Development , the official residence of the
Mayor of New York City and the city's last remaining
East River villa 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 (
Third Avenue) 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. 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 (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 , a designated
New York City landmark, as seen from
Madison Avenue on
85th Street 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. 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==