"If ever a place seems to live in the perpetual present, it is New York, a palimpsest of a city where the old is forever making way for the new. And so when you consider Gilded Age New York a time of outrageous fortunes, outsize ambitions and extravagant residences built as monuments to their owners' inflated egos it is easy to focus on the buildings that no longer survive."
"Most of these mansions were built cheek by jowl along Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side at the height of the Gilded Age in the last two decades of the 19th century the bigger and fancier, the better. Just ahead of the mansion boom, the Park Avenue Armory itself was built. Completed in 1881, it featured spectacular reception rooms designed by, among others, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Candace Wheeler and Stanford White."
"Collectively they are said to be the single most important collection of 19th-century interiors to survive intact in one building, according to the New York Landmarks Conservancy. But the mansions are a world unto themselves. The Andrew Carnegie residence on 91st Street is now the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum."
New York continually replaces older structures with newer ones, creating a city that feels stuck in the present. During the Gilded Age, Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side saw dense construction of extravagant mansions built in the late 1800s. These residences often served as monuments to their owners’ wealth and ambitions. Just before the mansion boom, the Park Avenue Armory was completed in 1881 and included spectacular reception rooms designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, Candace Wheeler, and Stanford White. The New York Landmarks Conservancy credits the building with preserving the most important surviving collection of 19th-century interiors in one structure. Some mansions still exist through new uses, such as Andrew Carnegie’s residence now operating as the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Read at www.nytimes.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]