The Upper East Side

Upper East Side residents enjoy a truly cosmopolitan lifestyle with easy access to the best New York offers. There is no shortage of Art and culture here. Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile, is home to important institutions including the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, the Frick Collection, Cooper Hewitt, the Jewish Museum and more. It's a glorious promenade of high culture along the eastern border of Central Park. It is the definition of the quintessential ‘uptown’ New York neighborhood, with an extraordinary array of world class shopping, fine dining, and entertainment options. Some of the best hospitals in the country may be found here too.

 

It’s a very large area with many smaller distinct enclaves like Sutton, Park Avenue, Lennox Hill, Carnegie Hill, and Yorkville. With a richly textured architectural tapestry of stately townhouses, elegant pre-war buildings, and luxurious high-rise condominiums. The street names of Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue are indeed metaphors for luxury living. They are lined with historic mansions and landmarked buildings, showcasing the neighborhood's more affluent history, with fashionable Madison Avenue as a boutique shopping street. Many of the coop buildings here set a high bar on financial requirements. The Upper East Side has over 120 individually designated landmark buildings scattered throughout the neighborhood, with no less than seven historic districts near its eastern border with Central Park. Amidst the historic buildings, modern luxury condominium developments have risen, offering contemporary living spaces, world-class amenities , views of Central Park and/or the East River. The townhouses in this part of town are often extra-wide in the Neo-Renaissance and Beaux-Arts styles with grand facades and classical ornamentation reflecting the opulence of the Gilded Age period. However for the rest of us, the Upper East Side also has homes for sale which are some of the most competitively priced in the city closer to the East River.

 

The area east of Third Avenue has benefited in value and convenience greatly from the addition of the Second Avenue Subway providing improved transportation to all parts of the city. We think it's an area where good values in Manhattan apartments can be found too. The iconic white buildings with projecting balconies, oversized windows, staffed with doormen in window-walled lobbies, can be found up and down the East Side avenues. They are exemplified by architect Gordon Bundshat’s Manhattan House at 200 E 68th Street, designed in the International Style, rejecting ornamentation and stone masonry in favor of essential geometry and simplicity, using modern materials like steel, glass, and shiny white ceramic brick. Opening in 1950, it marked a radical departure from the past. Today this style of multi-family dwelling can be found across NYC. Most of these apartment houses were first developed as rental properties, then converted to apartment ownership starting in the 1970s. There tends to be a higher supply of smaller units here; and as a result pricing can be more competitive for first-time buyers. The neighborhood ends at the East River in the low-key enclaves of sleepier Sutton and Yorkville, just north of Beekman. Just beyond East End Avenue, residents benefit from the East River Esplanade and scenic Carl Schurz Park, with the Mayor’s official residence of Gracie Mansion nestled within the park at 88th Street. You’ll also find a New York City Water Taxi dock at 90th Street as a novel means of transportation, up and down the East River. It is bounded approximately by 96th Street to the north, the East River to the east, 59th Street to the south, and Central Park and Fifth Avenue to the west.