The neighborhood is named for the hill that "stood at what became 70th Street and
Park Avenue." who owned about of land "at the five-mile (8 km) stone", reaching from Fifth to Fourth (now Park) Avenues and from East
74th to 68th Streets. For the sum of $6,420 ($ in current dollar terms) or $6,920 ($) According to one source, "Thereafter these two tracts were known as the 'Lenox Farm.'" The tenant farmhouse stood on the rise of ground between Fifth and Madison avenues and 70th and 71st Streets, which would have been the hill, if the property had ever been called "Lenox Hill." The railroad right-of-way of the
New York & Harlem Railroad passed along the east boundary of the property.
Robert Lenox's son
James Lenox divided most of the farm into blocks of building lots and sold them during the 1860s and 1870s; he also donated land for the
Union Theological Seminary along the railroad right-of-way, between 69th and 70th Streets, and just north of it a full square block between Madison and Fourth Avenue, 70th and 71st streets, for the Presbyterian Hospital, which occupied seven somewhat austere structures on the plot; He built the
Lenox Library on a full block-front of Fifth Avenue, now the site of the
Frick Collection. ==Structures==