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For about fifty years, upper Fifth Avenue was not a street of stores and offices. It was a near-unbroken wall of private chateaux, known to all of New York as 'Millionaire's Row,' where the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Clarks, and their rivals competed to build the most jaw-dropping home in America. Almost all of it is gone. What follows is a tour of the ghosts.
The losses are easiest to grasp as a list. Each of these houses was, in its day, among the grandest private residences in the country, and each was demolished within a single generation of being completed:
Five palaces, five demolitions, and four of them within a span of just a few years in the late 1920s. To walk that stretch of Fifth Avenue in 1900 was to pass a parade of turrets, mansard roofs, marble porte-cocheres, and iron gates, with the wealthiest families in America living one beside the next. To walk it today is to pass banks, flagship stores, and office lobbies.
What drove the destruction was the same force in every case: the land became worth more than the house. As Manhattan's commercial core pushed northward, the lots beneath these mansions turned into some of the most valuable real estate on earth. A family could either pour a fortune each year into maintaining an unfashionable palace, or sell the ground for a fortune and let the wreckers take it. Almost all of them, eventually, chose the money.
The houses that survived tended to be the ones that found a second life as an institution. The Carnegie mansion became a museum. The Frick house became a world-class art collection. But the pure private palaces, the ones built only to dazzle and to exclude, had no obvious afterlife, and so they were demolished one after another.
It is worth trying to picture the scale of what vanished. This was not one lost building but an entire streetscape, the densest concentration of private wealth ever assembled in American architecture. Block after block of it, gone within a generation, leaving behind little more than photographs and a nickname.
Each of the mansions on this list has its own full story, its own scandals and triumphs and final indignities, and the other posts in this series tell them one by one. But seen together, as a single roll call of the dead, they reveal something staggering about the Gilded Age: it built a civilization of palaces, and then it erased that civilization almost as fast as it had created it.
That is the strange power of Millionaire's Row. It was, for a brief moment, the most extraordinary residential street in the country. And then, in the space of a few years, New York decided it would rather have offices and shops, and the canyon of palaces was swept away as if it had never existed at all.
If you ever find yourself walking that stretch of Fifth Avenue, slow down and look up past the storefronts. With a little imagination you can still see them, the gates and the turrets and the chateau roofs, a lost world hiding in plain sight beneath a century of glass and steel.
A few survivors hint at what the whole avenue once felt like. Further uptown, the Andrew Carnegie mansion still stands, now the Cooper Hewitt design museum, and the Henry Clay Frick house endures as one of the world's great small art collections. Walk through either one and you get a fleeting sense of the scale, the craftsmanship, and the sheer ambition that once repeated, block after block, all the way down Millionaire's Row before the wreckers came and cleared it away.
