New York City’s Glitzy Gilded Age: A Tour with Context

Explore one of the most exciting times in American history, the Gilded Age, with Context Travel expert, Michele Gouveia. On this walking tour, which starts outside the famed Plaza Hotel, you’ll venture up Fifth Avenue (once nicknamed Millionaire’s Row), and visit some of the places that Manhattan’s elite called home in the late 1800s.

From the site where the city’s largest private residence once stood, to a Venetian palace whose architect was murdered, you’ll get a peek into how some of the richest people in US history once lived, and how they impacted the city’s urban landscape.

Michele will fill you in on the Gilded Age’s key players including a few ambitious men who made billions: Andrew Carnegie with steel, JP Morgan with finance, JD Rockefeller with oil, and Cornelius “the Commodore” Vanderbilt with railroads and shipping. She’ll also tell you about the divide between old money and new money among the upper class.

You’ll pass by the Frick Collection, a Beaux-Arts style home that was built to one day become a public gallery, and see a few famous private gentlemen’s clubs, like the Union and the Metropolitan Club. You'll also see the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the MET), created when a group of New York businessmen were inspired to open a museum like the ones they had seen on a trip to Paris before wrapping up the tour in front of the Neue Galerie New York.

On this 75-minute tour, you’ll:

• Marvel at Mary Augusta King’s house, which later became the headquarters for the American Irish Historical Society, where she lived with her Irish servants
• Admire the Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion, the only French Gothic-style house on the tour
• Take in the former Payne Whitney Mansion (now owned by the French government) where the horse-breeding Whitney families became one of New York’s wealthiest
• Discover how Frederick Law Olmstead, designer of Central Park, couldn’t stand monuments and tried to keep them out of the park
• Hear about Ward McAllister’s list of the number of people who reportedly made up high society, ‘The Four Hundred’
• Gaze upon Temple Emanu-El, one of the largest synagogues in the world, and the location where Mrs Astor's double mansion once stood
• Learn about Joseph Pulitzer, a newspaper baron who left money to Columbia University for a journalism school, and created the Pulitzer Prize
• Take in the Beekman Mansion, finished in 1905 by Warren & Wetmore in the Beaux Arts style, with an interior modeled after Versailles
• Admire the block where the Russell and Van Rijn families live in HBO’s series, The Gilded Age
• Find out about the controversial events that led to the creation of the exclusive Knickerbocker Club in 1871, involving John Jacob Astor III and Alexander Hamilton Jr

By the end of this tour, you’ll have a deeper understanding of what made the Upper East Side such a sought-after address, and the role the Gilded Age’s key figures played in shaping the city.