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 Morgan Library & Museum, the Woolworth Building, Grand Central Terminal, Pennsylvania Station, the main branch of the New York Public Library, The Frick Collection, Grant’s Tomb and select mausoleums in Woodlawn Cemetery, where some of the players rest.

The structures, or pieces of them, survived the advent of Art Nouveau, Art Deco and the modernist movement as the country radically transformed.

“Architecture is always a clear guide to how individuals or whole societies think of themselves,” the HBO show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, told The Associated Press about why he needed to get the details right. “The princes of the American renaissance were no different. They saw themselves as giants, no longer inferior to the products of older cultures across the sea, but kings of the world.”