GREAT HOUSES
G E N E R A L V I E W — M A D I S O N AV E N U E
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the English social events and had visions of duplicating them at home. It was not lost on Americans that to entertain on a grand scale required a commensurate setting. Newly rich Americans understood the potential to enhance their own social standing by emulating the lifestyle of the English ruling class. • • •
In the late 1860s, New York society was concentrated along Fifth Avenue between Washington Square and Murray Hill. With the northward expansion of the city, and the willingness of people to sell their houses for substantial profit to commercial developers, the fashionable residential district continued its uptown migration another 20 blocks by the 1880s. This progression would continue
NEW YORK
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until the beginning of World War I. Most of the American Great Houses were built on Fifth and Park avenues and the side streets connecting them from 50th to 95th streets, with the grandest houses being placed on the corner lots of the avenues. Unlike Fifth Avenue, which had been the residential street for the city’s elite for well over half a century, upper Park Avenue became acceptable only after the electrification of the trains, which had previously billowed smoke out of an open trough. After the submerged tracks were covered, Park Avenue became the handsome and wide residential avenue we know today. Former Secretary of State Elihu Root was the first to build a house on upper Park Avenue when his Carrère & Hastings–designed house went up on the southeast corner of 71st Street in 1905.
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