The Upper East Side runs along Central Park's eastern edge from 59th Street to 96th Street, the city's most consistently affluent residential district since the late 19th century, when the families who built Fifth Avenue's mansions moved here from downtown. Many of those mansions now house the museums that make Fifth Avenue's stretch facing the park known as Museum Mile.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, at 82nd Street, is the anchor of the strip and one of the largest art museums in the world. The Guggenheim, a few blocks north, occupies Frank Lloyd Wright's only New York building, a spiralling concrete form that remains controversial and beloved in roughly equal measure. The Neue Galerie, devoted to early 20th-century German and Austrian art, occupies a Fifth Avenue mansion and is small enough to see properly in an hour. Madison Avenue, one block east of Fifth, is the neighbourhood's boutique shopping street.