Gilded Age Self-Guided Audio Tour: Fifth Avenue's Millionaire's Row

This is an app-based audio walk, so there is no guide to meet and no fixed start time. You put in your headphones outside the Metropolitan Club on East 60th Street and walk north along Fifth Avenue, with Central Park on one side and what is left of the old money mansions on the other, until the recording brings you to the steps of the Met. The narrator is Tom Darbyshire of TellBetter Tours, billed as an Emmy-nominated storyteller, and the script leans on stories rather than dates. Love affairs and grief. Families fighting over who ranked above whom. Small, vicious arguments about the rules of late 1800s society. Voice actors and sound effects fill in the ballrooms, carriages and private clubs, so the buildings you are looking at come with the people who once lived in them. The route follows Millionaire's Row and part of Museum Mile, past the Knickerbocker Club, the Arsenal, the Frick Collection, the Richard Morris Hunt Memorial, the James B. Duke House and more. The recording runs about 80 minutes at walking pace, but you set the speed and can stop whenever you like. Once bought, the tour is yours for life. It works offline, with maps and GPS that start each chapter when you reach the right spot, and you can also play it at home like an audiobook, before or after your trip. Bring a charged smartphone and headphones: they are not included. Buildings are seen from the outside only, and there is no entry to the Met or any other museum.