The Gilded Age Guide: Mansions of Fifth Avenue and Millionaire’s Row

Opposite New York’s Central Park is the world’s most prestigious address: Fifth Avenue, where you’ll find grand mansions built by Gilded Age robber barons and their heirs. And with outrageous fortune comes outrageous behavior.

This walking tour starts outside the members-only Metropolitan Club, founded by JP Morgan, the man who inspired Monopoly’s Rich Uncle Pennybags. As you stroll along Millionaire’s Row and Museum Mile, I’ll share extraordinary stories of love and loss, epic battles over status, and deliciously petty squabbles over the rules that governed society in the late 1800s. You'll step into the exclusive Knickerbocker Club's legacy, where America's richest man, John D. Rockefeller, was denied entry until his grandson's generation.

Our final stop is the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art), founded by the Gilded Age millionaires who stuffed it with the art they acquired on their European Grand Tours. There, you’ll learn why its grand entry remains unfinished and how its design is actually a form of architectural revenge.

On this 90-minute tour, you’ll:

• Learn the true meaning of the term “Gilded Age,” coined by Mark Twain as a satirical criticism of the rich, and the origin of “Keeping up with the Joneses”
• Visit the real-life corner where the Russells and van Rijn families built their mansions in HBO’s TV series, The Gilded Age
• Marvel at how Caroline “Lina” Astor (THE Mrs. Astor ) climbed the social ladder by writing the rules herself
• Admire the cunning of Alva Vanderbilt, who bounced back from poverty, and hatched a scheme that forced old-money Mrs Astor to accept the new-money Vanderbilts into “polite society”
• Be a fly on the wall at the most extravagant, ostentatious and appalling parties of the era
• Fall for the charms of Porfirio Rubirosa, the playboy-diplomat-assassin who married – and profitably divorced – the world’s two richest women in just three years
• Be thrilled by the forbidden romance between heiress Ellin McKay and Irving Berlin, a poor Jewish immigrant who found fame and fortune as America’s greatest songwriter
• Get the skinny on why Fifth Avenue was the premier New York address for over a century
• Gaze upon impressive mansions including the Herbert N. Straus House, the James B. Duke House, the Payne Whitney Mansion, the Beekman Mansion and the Fletcher Sinclair Mansion
• Meet Henry Sinclair, the oil baron man who gave us the Teapot Dome Scandal, which was, until Watergate, “the most sensational scandal in the history of American politics”
• Stand in silent outrage at the doors of Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion, behind which he committed unspeakable crimes, until the FBI broke them down

Every mansion has its story, and we bring them to life in dramatic fashion, with voice actors and immersive sound design that puts you in the ballrooms, carriages and clubs of the Gilded Age elite. No other Gilded Age tour, recorded or live, packs as much detail and drama into one thrilling experience.

CREDITS: The website DaytonInManhattan.blogspot.com is an incredible resource for a detailed history of NYC buildings.
Additional voices add actual quotes, performed by actors: Peter Collery, Mattie Goldberg, Matt Jones, Clara Marshall, Hugh Osborn, Paul Safsel, Beth Saks, Terry Taylor, Bob Tracy, Lisa Wagner, Claudia Wallis, Josh Wallach, John Williams.