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Automobiles jam Fifth Avenue, at 54th Street, after 3,500 employees walked off their jobs at two bus companies on March 10, 1941. With 1,305 buses out of action, throngs of New Yorkers took to subways and taxis to get around town.

This photo shows traffic on Fifth Avenue going in two directions. That changed on January 14, 1966, when it became a one-way street, with traffic going uptown (southbound).

Bus strikes and traffic aside, Fifth Avenue has long been one of the city's most famous streets. Paul Goldberger of The Times wrote in 1990, "Fifth Avenue from 34th Street to Central Park has always embodied the most endearing side of Manhattan's ability to satisfy haute bourgeois fantasies: a street of grand shops, fine department stores, churches, and a smattering of banks, clubs, hotels and office buildings, all organized to make a coherent, though hardly repetitive, whole."

The article added, "As on all the best streets in New York, the buildings were different one from the next, but not too different: St. Patrick's Cathedral enjoyed a cordial relationship with Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman had something to say to Tiffany. And presiding over it all for more than half a century now have been several buildings that are not only truly great works of architecture but active, functioning parts of the public realm: the Plaza Hotel, Rockefeller Center and the New York Public Library."