At Home in the Neighborhood 

PEOPLE & PLACES

What is 1014’s neighborhood, and who are its neighbors? All New Yorkers have their own versions of the city. Our constantly evolving mental maps—tinged with memory, hope, regret, trauma, and desire—overlay the physical one.  

The Upper East Side of Manhattan, as New York Times art critic Roberta Smith once wrote, is “less a neighborhood than an aggregate of them... amorphously vague of border and devoid of geographical cohesion.” Despite its staid reputation, the Upper East Side, or UES, is full of hybrid identities.   

Beyond Fifth Avenue’s “Museum Mile,” the neighborhood can be read as a patchwork of migrant and community histories. The ruins of Seneca Village, one of the first free Black communities in New York City, lie buried under a nearby stretch of Central Park. East of Third Avenue stands Yorkville, where immigrants from Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, including many Jews, settled during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although few of the institutions and business from that era remain, a variety of cultural centers, neighborhood parks, and notable buildings reflect the neighborhood’s heritage and diversity today.   

Contrary to the myth that everything cool happens downtown, the UES has long nurtured pockets of cultural and architectural experimentation. Theaters on East 86th Street once showed foreign-language films. Pioneering architects developed new apartment types. Artists like Marc Chagall and Andy Warhol lived in the neighborhood. Even today, disparate communities can connect through the languages of art, dance, music, and science. The UES is not insulated from politics, either: countless marches, from 1960s anti-Vietnam War demonstrations to Black Lives Matter protests, have paraded up or down Upper Fifth Avenue.