The Gilded Age: Fifth Avenue and the Economics of Inequality

In the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, the stretch of Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth and One Hundredth Streets contained more concentrated wealth than any comparable strip of real estate on earth. The mansions that lined it were built in the styles of French chateaux, Florentine palaces, and Venetian guildhalls. The Vanderbilt double mansion occupied a full block between Fifty-First and Fifty-Second Streets. The William Kissam Vanderbilt house at Fifty-Second Street was designed by Richard Morris Hunt, who had been trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and brought that vocabulary to a city whose new rich wanted to look European.

The fortunes that built these houses came from oil, steel, railroad, and finance: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Frick. The workers whose labor produced those fortunes lived in the Lower East Side tenements, in the Bronx, in Brooklyn, in apartments of three hundred square feet with no plumbing and no ventilation. The infant mortality rate in the tenement districts was among the highest in the industrialized world. The distance between the mansions and the tenements was, in some cases, literally measurable in minutes by elevated railway.

Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age in eighteen seventy-three, and the name stuck because it was precise: a surface of gold over a core of something harder and less appealing to look at. The period produced Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park, but it also produced the Triangle fire and the five-year-old children who sorted coal in the Pennsylvania mines and the death-rate statistics that Jacob Riis documented in his photographs of the Lower East Side.

Most of the Fifth Avenue mansions are gone. The Vanderbilt double mansion came down in stages, starting in the late nineteen twenties and finishing after World War Two, to build commercial office buildings. The Frick mansion survived and became a museum. The Metropolitan Museum, built on the edge of the same street, is still there, on land that is part of Central Park, which was built by displacing Seneca Village. The layers here do not separate easily.