Old money, new money: Beaux Arts style gets attention on HBO

What surroundings, Mrs. Russell. We could be at Tsarskoye Selo,” exclaims Nathan Lane’s snooty Ward McAllister at his first glance of her opulent Fifth Avenue mansion on “The Gilded Age.”

The social arbiter’s reference to an 18th century palace outside St. Petersburg, Russia, is lost on the new-money Bertha, but the point was made: The HBO Max series has brought alive America’s post-Civil War renaissance and New York City’s cultural awakening in all its Beaux Arts glory.

The term, which translates simply as “fine arts,” was anything but simple in the hands of the city’s wealthiest figures of the time — names like Astor, Carnegie, Frick, Morgan, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and more. Thanks to this powerful ruling class and their architects, the period roughly spanning the 1870s to the 1930s produced some of New York’s finest structures.

Beaux Arts at its best includes buildings like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the