As soon as my schedule permitted, I returned to New York to see how the new incarnation of the Frick Collection turned out. Interested to learn more about the Upper East Side, I also had the Travel Office arrange for a historical walking tour of the neighborhood. Both proved highly worthwhile, but the experience felt one-sided. Life in late-19th-century New York City encompassed vastly different realities, representing the extremes of wealth and poverty. While Gilded Age industrialists amassed fortunes and erected grand mansions on the Upper East Side, working-class immigrants — mere blocks away — lived a daily struggle. I headed downtown, to the Lower East Side and Chinatown, to get glimpses of a very different New York through two other engaging museums.

UPTOWN

The Frick Collection

Few edifices illustrate the fortunes of the Gilded Age better than the palatial 1914 home of Henry Clay Frick, an industrialist or ruthless robber baron, depending on your point of view. He built an immense mansion on Fifth Avenue at 70th Street, which, along with its contents — a trove of fine and decorative arts — he bequeathed to the public. The Frick Collection opened in 1935 and became a major cultural attraction.

At last, this beloved museum has reopened after a five-year renovation and expansion. I was excited to see how the museum effectively doubled its space, with an enhanced first floor and, most significantly, the opening of the second floor, formerly the family’s private quarters. Inside, we encountered Flemish tapestries from the 1500s, a bevy of old masters paintings, bronze and marble busts, exquisite furnishings and one of the most important assemblages of portrait medals in the world.

Frick was a man who appreciated a certain kind of power, and his taste in paintings reflects that. As The New Yorker acerbically observed, the collection “turns on businessmen, bureaucrats and bishops: rich men dressed for work.” But of the 1,800-piece collection, I most appreciated the luminescent Vermeers — three of only 34 in the world, all depicting women — and Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert,” a masterpiece that called to mind the Benedictine monastery I visited near Santa Fe last year. But perhaps the work I loved best was one I’d never seen before, a new piece by Flora Yukhnovich commissioned by the museum. Her contemporary take on François Boucher’s 18th-century Four Seasons painting cycle occupies all four walls of the Cabinet Gallery. I happily lingered there, absorbed in her multilayered rococo-style confections.

Fans of the former version of the Frick will be happy to know it’s still the Frick, just better. There’s improved lighting, remade velvet walls in the East and West galleries, a new marble staircase, an underground event space and, most important, more paintings on view. Alas, there are also more visitors. Even with timed-entry tickets, navigating around the smaller second-floor rooms was challenging. For those who want a more serene experience, I recommend coming on a weekday morning and hiring a Frick guide for a 75-minute tour. Afterward, stop in the new Westmoreland café on the second floor. It serves upscale renditions of American and Italian classics, and note that reservations are essential.

The Frick Collection
1 East 70th Street. Tel. (212) 288-0700

Upper East Side Walking Tour

To better understand how the Gilded Age (from the 1870s to 1900) shaped the Upper East Side, I asked my travel advisor to book the Fifth Avenue Gilded Age Mansions Tour through Untapped New York. The 20-block route began at the southeast corner of Central Park, just across from the château-style Plaza hotel, an area dismissed in 1860 as a “goat-chewed wilderness.” With a dozen other participants, we hugged the park for most of the walk. The excursion outlined the city’s early development, the Civil War’s role in wealth accumulation and the migration of New York’s elite to the neighborhood. It wove together cultural touchstones, historic milestones and remarkable architectural sites, both demolished and still standing.

Highlights included the Knickerbocker Club, the Joseph Pulitzer House and the Harry F. Sinclair House, a Gothic Renaissance mansion erected between 1897 and 1899 that now houses the Ukrainian Institute of America. Despite its depth of detail, the tour certainly wasn’t dry. Our guide sprinkled in enough salacious gossip to keep things lively: century-old tales of the reclusive heiress Huguette Clark and her fascination with antique dolls; Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo’s prodigious shopping habits; and a Hungarian princess and portraitist who took up residence at The Plaza with a staff of 20, plus a menagerie that included an owl, an ibis and two alligators. The walk was both fascinating and fun.

DOWNTOWN

The Tenement Museum

A sharp contrast to the Frick’s Gilded Age mansion on the Upper East Side is the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, one of my favorite small museums in the city. For nearly 40 years, it’s told the immigrant story through two preserved tenement buildings — 97 and 103 Orchard Street — that serve as time capsules of 19th- and early-20th-century life in New York City. Stepping through the dark entryway into tiny rooms with original tin ceilings and torn wallpaper, it’s easy to imagine the overcrowding of the 325-square-foot apartments, which lacked indoor plumbing, proper ventilation and electricity.

Those two buildings focus on the lives of European and Asian immigrants, but the museum hadn’t, until recently, explored the history of Black residents in the area. That’s now changed with the introduction of an exhibition that brings together the real stories of two Joseph Moores, listed side by side in an 1869 city directory: one Irish, one Black, both waiters.

Though the Black Joseph Moore lived in what is now Soho, the museum has re-created his two-room apartment at 97 Orchard and offers a tour of it, called a Union of Hope: 1869. As we surveyed the cramped spaces, we learned he shared the apartment with four others: his wife, Rachel; his daughter, who worked as a seamstress in the bedroom; a white Irishwoman, who washed clothes for a living in the kitchen; and her biracial son. It was a fascinating look at two families and the common challenges they faced, including discrimination and economic oppression.

The Tenement Museum offers a host of apartment tours and guided neighborhood explorations. For a more thorough look at Black history in downtown New York, consider the neighborhood walking tour called Reclaiming Black Spaces, which explores the Black experience from the 1640s to the 1970s.

Tenement Museum
103 Orchard Street. Tel. (877) 875-3786

Museum at Eldridge Street

Five blocks south of the Tenement Museum stands the Museum at Eldridge Street, dedicated to preserving the Eldridge Street Synagogue, the oldest extant synagogue in the United States built by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. The institution offers a vivid look at how this wave of newcomers lived, worshipped and reshaped the Lower East Side.

Between 1880 and 1924, approximately 2.5 million Jews immigrated to the United States. With nearly 75% of them settling on the Lower East Side, the area became the most densely populated Jewish neighborhood in the world at the time. Our excellent docent, Jane, guided us through the synagogue’s sanctuary and the surrounding exhibits, which trace the increasingly violent antisemitic pogroms in Eastern Europe, the immigrants’ hope-filled journeys to America and the harsh realities they faced upon arrival. Many began their new lives alone, crowded into tenements and working long hours in terrible conditions. The museum’s permanent exhibition brings this era to life with photographs of bustling street scenes and shop fronts, original Yiddish business signs and displays of everyday objects from the time.

Determined to replace the makeshift synagogues that had sprung up in apartments and storefronts, four Russian Jewish immigrants — one later known as the “kosher sausage king of America” — raised approximately $92,000 in 1886 to build this grand Moorish Revival edifice. At its height, the synagogue drew more than 1,000 congregants, both wealthy and poor, who gathered amid more than 100 Stars of David in the celestial interior and proudly proclaimed their faith, something virtually impossible to do in the shtetls of the old country.

As Jewish families gradually moved out of the area, the congregation dwindled and the synagogue was eventually boarded up. In 1972, a New York University professor and architectural historian rediscovered the building, which was in severe disrepair: rusted metal, rotting wood and pigeons nesting in the rafters. A restoration campaign began 15 years later, culminating in a $20 million renovation. Today, the resplendent sanctuary, crowned by a luminous stained-glass window by artist Kiki Smith, stands as a National Historic Landmark and a testament to the endurance of Jewish immigrant faith and community.

Museum at Eldridge Street
12 Eldridge Street. Tel. (212) 219-0302