Presented by LANDMARK WEST! | Click here to get tickets

New York’s Fifth Avenue, America’s ‘Street of Dreams,’ is one of the most remarkable thoroughfares in the world. Shown on the Commissioners’ map of 1807 emerging from a country road, by the end of the century Fifth Avenue was synonymous with the incredibly fashionable lifestyles and mansions of the wealthy. Aggressive arrivistes such as Alva Vanderbilt and Marietta Stevens used their "new money" to employ European-influenced architects and decorators to build and furnish grand mansions, each more lavish than the next.

And then, it was all gone. Swept away in the shadow of tall buildings, the New York house was no longer the ultimate symbol of identity. All that exquisite and irreplaceable work quickly fell before the wrecker’s ball.

LANDMARK WEST! is honored to have Prof. Mosette Broderick, esteemed architectural historian and author of the just-published book Fifth Avenue— Architecture and Society: History of America’s Street of Dreams (Unicorn Publishing Group, 2024) join us for this extraordinary evening of history, recreating Fifth Avenue as it grew, flourished and failed.

This is an event not to be missed--one of our city's finest historians relating the story of Fifth Avenue’s 19th- and early 20th-century architecture and society as you have never heard or seen it before.

Prof. Mosette Broderick's interest in preservation was spurred by the efforts to save the McKim, Mead & White designed Villard Houses. An architectural historian, Broderick frequently provided expert opinions to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission on behalf of landmark designation proposals. She is Director of the Urban Design and Architecture Studies program as well as the London-based MA program in Historical and Sustainable Architecture in the Department of Art History at New York University. She is also the author of Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White: Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class in America’s Gilded Age (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).