New York Guide
The Upper East Side
The defining characteristic of Manhattan's Upper East Side – a two-square-mile grid that runs from 59th to 96th streets and includes Fifth, Madison, and Park avenues – is wealth. While other neighborhoods have been affected by influxes of immigrant groups and changing artistic trends, this area has remained an enclave of the well-off since they migrated here from downtown in the late nineteenth century. Largely residential, the buildings are all well preserved and the streets clean and relatively safe.
Scattered between the luxurious apartments are some of the city's finest museums – notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art – as well as upscale shops. Recent squeezes in the housing market have produced waves of high-rise construction and brownstone restoration on the avenues and streets east of Lexington Avenue, while farther east, in the middle of the East River, sits Roosevelt Island, an area distinctly different from the rest of the city, and one that many Manhattanites frequently forget is there.