors (cc photo: saebaryo).

Authors who have used this library include Isaac Bashevis Singer, Claude Levi-Strauss, E.L. Doctorow, Somerset Maugham, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Tom Wolfe and Frank McCourt. Poet Elizabeth Bishop met her mentor Marianne Moore here. The Xerox copier, the Polaroid camera and the atomic bomb were all researched here. Almost all the information in Ripley's Believe It or Not! came from here--as did much of Reader's Digest.

A ghost haunts the stacks here in the first Ghostbusters film; it's a refuge from freakish weather in The Day After Tomorrow and the headquarters of a criminal mastermind in Escape From New York.

The famous marble lions in front of the library are nicknamed Patience (south) and Fortitude (north)--so dubbed by Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia. The Cowardly Lion hides behind one in the movie The Wiz.

This was previously the site of the Croton Distributing Reservoir, a massive tank holding water from the Croton River, completed in 1842. Walking along its monumental Egyptian walls was a popular recreation, recommended by Edgar Allan Poe; the base of the reservoir serves today as the library's foundation. Croton Cottage, a place of refreshment, was at the corner of 5th and 40th.

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479-481: This was the last store (here from 1915 until the mid-1980s) of the Rogers, Peet clothing chain, which helped introduce such innovations as the fabric label, the money-back guarantee and the use of illustrations of merchandise in advertising. Actor John Barrymore worked for a time drawing cartoons for Rogers, Peet ads.

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452: HSBC Tower, formerly the Republic National Bank Tower, a 1983 building that incorporates the 1902 Knox Hat Building. (Knox Hats-- one of which was worn by Abraham Lincoln--is still around on 8th Avenue.) HSBC is the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Company. The building houses the Boomer Esiason Foundation, fighting cystic fibrosis.

450: Defunct address was the Macbeth Gallery, where the painters known as "The Eight" (aka the Ashcan School) had a groundbreaking show.

438 (corner): Circus promoter P.T. Barnum used to live at this defunct corner address. Later this was the site of the Wendel mansion, home of the heirs to John Jacob Astor's partner in the fur trade. ''North of it [was] the 'million-dollar yard' which they refused to sell because... the three Wendel ladies, spinsters all, desired to keep the yard for their little dog to exercise in''-- Greatest American City

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Mid-Manhattan NY Public Library

445: Not as cool as the Main Branch, but here you can check the books out. It's the largest lending library in the NYPL system.

On this site was Gordon's Riding Academy, where the first polo game in America (and perhaps the first ever indoors) was played in 1876, introduced to this country by newspaper heir James Gordon Bennett Jr.

West:

Lord & Taylor

424-434 (corner): A New York fixture since 1825, the department store built this (once) elegant building in 1914— breaking neighborhood tradition by looking like a store, not a mansion. When built, the window displays could be lowered on tracks to the basement, for instant replacement. Long noted for its Christmas displays, the chain closed its flagship here in 2019 before going out of business completely in 2021.

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445 (corner): Fifth Avenue Tower, 34 stories completed in 1985.

435: Alberene Cashmeres, good prices on fine woolens

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Corner: Site of the W&J Sloane store. (Their previous store is now ABC Carpets.)

414: Former Stern Brothers clerk Franklin Simon opened a store here in 1902, the first important retail business to open above 34th Street on 5th Avenue.

Corner: From 1858 to 1938, this was the site of the Brick Presbyterian Church, where Mark Twain's funeral was held, April 23, 1910. Samuel Osgood, the first postmaster general, was buried here in 1813.

At this corner, Buster Keaton got on a double-decker bus--on a different level from his date--in the silent movie The Cameraman.

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417 (corner): This 1911 building contains the editorial offices of Marvel Comics. It was built as the flagship of Bonwit Teller, which moved up the avenue to 56th Street in 1930. Billionaire Carlos Slim, at the time the world's richest person, bought the property in 2010, his first investment in New York City real estate.

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404 (corner): This was the A.T. Stewart & Co. store, built in 1914 to a Warren & Wetmore design, noted for its delicate blue-and-white terra cotta. The store moved further uptown to 56th Street in 1928; the building was landmarked in 2006.

Everything else on this block was demolished in 2007.

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409 (corner): Stanford White designed this building for Tiffany's in 1906, basing the plan on Venice's Palazzo Grimani. It was "the most magnificent retail space in New York City," according to Christopher Gray. The jewelry firm moved to 57th Street in 1940.

