Living On East End Avenue
IF YOU'RE THINKING OF LIVING IN EAST END AVENUE
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June 10, 1984
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East End Avenue is the spine of a
small, almost private residential
enclave that is so far off the beaten tourist path that few visitors to Manhattan ever stumble upon it and even many New Yorkers never set foot in it. The avenue that gives the neighborhood its name and cachet parallels the East River from 79th to 90th Streets and has no bakery, no bus line, no post office and only one bank, one restaurant, one supermarket and one dry cleaner.
What it does have is an abundance of luxurious living spaces, many with unobstructed river views, in some of the city's most selective buildings, including the most selective of all, Gracie Mansion, where a would-be tenant must be elected Mayor of New York to move in.
Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward lives nearby, as do Gloria Vanderbilt, Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff, Benno Schmidt, Osborn Elliott and a host of well-connected New Yorkers whose names are known only to other well-connected New Yorkers.
Though the East End name applies properly only to the eleven blocks of the avenue, the neighborhood also includes Gracie Square and Gracie Terrace (the easternmost blocks of 84th and 82d Streets) and the crosstown blocks running west to York Avenue.
In all, the enclave encompasses only two dozen square blocks, with most of the local shopping and services on York Avenue and tall apartment houses lining East End Avenue and 79th and 86th Streets. Crosstown buses on those two streets provide the main public transportation access to the neighborhood. Cruising cabs are hard to find at any hour and the nearest subway, the Lexington Avenue IRT, stops a good half-mile away at 77th and 86th Streets.
For residents, the remoteness is a tradeoff for privacy and quiet. Traffic noises from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive are muffled since its route through the area is mostly underground along the river. Boat whistles are heard more often than police sirens. ''It's almost as if you are living on a dead-end street,'' said Elizabeth Hagen, who has lived on East End Avenue for 20 years.
Some residents, among them Brewster Ives, the 80-year-old real-estate broker, can remember when residents could walk down to the river. Now they view it from a walkway built over the drive, which was completed in 1942.
''Renovating Gracie Mansion was the first real improvement to the area,'' Mr. Ives recalled. ''There was a residential colony called Henderson Place where the town houses are now. There was a hospital. The Good Shepherd Home for the Aging was there at 89th Street. Robert Moses, the Commissioner of Parks who designed the F.D.R. Drive, lived at 7 Gracie Square. It became a fashionable avenue when the apartments were built.''
According to Christopher Gray, the architectural historian, that transition began in the 1920's, when ''Park Avenue- type buildings with elevators and doormen'' began going up. The first, he said, were 520 and 530 East 86th Street, erected by Vincent Astor, who later built several others nearby. The new character of the area was confirmed by a rezoning in 1928 that limited development of East End Avenue below 84th Street to residential uses.
Among the early believers in the future of the avenue was Maria Bowen Chapin, founder of the Chapin School, who moved her growing academy for girls to a Georgian-style building she erected at the 84th Street corner in 1928. Brearley, another independent girls' school, followed a year later to a riverfront site on 83d Street. Both remain neighborhood anchors.
A long-time resident who recalls that era is Louis Jones, proprietor of the Park View Market grocery at 83d Street opened by his father in 1889. He recalls when many of the Irish, English and German working-class families who had lived in the neighborhood since the 1890's began moving out to Queens in the 1920's.
For a while, he said, the neighborhood died. ''Then the building started - 1 East End, 25 East End, 1 Gracie Square, 10 Gracie Square, 520 East 86th Street, 120 and 130 East End - until 1929 and the stock-market crash.''
Residential construction resumed after World War II and the demolition of the Third Avenue elevated in 1954 brought a wave of redevelopment throughout the Upper East Side. Hundreds of tenements were demolished and new high-rise apartment houses went up. East End Avenue got many tall new buildings at that time, and only a shortage of clear building sites has prevented further redevelopment.
