2. Millionaire’s Row extended up to the Upper East Side
Millionaire’s Row along Fifth Avenue, consisting of dozens of Gilded Age mansions occupied by some of the wealthiest people who ever lived, was primarily concentrated around Midtown. However, a handful of Beaux-Arts mansions still remain on the Upper East Side, primarily in the East 70s. Henry Clay Frick’s mansion at 70th and Fifth is now the Frick Collection, prized for its Old Master paintings, including three Vermeers. Although Museum Mile replaced a number of Fifth Avenue mansions, the 89th Street home of sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington previously housed the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, while the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design is located in one of Andrew Carnegie’s homes.
854 Fifth Avenue is Manhattan’s last intact Gilded Age Mansion, built in 1905 for stockbroker and future governor of Rhode Island R. Livingston Beeckman. At 1 East 71st Street, Florence Vanderbilt, daughter of William Henry Vanderbilt, helped design a 70-room home that matched the lavishness of her townhouse at 684 Fifth Avenue. The Ruth Brown House was completed in 1895 for its namesake, the mother of the first American racing-car champion David Bruce-Brown; but instead of moving in, she sold it to Alva Vanderbilt. 39 East 72nd Street is a seven-story townhouse on the Upper East Side where socialite Gloria Vanderbilt grew up.