Fifth Avenue: Architecture and Society – A History of America’s Street of Dreams

New York’s Fifth Avenue, America’s ‘Street of Dreams’ is one of the most remarkable thoroughfares in the world. Shown on the Commissioners’ map of 1807 emerging from a country road, then in the proposed grid plan of 1811 as one of the major boulevards, Fifth Avenue by the end of the century was synonymous with a lavish fashionable life, grand mansions, and services catering to the wealthy.

Professor Mosette Broderick, drawing from her recently published book, Fifth Avenue Architecture and Society: History of America’s Street of Dreams will illustrate how Fifth Avenue grew, flourished, and failed. Her talk will feature some of the 200 archive photographs that help tell the history of Fifth Avenue’s 19th- and early 20th-century architecture and society.

She will describe the story of how above Washington Square, in the 1840s and 50s, mainly speculative brownstone houses marched steadily northwards. The social fabric of the City, after the Civil War, shunned the more aggressive arrivistes such as Alva Vanderbilt and Marietta Stevens who employed European-influenced architects and decorators to build and furnish grand mansions, in contrast to their brownstone neighbors. Professor Mosette tracks the street’s shifting fortunes as fashion, hotels, and apartment towers bring a new skyline to the elite environs.

And then, it was all gone. Swept away in the shadow of tall buildings, the New York house on Fifth Avenue was no longer the ultimate symbol of identity. All that exquisite and substantial work quickly fell before the wrecker’s ball.

Mosette Broderick, Clinical Professor in the Department of Art History, New York University, is also the Director of the MA Programme in Historical and Sustainable Architecture in London. Professor Broderick’s many lectures and publications include Triumvirate: McKim Mead &White: Art, Architecture, Scandal and Class in America’s Golden Age.