Upper East Side
The Upper East Side 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. The neighborhood area incorporates several smaller neighborhoods, including Lenox Hill, Carnegie Hill, and Yorkville. Once known as the Silk Stocking District, it has long been the wealthiest neighborhood in New York City.
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. 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. 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 streams 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.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. 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, 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 to the river and the farmland inherited by James Lenox, who divided it into blocks of houselots in the 1870s, built his Lenox Library on a Fifth Avenue lot at the farm's south-west corner, and donated a full square block for the Presbyterian Hospital, between 70th and 71st Streets, and Madison and Park Avenues. 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. 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:
Arrival of famous residents
Before the Park Avenue Tunnel was covered, fashionable New Yorkers shunned the smoky railroad trench up Fourth 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, 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. 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. 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.
Demolishing the elevated railways on Third and Second Avenues opened these tenement-lined streets to the construction of high-rise apartment blocks starting in the 1950s. Among these were Manhattan House at 200 East 66th Street, one of the first apartment buildings in New York City to use white glazed brick on its facade, as well as the Sutton Terrace development on Sutton Place. The demolition of the els had an adverse effect on transportation, because the IRT Lexington Avenue Line was now the only subway line in the area. The construction of the Second Avenue Subway was originally proposed in 1919. Finally, on January 1, 2017, the first phase of the line was completed with three new stations opened. This brought in new local business to the area and had positive impact on real estate prices on the Upper East Side.
Demographics
For census purposes, the New York City government classifies the Upper East Side as part of three neighborhood tabulation areas: Upper East Side-Carnegie Hill, Yorkville, and Lenox Hill-Roosevelt Island, divided by Third Avenue and 77th Street. Based on data from the 2010 United States census, the combined population of these areas was 219,920, an increase of 2,857 from the 217,063 counted in 2000. Covering an area of, the neighborhoods had a population density of.The racial makeup of the neighborhoods was 79% White, 3.2% African American, 0.1% Native American, 8.6% Asian, 0% Pacific Islander, 0.3% from other races, and 1.8% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race was 7.1% of the population. While the White population is a dominating majority in all three census tabulation areas, it is more so in Upper East Side-Carnegie Hill compared to Yorkville and Lenox Hill-Roosevelt Island, being close to 90% of the population.
The racial composition of the Upper East Side changed moderately from 2000 to 2010. The most significant changes were the increase in the Asian population by 38%, the increase in the Hispanic/Latino population by 19%, and the decrease in the White population by 3%. The small Black population increased by 3%, while the even smaller population of all other races increased by 15%. Taking into account the three census tabulation areas, the decrease of the White population was concentrated Yorkville and Upper East Side-Carnegie Hill especially, while the increases of the other racial groups were evenly split across the three areas.
The entirety of Manhattan Community District 8, which comprises the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island, had 225,914 inhabitants as of NYC Health's 2018 Community Health Profile, with an average life expectancy of 85.9 years. This is higher than the median life expectancy of 81.2 for all New York City neighborhoods. Most inhabitants are adults: a plurality are between the ages of 25–44, while 24% are between 45 and 64, and 20% are 65 or older. The ratio of youth and college-aged residents was lower, at 14% and 5% respectively.
As of 2017, the median household income in Community District 8 was $123,894, though the median income on the Upper East Side individually was $131,492. In 2018, an estimated 7% of Community District 8 residents lived in poverty, compared to 14% in all of Manhattan and 20% in all of New York City. One in twenty-five residents were unemployed, compared to 7% in Manhattan and 9% in New York City. Rent burden, or the percentage of residents who have difficulty paying their rent, is 41% in Community District 8, compared to the boroughwide and citywide rates of 45% and 51% respectively. Based on this calculation, as of 2018, Community District 8 is not considered to be gentrifying: according to the Community Health Profile, the district was not low-income in 1990.