Bowery Boys Walking Tour: Gilded Age Mansions of Fifth Avenue, 70th to 91st Street

The Bowery Boys run this walk, and it covers about a mile of Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side in two hours, from East 70th Street up to East 91st. It stays on the sidewalk the whole way: nobody goes inside the mansions, and the tour is built around looking hard at their facades and hearing who lived behind them. The cast is the one you would hope for. Henry Clay Frick's house, now the Frick Collection. The James B. Duke House, a copy of a French château and later the home of Doris Duke, the girl the papers called the richest in the world. The Harry F. Sinclair House, which has kept most of its original design and is now the Ukrainian Institute. The Payne Whitney House, today the French Embassy's Cultural Services, where a statue attributed to the teenage Michelangelo turned up in the 1990s. Otto Kahn's house, built for a 1920s bon vivant who may have been the model for Mr. Monopoly. And at the end, Andrew Carnegie's 64-room mansion, which its owner called "modest and plain." The guides specialize in Gilded Age history, and the talk moves between the architecture and the families who paid for it. The tour suits adults and children over 8. Expect a moderate level of walking, and bookings are limited to five people.