P. Lorillard Tobacco factory, 1927.

The recorded history of Yorkville begins in the 17th century when it was a tiny hamlet on the Boston Post Road, which ran northward from New York, which at the time only occupied the tip of Manhattan. It was long the province of farmers and wealthy landowners, including merchant Archibald Gracie, whose riverfront estate is now the official residence of New York’s mayor. In the 19th century, the area slowly began its transformation into the urban neighborhood we see today. Like most such transformations in New York, these changes were largely propelled by transportation improvements. In 1834, the New York & Harlem Railroad (later the New York Central) opened a station at 86th Street and Park Avenue, and in the 1850s, horsecar lines were completed along Second and Third Avenues. This opened the neighborhood to low-density residential development, a few remnants of which remain, including 412 East 85th Street. After two major economic depressions (in 1857 and 1873) and the Civil War, the area was finally primed for a major wave of construction in the late 1870s with the arrival of mass transit. The Third Avenue elevated train was completed in 1877-78, and the Second Avenue elevated in 1879-80. In a relatively short period, the Upper East Side was entirely built up, and the elevated trains segregated the area along ethnic and economic lines. West of Third Avenue, wealthy homeowners established the city’s most exclusive neighborhood, while east of Third Avenue became a thriving immigrant community (already known as Yorkville by the 1860s), which in many ways was a second-generation immigrant neighborhood—a place that recent arrivals aspired to live after filtering through the older, more congested downtown districts like the Lower East Side. Its housing stock was largely composed of tenements, but they were brand new and built after the Tenement Law of 1879 (the “Old Law”), so were subject to improvements. There were abundant employment opportunities, notably in the neighborhood’s breweries and at the Steinway piano factory in Queens, which was a short ferry ride away from the foot of East 92nd Street. The largest and perhaps most visible immigrant group in Yorkville was the Germans. Already an established presence in New York following a wave of immigration in the 1840s, they began moving uptown from their Lower East Side settlement, Kleindeutschland (Little Germany) to Yorkville, which by the turn of the century had become New York’s foremost German neighborhood. They brought with them many of their institutions, including churches and benevolent organizations, as well as cultural and commercial enterprises, such as beer halls and music societies. East 86th Street became the community’s main artery. Other groups had micro-neighborhoods in Yorkville, as well. Czechs began moving to the area in the 1880s and settled mostly between 71st and 75th Streets. Hungarians arrived around the turn of the 20th century on East 79th Street, though their institutions can be found throughout the neighborhood. Yorkville’s heyday as a distinct immigrant community was relatively short-lived. German immigration to New York peaked in 1882, and by the early 20th century, Yorkville’s Germans were already moving farther afield, using the recently built subway to access newer, more affordable neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. At the same time, anti-German sentiment during World War I led many Germans to downplay overt displays of national heritage. The Second Avenue and Third Avenue elevated trains were demolished in the 1940s and 1950s, respectively, removing one of the major boundaries between Yorkville and the rest of the Upper East Side. The neighborhood has seen its share of redevelopment since then, with large apartment buildings towering over the tenements. The recent opening of the Second Avenue subway re-established one of the area’s transit links, but may also put additional pressure on Yorkville’s surviving historic resources.

Bohemian National Hall ARCHITECT: William C. Frohne DATE: 1895-97 STYLE: Renaissance Revival Bohemian National Hall (Narodni Budova) is a rare survivor of the social halls built in the nineteenth century for New York City’s immigrant ethnic communities. Constructed in two phases in 1895 and 1897, it replaced an earlier National Hall on East 5th Street, which had served the Czech and Slovak population living in the Tompkins Square area of the Lower East Side. The five-story building was designed by William C. Frohne in the Renaissance Revival style. Richly ornamented, it is faced in buff Roman brick, stone, and terra cotta. Among its prominent features are a projecting entrance porch with paired granite columns and a two-story arcade with Ionic columns resting on lion’s-head bases.

View east from the southwest corner of First Avenue and East 70th Street, ca. 1935. The large tower of the Rockefeller Institute seen in the distance still stands east of York between 70th and 71st Streets. Today it is obscured from this view by the large Hemlsey Medical Tower.

New York Hospital under construction, 1940. The original New York Hospital was founded in 1771 by Edinburgh graduate Samuel Bard in lower Manhattan. The hospital moved a number of times in the ensuing centuries until it landed at its current location in 1932 (it had become affiliated with Cornell University a few years earlier in 1927).

501-7 East 71st Street, at N.E. corner of York Avenue. In the foreground is the excavation for the Cornell Medical College-New York Hospital, July 31, 1930.

York Avenue - 74th Street, looking northwest, 1934. This corner of mostly empty storefronts and apartments on the upper floors would not survive long after this photograph was taken. In 1939 a Norman Gothic style church was erected on this corner for a congregation with a long New York City history. The Church of the Epiphany was established in 1833 as the first church of the New York Protestant Episcopal City Mission Society. The parish, which began in a small room on the Lower East Side, had their first church building at 130 Stanton Street. Through various moved and mergers with other parishes the church had services in locations on 47th and 50th Streets, as well as Lexington Avenue. The current church building was constructed around the time that the nearby hospital facilities were also being built. The architect of the church, Marion Sims Wyeth of the firm Wyeth & King, is perhaps currently (2017) best known as the architect of Mar-a-Logo. This Florida mansion built by socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post as a winter retreat for presidents was purchased in 1985 by Donald Trump and has been used in 2017 by the 45th president.

Webster Branch, November 20, 1928. Constructed in 1906 to the designs of the architectural firm of Babb, Cook & Willard, the Webster Branch of the New York Public Library became an important community hub for the neighborhood's large Czech population. The library provided Czech newspapers and magazines, children’s story hours in Czech, a location for Bohemian Club meetings, and exhibition space for cultural displays.

