Its north-south avenues include the upper stretch of Broadway, the original spine of this area, which was generally referred to as 'Bloomingdale' until ca 1870, with West End Avenue and Riverside Drive to the west and Amsterdam Avenue, Columbus Avenue and Central Park West towards the park.
In the eighteenth century, the Upper West Side-to-be contained some of colonial New York's most ambitious houses, spaced along the Bloomingdale Road, which was increasingly infilled with smaller, more suburban villas in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Hudson River line railroad right-of-way, granted in the late 1830s, soon ran along the riverbank. Bloomingdale degenerated into ragtag development of squatters' housing, boarding houses (Edgar Allen Poe roomed in a former farmhouse just west of the Bloomingdale Road in the 1840s) and rowdy taverns. The urban development of the neighborhood lagged even while Central Park was being laid out in the 1860s and 70s, then was stymied by the Panic of 1873, until the elevated train's rapid transit was extended up Ninth Avenue (renamed Columbus Avenue in 1890). The Upper West Side was built in a boom from 1885 to 1910.
Among the institutions in the Upper West Side:
Table of contents |
2 External links 3 References |
History
Before its massive redevelopment, the Lincoln Center area was a neighborhood previously called 'San Juan Hill,' the setting for exterior shots in the movie musical 'West Side Story'.
External links
References
Peter Salwen, Upper West Side Story, 1989.
Steven Bermingham, Life at the Dakota.