Upper East Side Architecture Walking Tour of Gilded Age Mansions and the Guggenheim

This is an architecture walk, and the Upper East Side's buildings are the subject. The guide leads on foot, and each guest follows the commentary through an individual headset. The group starts at the Frick Collection, at 70th Street and Fifth Avenue, in the former Henry Clay Frick house, one of the ornate town houses that New York's moneyed families built in the Gilded Age.

The walk reads the neighborhood through those buildings: the Frick mansion, the Metropolitan Museum, seen from Fifth Avenue with its architecture explained, the French Consulate and Central Park.

The modern end of the story is the Guggenheim. Frank Lloyd Wright received the commission in 1943 and the museum opened in 1959, and in 2019 UNESCO listed it as one of eight Wright buildings on the World Heritage List. The former Whitney Museum building, designed by Marcel Breuer, is on the route as well.