Fifth Avenue ( floor camera )

Fifth Avenue is a major thoroughfare in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It stretches north from Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village to West 143rd Street in Harlem. It is considered one of the most expensive and elegant streets in the world.

History
5th Avenue was originally only a narrower thoroughfare but the section south of Central Park was widened in 1908, sacrificing its wide sidewalks to accommodate the increasing traffic. The midtown blocks, now famously commercial, were largely a residential area until the turn of the 20th century. The first commercial building on Fifth Avenue was erected by Benjamin Altman who bought the corner lot on the northeast corner of 34th Street in 1896. In 1906 the B. Altman and Company Building was erected, occupying the whole of its block front. The result was the creation of a high-end shopping district that attracted fashionable women and the upscale stores that wished to serve them. The Lord & Taylor Building, formerly Lord & Taylor's flagship store and now a WeWork office, is located on Fifth Avenue near the Empire State Building and the New York Public Library Main Branch.
In the 1920s, traffic towers controlled important intersections from 14th to 59th Streets.

Description
Fifth Avenue originates at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village and runs northwards through the heart of Midtown, along the eastern side of Central Park, where it forms the boundary of the Upper East Side and through Harlem, where it terminates at the Harlem River at 142nd Street. Traffic crosses the river on the Madison Avenue Bridge. Fifth Avenue serves as the dividing line for house numbering and west-east streets in Manhattan, just as Jerome Avenue does in the Bronx. It separates, for example, East 59th Street from West 59th Street.

From this zero point for street addresses, numbers increase in both directions as one moves away from Fifth Avenue, The building lot numbering system worked similarly on the East Side as well, before Madison & Lexington Aves. were retrofitted into the street grid, confusing the building numbers. Confusingly, an address on a cross street cannot be predicted at the intersection of Madison Ave. or Lexington Ave., as these were added decades after the building numbers. It's as if the two retrofitted avenues are not counted for purposes of cross street addresses.

The "most expensive street in the world" moniker changes depending on currency fluctuations and local economic conditions from year to year. For several years starting in the mid-1990s, the shopping district between 49th and 57th Streets was ranked as having the world's most expensive retail spaces on a cost per square foot basis. In 2008, Forbes magazine ranked Fifth Avenue as being the most expensive street in the world. Some of the most coveted real estate on Fifth Avenue are the penthouses perched atop the buildings.

The American Planning Association (APA) compiled a list of "2012 Great Places in America" and declared Fifth Avenue to be one of the greatest streets to visit in America. This historic street has many world-renowned museums, businesses and stores, parks, luxury apartments, and historical landmarks that are reminiscent of its history and vision for the future. By 2018 portions of Fifth Avenue had large numbers of vacant store fronts for long periods, part of a citywide trend of vacant store fronts attributed to high rental costs