Ladies' Mile Historic District

Once the fashion center of New York's Gilded Age, this was the destination for stylish women shopping for French gloves, Japanese sunshades, bonbons, umbrellas, and other glamorous trifles. The area's financial success was ensured in 1860 by the Prince of Wale's stay at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on 23rd Street. Where princes led, society followed: beginning in the late 1850s, B. Altman, Lord & Taylor, Arnold Constable, W & J. Sloane, Tiffany & Co., Gorham Silver, and Brooks Brothers catered to the emerging carriage trade in this district.

The opulence of the area drew America's first ladies who shopped there, those from high society as well as the simply famous: actresses Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Russell, and Lillie Langtry, and art collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner. Restaurants, professional offices, piano showrooms, publishing houses, booksellers, the Academy of Music, Steinway Hall, and the first Metropolitan Museum of Art further enhanced the area's liveliness.

The growing commercialization of the district eventually drove its more fashionable residents, such as writers Emily Post and Edith Wharton, publisher Horace Greeley, and the Roosevelt family, uptown. By the end of World War I, most of the department stores had moved their operations farther north, and the lavish buildings were converted to manufacturing and later residential use. However, the elegant structures remain as silent witness to a much-romanticized era, one characterized by gaslight, glitter, and glamour. ©2014