Fifth Avenue Mansions Walking Tour with Top of the Rock Tickets and Optional Beam

Two hours with a licensed City Wonders guide, starting at Grand Army Plaza and ending 850 feet up at Top of the Rock. Your observation deck ticket is part of the price, so the walk finishes with the whole of Manhattan below you instead of at a ticket window. The first stretch is Gilded Age New York: the plaza where Cornelius Vanderbilt II built his mansion, the Pulitzer Fountain and the Plaza Hotel. Then the route heads south down Fifth Avenue, past Tiffany's and the Audrey Hepburn story, the gilded Crown Building and a view of Billionaire's Row, the pencil-thin towers that keep setting real estate records. Trump Tower, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, the Peninsula and the St. Regis come next. A detour west swaps money for show business. City Center, the world of Florenz Ziegfeld, the Park Central Hotel where gangster Arnold Rothstein was shot in 1928, and the Ed Sullivan Theater, where Elvis and the Beatles played to television audiences and Letterman and Colbert later taped their shows. Back on Fifth Avenue you pass MoMA, St. Thomas Church, the Cartier mansion and St. Patrick's Cathedral before reaching Rockefeller Center, built in Art Deco style during the Great Depression. At Top of the Rock you have access to all three observation levels, including the open-air deck, with views over Central Park and the skyline. One ticket option adds The Beam, a rotating steel beam that lifts you 12 feet above the deck for a photo modeled on the 1932 Lunch Atop a Skyscraper picture. Tips, food and drink, and hotel pickup are not included.