Yorkville Is Dead

As much as I slavishly devote most of my Manhattan-centric posts to largely downtown doings, as I have pointed out repeatedly, over the years, I actually spent a sizable amount of my life living uptown on the Upper East Side. It’s not a fact that wins me any cool points, for whatever that’s worth, but facts remain facts, even in this perilous era wherein the truth is essentially endangered.

Anyway, from about 1984 to about 1996, I lived in the far-flung, easterly region of the U.E.S. known as Yorkville, perched in a building on the northerly side of East 86th Street between York Avenue and East End Avenue. My roots in this neighborhood, however, actually date back much further, as my grandparents had lived in a building on the same strip in the early 1970s. As such, I spent a large swathe of my toddlerdom in the quiet, leafy confines of Carl Schurz Park (above) on the eastern edge of that part of the island.

A comparatively sleepy enclave, in those days, Yorkville initially seemed like a neighborhood well apart from the hustle of the avenues to its west. I still vividly remember regularly taking the crosstown bus across 86th Street, as a very small child, with my family to go visit my grandparents. I recall a long-since-vanished restaurant on the south side of the street, between Second and Third Avenues called the Bavarian Inn (Yorkville having been a thriving epicenter of New York City's German community for decades, at the time). As the bus would pass by it, I would peer out the window and try to spot the curious signage above its entrance, which featured a strange little man in lederhosen posing -- as one does, I suppose -- with a giant beer and what looked like a goat (see above ... thanks, internet!) I always loved that.

After my grandparents finally forsook the elderly-hostile environs of New York City for Florida, I wouldn’t set foot that deep into Yorkville again until my mother and step-father got divorced in 1984. My mom and I moved out of our then-spot in Carnegie Hill -– also on the Upper East Side -- to the afore-cited new apartment between York and East End Avenues.

I still remember leaving the former for the last time, going to high school -- I would have been starting my junior year, I believe –- and then walking to the new apartment, for the first time, after my last class. For some reason, I recall listening to “Mean Street” by Van Halen on my Walkman as I approached what was to become my new local street corner. Yeah, as if. At its worst, this idyllic little patch of Yorkville was hardly what anyone would consider an urban badlands.

That all said, as laboriously described in this post (one of my favorites), I did manage to encounter an actual bit of trouble, finding myself at odds with members -– or at least satellite supporters of -– an infamous gaggle of neighborhood toughs then mistakenly referred to as The 84th Street Gang. Recently, a former member of that actual organization thoughtfully wrote in to discuss that post, taking the opportunity to inform me that they were actually the 84th Street Bombers. As many kids from that neighborhood –- and surrounding Upper East Side -- can still attest, they were assuredly no joke.

In any case, as mentioned in that earlier post, I somehow managed to elude said gang and got on with my life in Yorkville. At the time, I invariably decried the neighborhood as being too sleepy and “characterless” (not at all true) and routinely lamented having to cross multiple avenue blocks just to make it to the 6 Train to take me to more interesting parts of town. Youthful indignation aside, however, life could have been significantly much worse.

I finally left Yorkville and its surrounding Upper East Side in 1996, repairing to a great studio apartment in Greenwich Village. I’m relatively certain that when I left, I waved goodbye to that idyllic urban backwater with two emphatic middle fingers, and proceeded on with life. In reality, though, I’d grown accustomed, attached and downright fond of Yorkville, quietly assuming it would always remain as I left it, virtually preserved in amber. Untouchable.

As it turned out, however, this was not to be the case.

I was largely spared the upheaval it unleashed on my former turf, but the finishing construction of the long-promised Second Avenue subway line ushered in a new era for Yorkville. While it rendered Second Avenue itself unrecognizable for a long period of years and made life exceptionally difficult for many longstanding small businesses on same, most greeted the arrival of the Second Avenue line as an overdue relief, easing the crowds on the 6 Line two avenues to its west and allowing for comparatively swifter transit between the upper and lower halves of Manhattan’s east side. I cannot authoritatively speak to either of these outcomes, but my daughter, Charlotte -– who regularly heads up to the Upper East Side during the school year -– attests that the 6 train is still jam-packed at certain points of the morning.

Since the arrival of that line, however, much has changed.

A couple of months back, I had a fleeting day off and accompanied my daughter to school, helping her carry some unwieldy fencing gear (she joined a team on a lark, unaware that it would require a sizable amount of heavy lifting). After dropping Charlotte off, I found myself back on the Upper East Side with nothing to do and nowhere to be. As such, I thought I’d take a stroll over to Yorkville and check in on my former home ground.