The newest apartments are in Asten House, a cooperative completed last year at 515 East 79th Street, and 2 East End Avenue, a co-op created out of a remodeled warehouse in 1979.
There are 33 cooperative buildings in the area and all are expensive. One-bedroom apartments begin at about $130,000, according to Edith Sacks, vice president and director of sales for J. I. Sopher & Company, and prices in excess of $1 million are not unusual for three-bedroom units. The owner of one co-op with a grand library overlooking the river recently listed the apartment for $7 million.
Rentals also are expensive, ranging upward from $1,000 for a studio, according to J. I. Sopher, but there also are some hard-to-get rent-regulated tenements with more moderate rents. Town houses range upwards from $750,000.
Many residents send their children to Chapin, Brearley and other private schools scattered throughout the Upper East Side. Others choose among well- thought-of public schools nearby - P.S. 158 at 78th and York; P.S. 190 on 82d between First and Second Avenues; Wagner Junior High School between Second and Third on 76th, and the Hunter College Campus Schools at 94th and Park Avenue, to which students are admitted by competitive examination.
The neighborhood's major recreational resource is Carl Schurz Park, a 14.9-acre tract of greenery and paved playground that runs along the river from 84th to 90th Streets. Within it, behind a fence to insure the Mayor's privacy, is Gracie Mansion, built as a country seat by Archibald Gracie in 1799, enlarged by him in 1811 and enlarged again by the city in 1966.
On fine spring and summer weekends, hundreds of sun-seekers pour into the park and take perches along its riverfront promenade to watch the passing parade of tugboats, tankers, yachts and cabin cruisers. Despite crowds of strollers and sitters who often fill every bench, a day in the park is for many as refreshing as day in the country. The promenade extends to the Queensboro Bridge and is a jogger's haven.
Opposite the park, on the 86th to 87th Street blockfront, are 24 small Queen Anne style houses, the remnant of an enclave of 32 built in 1881, that now constitute the Henderson Place Historic District.
When residents want to dine out near home, they walk to York Avenue (where most of the restaurants have sidewalk tables in the summer) and choose among Francesco's, Arturo's, Gold Medal 83, Wilkinson's Seafood Cafe and other dining places or walk farther west along 86th Street to the bustling heart of Yorkville near Third Avenue, where there are German restaurants such as Ideal, specializing in potato pancakes, and the pre-World War II Cafe Geiger.
There is a bus line on York that runs as far south as 59th Street and links the neighborhood to the shopping hub around Bloomingdale's. And there is express bus service to Wall Street from 79th and York. It costs $2.50 each way.
Among the entertainments in the neighborhood are Mayor-watching and its concomitant, watching the celebrities who visit the Mayor.
Beatrice Morse, who lives on 85th Street, often walks her dog past Gracie Mansion to see who may be calling, and recently saw Zhao Ziyang, the Prime Minister of China. ''It's comforting to know Gracie Mansion is here,'' she said. ''I walk the dog from 1 to 2 in the morning and feel safe.''
Traffic Away From Their Doors
East End Avenue residents usually are hardly aware of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive because it carries cars through the community on a viaduct stretching from 79th to 90th Streets that is hidden under Carl Schurz Park and Gracie Mansion. But when they learned that the city was planning to rebuild the viaduct to improve traffic flow and decrease the flooding that follows heavy rains, they took alarm.
They protested a proposal by the city to reroute traffic onto East End Avenue while the drive was repaired, fearing accidents and traffic jams on the normally quiet thoroughfare, and came up with an alternate plan. Community Board 8, which covers East End Avenue and York Avenue, proposed that the drive be repaired while it remains in use by having the work done from the river and closing only one lane at a time during off-peak hours.
According to the city's Department of Transportation, East End Avenue is no longer being considered as a detour and other proposals to renovate the drive are being discussed. The Mayor already has approved a budget to repair pumping stations along the viaduct, so diverting traffic onto East End will not be necessary.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/10/realestate/if-youre-thinking-of-living-in-east-end-avenue.html
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