Private Tour of the Gilded Age City around Madison Square

We begin the tour with a general overview of history and the city's move uptown. Pictures help recreate the evolution of the area from farmland to a fashionable city center. We learn the history of the Astors, the creation of the first Waldorf=Astoria, and their social interactions with families like the Vanderbilts of the new Industrial class wealth.(15 min)

Pictures enhance a short walk and talk around Madison Square, including the hisotries of Met Life and the first Madison Square Gardens at the height of the Gilded Age.(10 min)

We begin hte process of circumnavigating the ruins of the long forgotten city, when the telephone and electricity were brand new and not yet common to households. It was the age of the department store, hte apartment buildnig and the office towers, new ways of living, working and playing for a rising middle class. Each thoroughfare that crossed at Madison Square held a different class-based attraction of some form of commercia culture, including a redlight distrcit of blocks above 23rd Street and west of Broadway! Here, we begin the tour with the carriage trade shops of upper class wealth along Broadway, including th old Lord & Taylor and Arnold Constable & Co buildings, among others.(5 min)

Fifth Avenue below 23rd Street has its own particular hisotry of development like no other place in hte city. Here, the Garment Distrcit was "diverted" from Midtown. The built environment here is different from any other blocks around.(10 min)

Sixth Avenue was the middle class shopping district and retains its spactacular array of buildings as the city moved from cast iron to steel frame construction. Some of the buidlings include: Seigel-Cooper, B. Altmans, Hugh O'Neill's, and Adams Dry Goods Store.(10 min)

Above 23rd Street history takes an abrupt turn as a few steps take us into the old tenderloin, blocks of concert-saloons, brothels and gambling halls from a time when the main form of entertainment in the house was the piano.(20 min)

We cross back to Fifth Avenue and again into a realm of substantial architecture. Here, early experimental forays into multiple family housing: apartment-hotels, French flats, bachelor flats, early coops are the featured buildign types. Some of the buildings include: the Wilbraham, Holland House, Seville and the Martha Washington.(20 min)

We end the tour in Madison Square Park with some last interesting histories, inluding the Worth Monument, Delmonico's and the old Brunswick Club.(15 min)