Fifth Avenue is a major thoroughfare in the center of the borough of Manhattan in New York City, USA. The section of Fifth Avenue between 34th Street and 59th Street is one of the premier shopping streets in the world. Fifth Avenue serves as a symbol of wealthy New York and is consistently ranked as one of the most expensive streets in the world.

The "most expensive street in the world" moniker changes depending on currency fluctuations and local economic conditions from year to year. For several years starting in the mid-1990s, the shopping district between 49th and 57th Streets was ranked as having the world's most expensive retail spaces on a cost per square foot basis. In 2008, Forbes magazine ranked Fifth Avenue as being the most expensive street in the world.

Fifth Avenue originates at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village and runs northwards through the heart of Midtown, along the eastern side of Central Park, where it forms the boundary of the Upper East Side and through Harlem, where it terminates at the Harlem River at 142nd Street. Traffic crosses the river on the Madison Avenue Bridge. Fifth Avenue serves as the dividing line for house numbering in Manhattan.

It separates, for example, East Fifty-ninth Street from West Fifty-ninth Street. From this zero point for street addresses, numbers increase in both directions as one moves away from Fifth Avenue, with 1 West Fifty-ninth Street on the corner at Fifth Avenue, and 300 West Fifty-ninth Street located three blocks to the west of it. The lower stretch of Fifth Avenue extended the stylish neighborhood of Washington Square northwards.

The high status of Fifth Avenue was confirmed in 1862, when Caroline Schermerhorn Astor settled on the southwest corner of Thirty-fourth Street, and the beginning of the end of its reign as a residential street was symbolized by the erection, in 1893, of the Astoria Hotel on the site of her house, later linked to its neighbor as the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (now the site of the Empire State Building). Fifth Avenue is the central scene in Edith Wharton's 1920 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Age of Innocence. The novel describes New York's social elite in the 1870s and provides historical context to Fifth Avenue and New York's aristocratic families.

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