The Upper East Side has numerous historic buildings, including stately and gracious apartment buildings particularly along Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue. As such there are six historic districts on the Upper East Side. It is also the home to several museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. The concentration of museums is large enough that a stretch of Fifth Avenue is known as “Museum Mile.” It is also home to cultural institutions such as the 92nd Street Y.

For over 100 years, the Upper East Side has also been famous for being the home of some of the wealthiest people in the world. In early 1900′s industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick built mansions in the neighborhood.  At the end of 1900′s, such business people and entrepreneurs as Estee Lauder, Michael Bloomberg, and Ron Perelman made their homes on the Upper East Side. In fact, in 2006, a book was published about one building, 740 Park Avenue, with the subtitle “The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building.”

White City featured several roller coasters, a chute-the-chutes, two ballrooms, inexpensive food, and its landmark Electric Tower. Partly due to a large fire in the late 1920s, and partly due to the economic hardship of the Depression, much of White City’s amusements had been shut down by the mid-1930s. Stiff competition from the growing Cottage Grove entertainment district, particularly the new Trianon Ballroom, also drew entertainment-seekers away from the park. In 1937, only one dance hall, the roller rink, the basketball courts, and the bowling alleys remained in operation. White City closed for good in the 1950s.

Located in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side, the 1893 Exposition was known as “the White City” for its gleaming white, Beaux-Arts style buildings designed by famed architect Daniel Burnham, famous for designing the Flatiron Building in New York, among many others, and the renowned firm of McKim, Mead & White, famous for the now-lost Pennsylvania Station in New York among many others. The buildings of the so-called White City dotted a lagoon reminiscent of Venice.  Only two of the buildings from the World’s Fair survive to this day in their original location: the Palace of Fine Arts, which is now the Museum of Science and Industry; and the World’s Congress Auxiliary Building, which is now the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Stepping off the cable car that had brought him from the Loop, he stood on the Hyde Park prairie Paul Cornell had plated and drained, between Olmsted’s Washington and Jackson Parks, gazing with disappointment at the ‘unfinished gray stone buildings scattered loosely over the immense campus which was nothing more than a quagmire with a frog pond at the south end.’  Just a few blocks east of this chaotic construction scene, he could see the vastly larger building site of the great fair Chicago would host.  They stood next to each other, connected by Olmsted’s Midway Plaisance, two miniature cities in the making, Burnham’s White City and Harper’s Gray City, both of them planned by ‘ardent, ambitious businessmen eager to change the city’s image from one of barbarous materialism to one of refinement and culture.’”—Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 394.

The Exposition drew more than 27 million visitors from all over the world, including abolitionist Frederick Douglass, social reformer Jane Addams, writer Paul Laurence Dunbar, writer Henry Blake Fuller, and composer Scott Joplin.

In the United States, the “Twin Cities” is most commonly used to refer to Minneapolis-St. Paul in the state of Minnesota. The nickname of the region’s professional baseball team is the Minnesota Twins.

There are many other paired cities in the U.S. and indeed throughout the world that are also referred to as “Twin Cities.”