The Upper East Side (sometimes abbreviated UES) is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It is bounded approximately by 96th Street to the north, the East River to the east, 59th Street to the south, and Central Park and Fifth Avenue to the west.Gronowicz, Anthony. ""Upper East Side in p. 1352 The neighborhood area incorporates several smaller neighborhoods, including Lenox Hill, Carnegie Hill, and Yorkville. Once known as the Silk Stocking District,The City Review Upper East Side, the Silk Stocking District it has long been the wealthiest neighborhood in New York City.Plitt, Amy. "The richest neighborhoods in New York City; Where do the wealthiest New Yorkers live? The answers may surprise you (or not)" , Curbed New York, June 27, 2017. Accessed September 3, 2017. "That the Upper East Side is No. 1 should come as no surprise, given the concentration of wealth found along the westernmost border of the neighborhood (i. e., Museum Mile and the Gold Coast)."
The Upper East Side is part of Manhattan Community District 8, and its primary ZIP Codes are 10021, 10028, 10065, 10075, and 10128. It is patrolled by the 19th Precinct of the New York City Police Department.
Geography Neighborhood boundaries in New York City are not officially set, but according to the Encyclopedia of New York City, the Upper East Side is bounded by 59th Street in the south, 96th Street on the north, Fifth Avenue to the west, and the East River to the east.Gronowicz, Anthony. "Upper East Side" in The AIA Guide to New York City extends the northern boundary to 106th Street near Fifth Avenue.
The area's north–south avenues are Fifth, Madison, Park, Lexington, Third, Second, First, York, and East End Avenues, with the latter running only from East 79th Street to East 90th Street. The major east–west streets are 59th Street, 72nd Street, 79th Street, 86th Street, and 96th Street.
Some real-estate agents use the term "Upper East Side", instead of "East Harlem", to describe areas that are slightly north of 96th Street and near Fifth Avenue, in order to avoid associating these areas with the negative connotations of the latter, a neighborhood which is generally perceived as less prestigious.
Historic districts
The Upper East Side Historic District was designated as a city district in 1981 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.Upper East Side Historic District Designation Report, Vol. 1 , May 19, 1981, Landmarks Preservation Commission The city district runs from 59th to 78th Streets along Fifth Avenue, and up to Third Avenue at some points. It is composed of residential structures built after the American Civil War; mansions and townhouses built at the beginning of the 20th century; and apartment buildings erected later on. The city district was slightly expanded in 2010 with 74 additional buildings.
The Metropolitan Museum Historic District was designated a city district in 1977. It consists of properties on Fifth Avenue between 79th and 86th Streets, outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as properties on several side streets.
The Park Avenue Historic District was designated a city district in 2014. It encompasses 64 properties on Park Avenue between 79th and 91st Streets.
The Carnegie Hill Historic District was designated a city district in 1974 and expanded in 1993. It covers 400 buildings, primarily along Fifth Avenue from 86th to 98th Street, as well as on side streets extending east to Madison, Park, and Lexington Avenues.
There are also two smaller city historic districts. The Henderson Place Historic District, designated in 1969, comprises the town houses on East End Avenue between 86th and 87th Streets, built by John C. Henderson in 1981. The Treadwell Farm Historic District, designated in 1967, includes low-rise apartments on East 61st and 62nd Streets between Second and Third Avenues, on the former farm of Adam Treadwell.
History Development
Before the arrival of Europeans, the mouths of streamsNoted at East 53rd, 62nd, 74th Streets (the Saw Kill, dammed to form the Lake in Central Park) and 80th Street (Eric W. Sanderson, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, 2009, p. 261 "Lenape sites and place-names"). that eroded gullies in the East River bluffs are conjectured to have been the sites of fishing camps used by the Lenape, whose controlled burns once a generation or so kept the dense canopy of oak–hickory forest open at ground level.A reconstructed map of the patchwork ecologies of Manhattan island before Europeanization is presented in Sanderson 2009; map p. 139.
