During the period now known as the Gilded Age, the United States and the rest of the world were on the brink of a new modern era of enormous economic growth, immense personal wealth, and revolutionary social mores and systems. These years represented a time of remarkable transition in New York, and its influence on the city’s expansion is still evident along upper Fifth Avenue and its verdant side streets. The inevitable advance of commerce on Fifth Avenue below Central Park drove to the north the completion of many grand private residences adjacent to the carefully planned rusticity of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s bucolic Central Park and the newly opened Metropolitan Museum of Art.
