"Where wealth is so swollen that it almost bursts," wrote Collinson Owen of Park Avenue in 1929, and things aren't much changed: corporate headquarters jostle for prominence in a triumphal procession to capitalism, pushed apart by Park's broad avenue that was built to support elevated rail tracks. Whatever your feelings, it's one of the city's most awesome sights. Looking south from anywhere above 42nd St, everything progresses to the high altar of the New York Central Building (now renamed the Helmsley Building ), a delicate, energetic construction with a lewdly excessive Rococo lobby.

Despite Park Avenue's power, an individual look at most of the skyscrapers reveals the familiar glass box, and the first few buildings to stand out do so exactly because that's what they're not. Wherever you placed the solid Waldorf-Astoria Hotel , it would hold its own, a resplendent statement of Art Deco elegance. Duck inside to stroll through the sweeping marble and hushed plushness. Crouching across the street, St Bartholomew's Church is a low-slung Byzantine hybrid that by contrast adds immeasurably to the street scene, giving the lumbering skyscrapers a much-needed sense of scale. The spiky-topped General Electric Building behind seems like a wild extension of the church, its slender, carved red-marble shaft rising to a meshed crown of abstract sparks and lightning strokes that symbolizes the radio waves used by its original owner, RCA. The lobby with its vaulted ceiling (entrance at 570 Lexington Ave) is yet another Art Deco delight.

Explore Park Avenue (Midtown)

Seagram building 

#E or #V to Lexington Ave-53rd St.

Among all this it's difficult at first to see the originality of the Seagram Building between 52nd and 53rd streets. Designed by Mies van der Rohe and built in 1958, this was the seminal curtain-wall skyscraper, the floors supported internally rather than by the building's walls, allowing a skin of smoky glass and whiskey-bronze metal, now weathered to a dull black. It was the supreme example of modernist reason, deceptively simple and cleverly detailed, and its opening was met with a wave of approval. The plaza , an open forecourt designed to set the building apart from its neighbors and display it to advantage, was such a success as a public space that the city revised the zoning laws to encourage other high-rise builders to supply plazas.

Across Park Avenue between 53rd and 54th, Lever House was the building that set the modernist ball rolling on Park Avenue in 1952. Then, the two right-angled slabs that form a steel and glass bookend seemed revolutionary compared to the traditional buildings that surrounded it.

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Third, Second and First Avenues (Midtown) 

Citicorp provided a spur for the development of Third Avenue , though things really took off when the old elevated railway that ran here was dismantled in 1955. Until then Third had been a strip of earthy bars and run-down tenements, in effect a border to the more salubrious midtown district. After Citicorp went up, other office buildings sprouted, revitalizing the flagging fortunes of midtown Manhattan in the late 1970s. The best section is between 44th and 50th streets - look out for the sheer marble monument of the Wang Building between 48th and 49th, whose cross-patterns reveal the structure within.

All this office space hasn't totally removed interest from the street, but most life, especially at night, seems to have shifted across to Second Avenue - on the whole lower, quieter, more residential and with any number of bars to crawl between. The area from Third to the East River in the upper 40s is known as Turtle Bay , and there's a scattering of brownstones alongside chirpier shops and industry that disappear as you head north.

First Avenue has a certain raggy looseness that's a relief after the concrete claustrophobia of midtown, and Beekman Place , 49th to 51st streets between First Avenue and the East River, is quieter still, a beguiling enclave of garbled styles. Similar, though not quite as intimate, is Sutton Place , a long stretch running from 53rd to 59th between First and the river. Originally built for the lordly Morgans and Vanderbilts in 1875, Sutton increases in elegance as you move north and, for today's crème de la crème, Riverview Terrace is a (very) private enclave of five brownstones.