Upper West Side is a neighborhood in Manhattan that lies between Central Park and the Hudson River north of West 59th Street.
The area is primarily a residential and shopping area. Many of its residents work in more commercial areas in Midtown and Lower Manhattan.
The area has a reputation for being home to New York City's liberal cultural and artistic workers, as opposed to the Upper East Side, which is considered home to more conservative commercial and business types.
One of the main attractions is Lincoln Center, the famous performing arts center located on Lincoln Square where you can find notable institutions like the Julliard School and Fordham University.
Upper West Side is also noteworthy for its cuisine. It offers a wide variety of cuisines from a range of cultures and backgrounds.
Moreover, the apartment buildings along Central Park West, facing the park, are some of the most desirable apartments in New York, some of which are famous beyond Manhattan’s boundaries. Among them is “The Dakota.” Located on 72nd Street, The Dakota is known for being the home of a number of celebrities, including John Lennon.
Other famous buildings in the area include the Art Deco Century Apartments, the Majestic, the San Remo, and the Beresford. Riverside Drive features many beautiful pre-war houses and larger buildings, including the graceful curving apartment buildings the Paterno and The Colosseum.
Upper West Side is considered a cultural district and offers the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, a number of performing arts groups and museums.
Upper West Side History
The Upper West Side is a substantial Jewish neighborhood, populated with equally German Jews who moved in at the change of the century, along with Jewish refugees escaping Hitler's Europe in the 1930s. These days the area between 85th Street and 100th Street hosts the greatest community of young Modern Orthodox singles outside of Israel. Nonetheless, the Upper West Side also includes a considerable wide variety of non-Orthodox Jews.
The Bloomingdale district was the site for many long-established charitable institutions: their unbroken parcels of land have given suitably-scaled sites for Columbia University and also the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, as well as for a few vanished attractions, for instance the Schwab Mansion on Riverside Drive, probably the most driven free-standing individual house ever built in Manhattan.
The title Bloomingdale continues to be used in mention of the a part of the Upper West Side, basically the location associated with old Bloomingdale Village, Upper West Side from about 96th Street up to 110th Street and from Riverside Park east to Amsterdam Ave. The triangular block bound by Broadway, West End Avenue, 106th Street and 107th Street, despite the fact that often known as Straus Park (named for Isidor Straus and his wife Ida), has been formally designated Bloomingdale Square in 1907. Upper West Side additionally consists of the Bloomingdale School of Music and Bloomingdale neighborhood department of the New York Public Library. Next to the Bloomingdale neighborhood is a more diverse and less wealthy subsection of the Upper West Side called Manhattan Valley, centered on the downslope of Columbus Avenue and Manhattan Avenue from about 102nd Street up to 110th Street.
