Fifth Avenue: History of America’s Street of Dreams

New York’s Fifth Avenue is one of the most remarkable thoroughfares in the world. By the end of the 19th century it had become synonymous with the most fashionable lifestyles and mansions (and all that accompanied them) of the wealthy. Aggressive arrivistes such as Alva Vanderbilt and Marietta Stevens used their “new money” to employ European-influenced architects and decorators to build and furnish the city’s grandest mansions, each more lavish than the next.

And then, it was all gone. All the exquisite and irreplaceable work quickly fell before the wrecker’s ball.

LW! is honored to have Prof. Mosette Broderick, esteemed architectural historian and author of the just-published book “Fifth Avenue— Architecture and Society: History of America’s Street of Dreams” (Unicorn Publishing Group, 2024) join us for this extraordinary evening of history, recreating Fifth Avenue as it grew, flourished and failed.

This is an event not to be missed–one of our city’s finest historians relating the story of Fifth Avenue’s 19th- and early 20th-century architecture and society as you have never heard or seen it before.