Fifth Avenue began as Middle Road, a track through land nobody wanted
Manhattan's most expensive shopping street started in 1785 as a surveyor's access lane through unsellable common land. Mansions, Vanderbilts, department stores and bronze traffic towers followed. Today the avenue runs from Harlem to Washington Square, and its stretch in the 50s consistently ranks among the priciest retail addresses on Earth.
The city's Common Council owned about 1,300 acres, roughly 9 percent of Manhattan, by 1785, much of it rocky ground far from rivers and roads. To raise money it hired Casimir Goerck to carve the land into lots of about five acres. His plan included a lane called Middle Road, which became Fifth Avenue. Buyers stayed away, so in 1794 he resurveyed the area into more regular rectangles with flanking roads, later Fourth and Sixth Avenues, and numbered cross streets. That work heavily inspired the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 that gave Manhattan its grid.
Through the mid-19th century the Midtown stretch held orphanages, asylums, a hospital and even a cattle farm into the 1860s. After the Civil War it turned fashionable. Mary Mason Jones built Marble Row between 1868 and 1870, and three Vanderbilt mansions in the late 1870s earned the ten blocks below Central Park the name Vanderbilt Row. Mansions eventually lined the park up to 96th Street, a stretch once called Millionaire's Row; part of it is now Museum Mile, home to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim.
Commerce then pushed the millionaires north. Benjamin Altman bought a corner at 34th Street in 1896 for the first commercial building on the avenue, and Saks and Bergdorf Goodman followed in the 1920s. In 1926 alone thirty office buildings rose along it. Widening in 1908 and after sheared stoops off mansions and forced the facade of St. Patrick's Cathedral back. Seven bronze traffic towers paid for by the Fifth Avenue Association in 1922 cut the drive from 34th to 57th Street from 40 minutes to 15.
Two-way traffic ended on January 14, 1966, when most of the avenue became southbound only. By 1971 only 57 percent of Midtown frontage was shops, prompting Mayor John Lindsay to propose zoning that rewarded new buildings for ground-floor retail. Artists noticed the energy early: John Marin's 1912 watercolor shows the cathedral spire and a street that seems to heave upward.
Source: Fifth Avenue
