A Walking Tour of the Upper West Side: The Development of an Early NYC Suburb

 

While it’s very much part of the city today, a great many of the buildings on the Upper West Side, among them gorgeous brownstones and beaux arts apartment-hotels, were built when the area was a residential suburb. As time went on and the city grew the character of the neighborhood would evolve to accommodate and incorporate the urban sprawl of the uptown growth of the city. This walking tour makes sense of the streets in the area today, using images to show what the streets originally looked in their first transformation from farmland, how the streetscapes changed with buildings being replaced or altered, and how the different avenues of the Upper West Side developed to the beat of their own drum.