Upper East Side Historic District, Historical district in Manhattan, United States
The Upper East Side Historic District is a protected historic area in northern Manhattan, stretching along Fifth, Madison, and Park Avenues. It is made up mostly of late 19th and early 20th century residential buildings, including limestone townhouses, classical apartment blocks, and several of New York City's major museums.
The neighborhood began to take its current form in the late 1800s, when wealthy families built large townhouses along the avenues facing Central Park. Over the following decades, taller apartment buildings replaced many of those mansions, but the overall scale and layout of the streets remained largely unchanged.
The stretch of Fifth Avenue that runs along this district is sometimes called Museum Mile because of the many art institutions lined up along it. Walking past these buildings today, visitors can see how private wealth and public culture have long shared the same street.
The district is easy to walk through since the avenues run parallel and each has a different feel, from museum-lined Fifth Avenue to the more residential Park Avenue. Visiting on a weekday morning tends to give a clearer sense of how the neighborhood looks and feels day to day.
Within the larger district, there is a smaller protected zone called the Metropolitan Museum Historic District, designated in 1977 and centered on the blocks near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This makes it one of the few cases in New York City where a museum and its surrounding streetscape are protected together as a single unit.
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