I started walking east on East 85th Street. My shoulders sore from hauling all that fencing gear (I don’t know how Charlotte does it on her days without assistance), I popped into a backrub/foot-rub joint just across the way from a favorite old, tiny bar of mine (formerly The Gaf, Pedro’s before that and probably six-dozen other concerns, now the backroom of a place called The Daisy). When I lived in this neighborhood in the early 90’s, this plot of East 85th offered some significantly less salubrious services as a strip for some frankly disarming variants of prostitute. Reasonably certain I wasn’t going to be offered a “full service” backrub, I got myself a ten-minute massage, then continued heading east.

Reaching York Avenue, I was pleased to see Arturo’s still in business on the northeast corner of 85th. A perennially unfussy pizzeria, Arturo’s makes perfectly respectable pizza -– nothing to write home about, but way better than the one-dollar variety that’s now too-readily available around town. I stopped in for a nostalgic slice.

It wasn’t until I walked north to check out my old block that I noticed something was seriously afoot.

I’d been aware that a selection of humble rowhouses that formerly stood between my building and the newspaper store that abutted The Mansion Diner on the corner had been razed some time ago, but I hadn’t seen what was coming next, nor had I heard about the demolition and construction slated for the southeast corner of 86th (its former appearance is the row of low buildings at the top of this post).

In the footprint of the rowhouses that formerly stood to my old building’s west, there is now a giant glass and steel tower that completely dwarfs everything around it, shattering the symmetry of that end of the block. Meanwhile, the four-story building pictured above have all been razed for the purposes of erecting something new on the southeast corner.

Obviously, there is rampant (over)development literally all over Manhattan, but to see this comparatively out-of-the-way portion of Yorkville fall prey to same really took the wind out of my sails.

In my old room on 86th, I had a corner window in the back that looked out over a shaft-way adjacent to a courtyard behind those low row-houses. I used to get plenty of light, even in that back room. With that new colossal structure next to it, now, I cannot imagine that is still the case. Meanwhile, the corner window in my mom’s room in the front (which used to give me visual access to the stoop adjacent to the newspaper stand, where the afore-cited 84th Street Bomber-types frequently hung out) must now be completely obstructed by the new building’s assertive façade.

This whole, weepy post is essentially just preamble to a New York Times article that posted on Monday, that pretty much echoed and confirmed all of my worst fears about the fate of Yorkville. Check it out here.

Comments

[ANNE RASO]

I have lived in Yorkville since early 1986 and I have to say that no other thoroughfare looks more like a Jersey mall that 86th between Lex and York. There were still some German places up until the early 90s but now all you have are Schaller & Weber and The Heidelberg. The amount of glass towers is incredible. Where do they find the tenants for all these towers where the condos start at 1.5 million with a huge amount of maintenance and taxes? By the way, I want to say “kudos” to S&W for recently refusing to sell even though they were offered 24 million. No doubt that another ugly steel and glass tower would have been built on their space which has not changed much in 80 or 85 years except for expanding into the next storefront south of their original store.

[Boourns]

I lived on east 95th from my mid teens until just after college. I loved everything about the UES from 96th down to about 79th—this was the mid 90s up to around 9/11-ish... Exponentially safer and civilized with every year, a quiet respite from a downtown that I still only felt comfy dipping my toes into here and there. Good, cheap food still abounded. Beautiful blocks to take walks down in the middle of the night listening to my discman. Pretty preppy girls who would never give me the time of day but I was always inspired to try for their attention. No fucking cell phones. I remember that time and area fondly.

I had no idea back then that the gradual stability coming to NYC would open the floodgates for the robber-barons of the world financial system to rape it to its core. Now, when I walk around the UES, I recognize very little. As the previous poster mentioned, 86th looks like some sort of suburban shopping strip plopped into Manhattan. Little mom and pop businesses that thrived for decades now sit as vacant, dark pock marks on entire blocks of high rent blight. Places that served entire generations like the Ray's on 2nd and 95th as providers of cheap sustenance and a place to just *be* for a little while—whether teenager or elderly or in-between—get ripped out seemingly overnight, replaced by vacant space that will undoubtedly rotate between overwhelmed and indebted tenants for decades to come.

Everything is cyclical, so I'm sure at some point Manhattan will become scorched commercial Earth and individualism and the middle class will thrive again within its confines. But I don't see that happening in our lifetimes. At least I have my memories.