401: Was As Seen On TV, a store that sold things "not available in any stores."

393: Yankees Clubhouse, sports souvenirs

389: Was Fifth Avenue Coffee Bar & Restaurant

West:

390 (corner): Gorham Building, designed for the Gorham jewelry company by Stanford White in 1905. From 1925–59 this was Russeks, a department store that started in the early 1900s as a furrier. By the 1930s, the store was owned by Gertrude Russek Nemerov and her husband, David Nemerov; their daughter, Diane Nemerov, was a 13-year-old working as a photographer in the store's marketing department when she met another teenage employee, Allan Arbus; Allan and Diane Arbus were married in 1941. In 1960, the new owner, Spear Securities, ordered much of White's delicate relief sculpture and archways to be torn off.

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383: A branch of the female-centric tearoom chain Schrafft's was here, decorated in Colonial style.

375: Oxford Cafe

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Corner (2 W 35th): Catwalk, bar with an actual catwalk where would-be models can practice their moves.

Corner (1 W 34th): Site of the opulent marble mansion of department store founder Alexander T. Stewart, who despite his wealth was shunned by New York society, as represented by his neighbor, Mrs. William Astor. Stewart built his mansion in 1867 after tearing down the previous mansion of Dr. Samuel B. Townsend, the Sarsaparilla King. The mansion was for a time the home of the Manhattan Club, a Democratic Party association. It was torn down early in the 20th Century.

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CUNY Graduate Center

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Empire State Building

This block was the site of two mansions owned by the Astor family--the northern half was owned by Caroline (Mrs. William) Astor, whose annual parties literally defined New York society; the ballroom could hold 400 guests, and these "Four Hundred" were considered the who's who.

The southern half held the mansion of her nephew, William Waldorf Astor, which inspired the fashion for mansard roofs. Feuding over who had the right to be referred to as "Mrs. Astor," the nephew in 1893 replaced his house with the Waldorf Hotel, designed by Henry Hardenbergh, in order to spite his aunt. (Waldorf was John Jacob Astor's hometown in Germany.) Caroline Astor responded by replacing her own home with the Astoria Hotel, also designed by Hardenbergh, which were combined in 1897 to create the Waldorf-Astoria (though Caroline insisted on the right to re-separate the hotels at any time). The hotel catered to the super-wealthy; B.C. Forbes, of Forbes magazine, used to have a regular poker game there with Henry Clay Frick and other plutocrats. U.S. Steel was born at the hotel in 1901. The Waldorf salad was invented there in 1896, and Thousand Island dressing popularized; the Gibson and the Rob Roy were created at the Bull & Bear Bar here. In 1929 the hotel relocated uptown, and the Empire State Building was built on this site.

With ground broken on January 22, 1930, the building took only a year and 45 days to complete. The architect, William Lamb, said his design was inspired by a pencil. At 102 stories and 1,454 feet, it was the tallest building in the world from 1931 until 1974; there are still only three buildings in the world with more floors.

The mast on top was supposed to be a mooring tower for dirigibles, but the idea was abandoned due to chronic high winds shortly before dirigibles were themselves abandoned. On July 28, 1945, a B-25 bomber flying through fog crashed into the 79th floor, killing 11 people. Allen Ginsberg briefly worked in an advertising office here. The Heartland Brewery on the ground floor used to be a branch of the Longchamps chain, decorated in Mississippi riverboat style.

The building was famously climbed by the giant gorilla in King Kong, and was a meeting place for lovers in An Affair to Remember and Sleepless in Seattle.

See the official guide to the colors of the Tower Lights.

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347: J.S. Sutton & Son, New York Souvenirs--est. 1925. It's older than the Empire State Building--the Empire State Building should be selling souvenirs of this place!

Demarest Building

339 (corner): A four-story commericial building with large arched windows, erected in 1890 for luxury carriage-maker Aaron Demarest. It featured the first two successful electric elevators. The city Landmark Commission failed to save this obvious landmark, scheduled for demolition in 2021.

West:

Corner (330 5th Ave): Maui Tacos

322: Hudson River School painter Albert Bierstadt died at his home at this address in 1902.

320 (corner): A neo-classical building from 1904 that houses handbag and accessory showrooms.

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333 (corner): Big George's Pizza; Sedutto Ice Cream

325: The Irish Treasury, pub

319 (corner): The location of the exclusive Knickerbockers Club.

