by Uppereast.com Staff
The Upper East Side is all about money. The greed and gold of old New York high society reside in the mansions of Fifth and Park Avenues. Elderly ladies and young trust-funders spend their (ample) spare change in Madison Avenue's chi-chi boutiques; rich businessmen take advantage of tax write-offs to fund the area's cultural institutions (which their families probably founded), including the museums and societies of Museum Mile and beyond. Once Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux had wrenched the wondrous Central Park out of swampland, New York society felt ready to move north. In the mid-1800s the super rich had built mansions along Fifth Avenue. By the beginning of this century, the merely rich had warmed to the (at first outrageous) idea of living in apartment buildings, provided they were near the park. Many grand examples of these were built along Park Avenue and the streets joining it to Fifth. Amid the apartments sprang up the results of tycoons' philanthropic gestures-the many art collections, museums and cultural institutes that attract most visitors to the area.
Museum Mile is actually a promotional organization rather than a geographical description, but since most of the museums along Fifth Avenue are members, it is an apt name. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, set in Central Park between 80th and 84th Streets, is the grandest of them all. Walking north from the steps of The Met, you reach the stunning spiral design of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum at 88th Street; the National Academy of Design at 89th; the Cooper-Hewitt Museum - set in Andrew Carnegie's mansion - at 91st; The Jewish Museum at 92nd; and the International Center of Photography at 94th.The brick fortress facade at 94th and Madison is what's left of the old Squadron A Armory. Just off Fifth Avenue at 97th Street are the onion domes and rich ornamentation of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Nicholas, and a little farther north are the Museum of the City of New York and El Museo del Barrio, at 103rd and 104th Streets, respectively.
There's another clump of museums farther south and east of Central Park. The Frick Collection, an art-filled mansion, faces the park at 70th Street. A few blocks south is the Society of Illustrators. At Madison and 75th Street is the Whitney Museum of American Art, home of the often controversial Whitney Biennial.
The wealth concentrated in this area has also been used to found societies promoting interest in the language and culture of foreign lands. Rockefeller's Asia Society is on Park Avenue at 70th Street. Nearby are the China Institute in America and the Americas Society, dedicated to the nations of South and Central America. On Fifth Avenue is the Ukrainian Institute (at 79th), the German Cultural Center (at 83rd) and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (at 86th).
Madison Avenue used to symbolize the advertising industry. Now it's also synonymous with ultra-expensive shopping: Don't even think about buying here unless you have serious loot. Established designers - Yves Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Missoni, Geoffrey Beene et al. - all have pricey boutiques here. (If you find the atmosphere of the Avenue too overbearing, you could always head to Bloomingdale's, that frantic, glitzy supermarket of high fashion.) Many commercial art galleries abound here too, including the Knoedler Gallery and Hirschl & Adler Modern. Established artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella prefer to show here rather than downtown in Soho's circus.
At 66th Street and Park Avenue is the Seventh Regiment Armory, whose interiors were designed and furnished by Louis Comfort Tiffany, assisted by a young Stanford White. It now houses the Winter Antiques show, among other events. From Lexington to the East River the aura is less grand. The Abigail Adams Smith Museum (421 E 61st St near First Ave) is a lovely old coach house dating from 1799 and now operated as a museum by the Colonial Dames of America. It was once part of a farm owned by the daughter and son-in-law of John Adams, the second American president.
Kim Novak, Montgomery Clift, Tallulah Bankhead and Eleanor Roosevelt all lived a little bit farther west, in the tree-lined streets of three and four-story brownstones known as the Treadwell Farm Historic District, at 61st and 62nd Streets between Second and Third Avenues.
The central building of Rockefeller University from 64th to 68th Streets, on a bluff overlooking FDR Drive-is listed as a national historic landmark. The Founders' Hall dates from 1903, the year the university was established as a medical research center. With the guard's permission, you may walk around the campus. Look out for the President's House and the domed Caspary Auditorium. Medical institutions, including the New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center, into which the city's oldest hospital is incorporated, dominate the next few blocks of York Avenue.