In the 19th century the farmland and market garden district of what was to be the Upper East Side was still traversed by the Boston Post Road and, from 1837, the New York and Harlem Railroad, which brought straggling commercial development around its one station in the neighborhood, at 86th Street, which became the heart of German Yorkville. The area was defined by the attractions of the bluff overlooking the East River, which ran without interruption from James William Beekman's "Mount Pleasant", north of the marshy squalor of Turtle Bay, to Gracie Mansion, north of which the land sloped steeply to the wetlands that separated this area from the suburban village of Harlem.The original ecology of Manhattan Island and its evolution is now thoroughly explored in Eric W. Sanderson, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City (New York: Abrams, 2009), based in part on a British army map detailing the island's natural terrain at the time of the American Revolution. Among the series of villas a Schermerhorn country house overlooked the river at the foot of present-day 73rd Street and another, Peter Schermerhorn's at 66th Street,In 1818, with a purchase to the south, Peter Schermerhorn enlarged the property given him by his father-in-law, John Jones ("History of the Schermerhorn family", The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record,, 36 (July 1905:204)), now the site of Rockefeller University (Rockefeller University: history ). and the Riker homestead was similarly sited at the foot of 75th Street. By the mid-19th century the farmland had largely been subdivided, with the exception of the of Jones's Wood, stretching from 66th to 76th Streets and from the Old Post Road (Third Avenue) to the river and the farmland inherited by James Lenox, who divided it into blocks of houselots in the 1870s,"Realty Romance in Old Lenox Farm" . The New York Times. December 15, 1918. The occasion was the auction of the auction sale an 1874 map of the section of Robert Lenox's farm, bought in 1818 that lay between 71st and 74th Streets, from Fifth Avenue to the railroad right-of-way that became Park Avenue. built his Lenox Library on a Fifth Avenue lot at the farm's south-west corner,When the library was consolidated with Astor and Tilden trusts to form the New York Public Library, a unique block-long stretch of Fifth Avenue frontage was liberated for the latecomer Henry Clay Frick to build his grand residence, now the Frick Collection. and donated a full square block for the Presbyterian Hospital, between 70th and 71st Streets, and Madison and Park Avenues."Founded by James Lenox, the chief features of the Presbyterian hospital..." . The New York Times. July 3, 1892. At that time, along the Boston Post Road taverns stood at the mile-markers, Five-Mile House at 72nd Street and Six-Mile House at 97th, a New Yorker recalled in 1893.
The fashionable future of the narrow strip between Central Park and the railroad cut was established at the outset by the nature of its entrance, in the southwest corner, north of the Vanderbilt family's favored stretch of Fifth Avenue from 50th to 59th Streets.Arthur T. Vanderbilt 2nd, Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt (New York, 1989). A row of handsome townhouses was built on speculation by Mary Mason Jones, who owned the entire block bounded by 57th and 58th Streets and Fifth and Madison. In 1870 she occupied the prominent corner house at 57th and Fifth, though not in the isolation described by her niece, Edith Wharton, whose picture has been uncritically accepted as history, as Christopher Gray has pointed out:Gray, Christopher. "Streetscapes: Edith Wharton; In The Age of Innocence, Fiction Was Not Truth" , The New York Times, August 27, 1995. Accessed September 3, 2017.
Arrival of famous residents Before the Park Avenue Tunnel was covered (finished in 1910), fashionable New Yorkers shunned the smoky railroad trench up Fourth Avenue (now Park Avenue), to build stylish mansions and townhouses on the large lots along Fifth Avenue, facing Central Park, and on the adjacent side streets. The latest arrivals were the rich Pittsburghers Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. The classic phase of Gilded Age Fifth Avenue as a stretch of private mansions was not long-lasting: the first apartment house to replace a private mansion on upper Fifth Avenue was 907 Fifth Avenue (1916), at 72nd Street, the neighborhood's grand carriage entrance to Central Park.
Most members of New York's upper-class families have made residences on the Upper East Side, including the oil-rich Rockefellers, political Roosevelts, political dynastic Kennedys, thoroughbred racing moneyed Whitneys, and tobacco and electric power fortuned Dukes.
Transportation constructed
Construction of the Third Avenue El, opened from 1878 in sections, followed by the Second Avenue El, opened in 1879, linked the Upper East Side's middle class and skilled artisans closely to the heart of the city, and confirmed the modest nature of the area to their east. The unbuilt "Hamilton Square", which had appeared as one of the few genteel interruptions of the grid plan on city maps since the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, was intended to straddle what had now become the Harlem Railroad right-of-way between 66th and 69th Streets; it never materialized, though during the Panic of 1857 its unleveled ground was the scene of an open-air mass meeting called in July to agitate for the secession of the city and its neighboring counties from New York State, and the city divided its acreage into house lots and sold them.Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: a history of New York City to 1898, 1999, pp. 421, 840, 849. From the 1880s the neighborhood of Yorkville became a suburb of middle class Germans.
Gracie Mansion, the last remaining suburban villa overlooking the East River at Carl Schurz Park, became the home of New York's mayor in 1942.Barron, james; and Roberts, Sam. "New York Mayor's Mansion Seeks a Missing Item (the Mayor)" , The New York Times, November 2, 2013. Accessed September 3, 2017. "Gracie Mansion, home to the mayors of New York since movers delivered the La Guardias' own furniture in 1942, was never quite right for the billionaire mayor, who shunned it even as he shined it up, donating millions for repairs, renovations and the occasional antique." The East River Drive, designed by Robert Moses, was extended south from the first section, from 125th Street to 92nd Street, which was completed in 1934 as a boulevard, an arterial highway running at street level; reconstruction designs from 1948 to 1966 converted FDR Drive, as it was renamed after Franklin Delano Roosevelt, into the full limited-access parkway that is in use today.FDR Drive , New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Accessed September 3, 2017.