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316 (corner): Kaskel & Kaskel Building, "a wonderful crusty old Beaux Arts building" from 1903--AIA Guide. Designed by Cady & Berg--note the Kaskel monogram in the cartouche above the grand entrance. Houses 316 Fifth Avenue Electronics; Soup & Smoothie Heaven.

314: Empire (formerly Mimmo's) Pizza is at the address of Polk's Hobby Shop, a model-train Mecca featured in The Godfather. You can still see the old name above the doorway.

312: Andiamo Fine Men's Wear & Shoes

310: JJ Hat Center, a serious hat store

306: Torkan USA, rugs

304: LaCrasia/Glove Street, specialty glove store that includes a glove museum.

302: Was Shields Fifth Avenue, jewelry outlet that became a trademark.

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315: A 1905 Renaissance Revival building by Maynicke and Franke. Galleria is on the ground floor; on the third floor is the Third Floor Cafe. This was the address of Durand-Ruel, an art dealer that provided European Impressionists for American millionaires.

313: Collegeware USA

309: Sinclair Lewis lived at this address as a struggling short-story writer.

307: Hiram Haddad Building, designed in 1928 by William I. Hohauser, has stylized facade designs--sort of Mideastern Deco.

303 (corner): Veratex is in a 20-story 1909 building designed by Buchman & Fox, built as a headquarters for the FAO Schwartz toy store.

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284 (corner): Shalom Brothers Oriental Rug Gallery is in the Wilbraham Building, 1890 Belle Epoque apartments designed for bachelors by David & John Jardine. Spookily charming. On the second floor is Kyokushin Karate.

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Textile Building

295 (block): An imposing 1920 building by Sommerfeld & Steckler, it began the shift of this stretch of the avenue from retail to wholesale commerce. Still houses showrooms for the bed, bath and linen industry.

291: Was the address of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, also known as 291, where Alfred Steiglitz showcased such new artists as Henri Matisse (1908), Henri Rousseau and Paul Cezanne (both 1910), and Pablo Picasso (1911).

West:

Holland House

The first cross-country auto trip ended here July 16, 1903, when Horatio Nelson Jackson drove to the hotel from San Francisco in 63 days.

On the fourth floor here was Harry "A" Chesler's pioneering comic book studio-- the "A" stood for "Anything."

Marble Collegiate Church

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260: This building was used for rooftop shots in Spider-Man 2.

256: Building with Silver & Crystal Collection is a "neo-Venetian Gothic, somewhat Moorish phantasmagoria"--AIA Guide. It's hard to find three square inches that aren't decorated.

254: Dano Bar

250 (corner): Broadway National Bank was Second National Bank (1908)--a lesser McKim, Mead & White effort.

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261 (corner): A 26-story 1929 highrise from Buchman $amp; Fox.

251: The address of Black, Starr & Frost, a fashionable jewelry firm, from c. 1876 to 1913.

West:

246 (corner): Yi Li Da Inc., export/importers, is in an 1892 building I find very interesting, with its three-story arch and its asymmetry.

242: Glassy facade was ahead of its time in 1892.

240: Man Hing Import Corporation, Oriental art and antiques

238: Istanbul Grand Bazaar, carpets

236: Ilili, high-end Lebanese

234 (corner): Naturally Tasty, health food coffee shop. At this address, Enrico Caruso recorded the first million-selling record—"Vesti La Giubba" from Il Pagliacci.

At this corner, 25-year-old Dorothy Arnold was last seen on December 12, 1910. The disappearance of the wealthy young woman is a mystery that has never been solved.

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241: Chohung Bank of New York

235: Great Eastern Bank

museumofse[x]

233 (corner): A newish institution dedicated to erotic history and culture. Its website used to have an amazing map of Manhattan's sexual history.

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230 (corner): The Victoria Building is on the site of the Victoria Hotel, where President Grover Cleveland lived between his two separated terms of office. Ax-wielding prohibitionist Carry Nation stayed there on a trip to New York in 1901, insisting that a marble statue of Diana in the lobby be covered with cheesecloth. The present 19-story building, a 1914 effort by Schwartz & Gross, has Alpine Designs, oddly named oriental furniture store, on the ground floor; Miller Import and La Vie International have moved out, as the upscale part of the Wholesale District seems to be vacating. On the roof is 230 Fifth, a trendy bar with a spectacular view.