Upper East Side

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The Upper East Side is a neighborhood in Manhattan in New York City, between Central Park and the East River. The Upper East Side lies within an area bounded by 57th Street to 96th Street, and the East River to Fifth Avenue-Central Park. Once known as the Silk Stocking District, it is one of the most affluent neighborhoods in New York City.

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 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 in the 50s.

Before the Park Avenue railroad cut 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.

Historically, 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.

Landmark Buildings and Distinguished Addresses

The Lucida, 151 East 85th Street
Georgica at 305 East 85th Street
205 East 59th Street, Lenox Hill
Manhattan House Condo, 200 East 66th Street
Trump Tower Condo, 721 Fifth Avenue
One Beacon Court (the Bloomberg Building) 151 East 58th Street
The Rio Condo, East 65th Street
The Savoy Condo, 200 East 61st Street
530 Park Avenue
 

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_East_Side