Three-story frame structures, southwest corner of 1st Avenue and 75th Street, 1935. Charles Kosches was a furniture store that had locations uptown as well as on 14th Street and st Avenue.

Public School 158, 1920. This large school which fronts York Avenue from 77th to 78th Streets opened on Jan. 9, 1899. For more than four years, a school trustee, W. Horithal, had been advocating for a school building to education the rapidly growing population of immigrant children in the neighborhood. Today the school is named for Bayard Taylor, an American poet, literary critic, translator, travel author, and diplomat.

New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center (now NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center), ca. 1931. The view is from Roosevelt Island, then known as Welfare Island.

The four buildings of the former Shively Sanitary Tenements (a.k.a.East River Homes, Vanderbilt Model Tenements); 1911. Built in 1910-11, the Shively Sanitary Tenements, named for Dr. Henry Shively, were an experiment in housing for sufferers of tuberculosis and their families. Shively, architect Henry Atterbury Smith, and benefactor Anne Harriman Vanderbilt envisioned a housing development where poor tuberculosis patients could receive treatment in an environment replete with fresh air and sunlight — without being quarantined from their non-infected families. Smith's design prioritized features encouraging exposure to fresh air: open stairways, courtyards, rooftop recreation areas, and triple-hung windows were all thought to confer therapeutic benefits. The trustees were ultimately unable to provide meaningful help to poor New Yorkers with tuberculosis, though not for any failure of design or treatment — the apartments were simply too expensive for the communities they were intended to serve. In 1923, the trust governing the project was dissolved and the buildings sold for residential use. In 1986, the residential units were again turned over for condo conversion, with the new development dubbed the Cherokee apartments, after neighboring Cherokee Place.

The Memorial Hospital (now part of Memorial Sloan Kettering) moved to its new location following a donation of land and millions of dollars from John D. Rockefeller Jr. amongst others. Officially reopening in 1939, the Memorial Hospital was one of the city's leading cancer hospitals.

1314-1318-1322 York Avenue (Avenue A), at and adjoining northeast corner of 70th Street, 1928. No. 1314 (at corner) was built around 1905 on the site of the Davis Moulding Mill (1895). No. 1322 (at left) was built around 1895, as a cigar factory, and circa 1916 by the American Tobacco Company. These buildings were demolished soon after this photograph was taken in 1928. They were replaced by a building for the New York Hospital and Cornell Medical School, which included residences for nurses. Today that structure is called the Hemsley Medical Tower and is a residence for families of patients at New York -Presbyterian Hospital.

Court of the First Model Tenements in New York City, 1936 At the time of the 1879 Tenement House Act, which first regulated the City’s low-income housing, Mayor Edward Cooper invited a group of prominent businessmen to form the Improved Dwelling Association. The Association invested $300,000 in the first model tenement and by law was limited to a five percent return on its investment. Constructed in 1882, the tenement was laid out along the perimeter of First and Second Avenues and 71st and 72nd Streets, with an open courtyard in the center admitting light and air. Fifty years later, Abbott documented the courtyard, which had become a communal laundry line: ropes with pulleys led from apartments to five-story poles embedded in concrete. She later recalled that winter day: the laundry was frozen stiff, and the children were huddled together, too cold to move. In the 1960s, the tenement was replaced with a full-block, white brick apartment building.

Seen in this undated photograph, the First Hungarian (Magyar) Reformed Church at East 69th Street, has a distinguished history, architect, and design. Originally established on the Lower East Side in 1895, the congregation commissioned, in 1914, Hungarian-American architect Emery Roth to design their new church in Yorkville. Roth was born in Hungary and immigrated to the United States as a child. He opened a New York City office in 1895, and over the next forty years, he designed some of the most iconic apartment houses in New York City in a variety of styles. The First Hungarian Reformed Church was the architect’s only ecclesiastical building, and it displays a Hungarian vernacular style that incorporates Art Nouveau motifs. The structure was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000 and as a New York City individual landmark in 2019.

The Holy Trinity Cathedral, at 319 East 74th Street, was constructed in 1932 in the Neo-Byzantine style. Eleanor Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the cathedral in 1931, and today the church serves as the National Cathedral of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in America. Originally established in 1891 on the West Side, Holy Trinity was the first Greek Orthodox church in New York City. But that’s not the only first on the block. The Upper East Side is so dense with extraordinary ecclesiastical structures that this stretch of East 74th Street is also home to Jan Hus Presbyterian Church, (visible further up the street in this photograph) at 351 East 74th Street. Jan Hus is the oldest Czech Presbyterian Congregation in the United States. Originally founded in 1877 to serve a variety of small Czech communities worshiping around the city, the parish grew to become the First Evangelical Bohemian Presbyterian Church. The building at East 74th Street was constructed in 1888 by renowned architect R.H. Robertson in a Bohemian Gothic Revival Style with features “that harks back to Prague,” embracing the cultural roots of its congregation. The church went on to build an even greater sense of community around Czech identity when it constructed the Neighborhood House next door in 1915. The house became a center for Czech music, art, and dance, and offered social services like job training, athletic clubs, and language classes. Later it also offered a number of theatrical shows that would serve as early training grounds for Barbra Streisand, Robin Williams, and Jerry Seinfeld. Most recently the Neighborhood House has provided outreach and advocacy for the homeless In 2019 the congregation sold its East 74th Street building and purchased a new property on First Avenue where they hope to create an Urban Outreach Center comprised of a pantry, showers, charging stations, and more to serve the community. The building at East 74th Street was acquired by the Church of Epiphany, which is adapting the sanctuary and community house for continuing us