West End Avenue in this part of the neighborhood is made up of fabulous brownstones and brilliant old apartment buildings with marble foyers. Many of them are pre-war and are generally co-op apartments. At one time some of these buildings were mansions lived in by one family, or large apartments with servants quarters. Some units still adorn the floor bell that would be located under the dining room table so that the host could ring the servants to bring in the next course. Local residents have lived in this neighborhood for most of their lives and don’t have any intentions on leaving it. The neighborhood is peaceful, serene and very close to mass transit and midtown.

Just one block west of West End Avenue is the coveted Riverside Drive. Facing the Hudson River with spectacular views of sunsets and passing sailboats, Riverside Drive apartments have been sought after for over a century. Even though the building inventory here is not quite as impressive as many of the best limestone palazzos on Fifth Avenue or Central Park West, the views of Riverside Park, the Hudson River and the New Jersey skyline are fabulous and they are the main reason why people want to live in this area. The neighborhood is relatively quiet in comparison with the rest of the city. Its park, which stretches from low 60s to 120th Street gives in a nice shelter from the West Side Highway traffic. It is also the best place to walk your dog or if you want to meet somewhere suitable for coffee. The places to go for shopping and dining are Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway only one or two blocks in any direction.

Although there are many pockets of elegance throughout the city, only the Upper West Side has two adjacent avenues of great and almost uninterrupted residential distinction: Riverside Drive and West End Avenue.

While Riverside Drive’s building inventory is not quite as impressive as many of the best limestone palazzos on Fifth Avenue, its views of Riverside Park, the Hudson River and the New Jersey skyline are fabulous and, some observers think, more interesting.

While West End Avenue is not as broad as Park Avenue and does not have its center landscaped mall, it has a more robust architectural character with fewer postwar buildings and tall towers interrupting its often intricate facades and fairly consistent cornice line, respectively.

Moreover, Riverside Drive is relatively quiet in comparison with the often raucous parades that routinely ply their way up Fifth Avenue in pleasant weather and both Riverside Drive and West End Avenue have far less traffic than Fifth and Park Avenues.

Another important consideration is that Riverside Drive is the only major residential avenue in uptown Manhattan that is winding, which adds considerable visual interest.

Such a scorecard leads one to wonder why Riverside Drive and West End Avenue did not become more desirable and closer in valuations to their Upper East Side counterparts.

Part of the answer, of course, is that many of the Fifth and Park Avenue buildings were a bit more upscale in their layouts and finishings since the East Side had been established earlier as a luxury apartment enclave. Another reason is that Madison Avenue is considerably more fashionable than Broadway and another is that the Midtown business district is a bit closer.

Perhaps more importantly, the Depression interrupted the phenomenal development of the Upper West Side before all of Broadway could be redeveloped and, although the Columbus Avenue Elevated was taken down just before World War II, an event that might have led to the redevelopment of the tenement blocks along the avenue, the demographics of the Upper West Side changed dramatically after the war. A change in city regulations, initiated in anticipation of an influx of people coming to the World’s Fair in 1939 and 1940, encouraged the proliferation of "Single-Room Occupancy" buildings that soon witnessed the widespread conversion of many brownstones and townhouses as well as apartment buildings to rooming houses that were quickly filled by many new Hispanic immigrants. The decline of the Upper West Side was quite swift and it was the setting for the famous musical, "West Side Story," about street gangs in the mid-1950’s at which time several very large urban renewal plans for the area were initiated.

In the early 1960’s, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts began to be completed as part of one of the larger urban renewal plans, but its impact on the surrounding areas was relatively slow to take effect. By the late 1990’s, however, the Lincoln Center district had finally begun to come into its own, so much so, in fact, that it had become the city’s most vibrant neighborhood.

In late 1998 two other major projects were begun that would greatly enhance the desirability of the Upper West Side: after a 14-year controversy, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority was selecting a developer for a major mixed-use redevelopment of the New York Coliseum site at Columbus Circle, the midtown gateway to the Upper West Side; and Donald Trump was in construction on the first, northern section of his vast Riverside South project that would eventually extend Riverside Park and Riverside Drive southward to 60th Street from 70th Street.

"Trump City" as the project was known initially had originally been designed by Helmut Jahn, the flamboyant, high-tech architect from Chicago, to include the world’s tallest building, but, given the Upper West Side community’s strong reaction to earlier plans to redevelop the Coliseum with a very tall building that would have cast some shadows on Central Park, Trump changed his plan and his architect. His new architect, Alexander Cooper, who had written many of the guidelines for the development of Battery Park City and the redevelopment of Times Square, came out with a design that was modeled in large part of the famous multi-towered apartment buildings of Central Park West and the serpentine building lines of Riverside Drive to the north.

Riverside South will dramatically alter the area’s skyline as seen from the Hudson River, blocking out many views of the sprawling Lincoln Towers complex, the major residential component of the large Lincoln Square urban renewal project. As such, moreover, it will bring a new focus to Riverside Drive and Riverside Park as well as West End Avenue.

While many will undoubtedly be drawn to the new construction, it is likely that many will also discover the merits of the smaller, pre-war buildings to the north on Riverside Drive and West End Avenue, especially since those will be much closer to Broadway and its transportation and retail activity whereas Riverside South will be separated from Lincoln Center by numerous large housing projects.

Riverside South, of course, will take many years to complete and the development of the Riverside Park extension has not been resolved because the Federal Government went ahead with an expensive repair of the elevated West Side Highway that runs between the new Trump Buildings and the Hudson River and which many community planners hoped will be depressed or tunneled beneath a landscaped park.

Riverside Park was the creation of Frederick Law Olmsted, who started planning it in 1873. The park had been proposed by William R. Martin in 1865 and Riverside Drive was planned in 1870. Olmsted merged plans for both and completed the design in 1888, although the park was not finished until 1910. Olmsted had been the designer with Calvert Vaux of Central Park and his design of Riverside Park was naturalistic and picturesque and another great success. In 1937, Robert Moses’s West Side Improvement Plan added 132 acres of parkland to Riverside Park by putting the Henry Hudson Parkway and landfill and covering over the freight train tracks. The expanded park was designed by Clifton Lloyd who also designed the wide, straight walkway in the park and the paths and playgrounds along the river.

The initial development consisted of very attractive single-family homes. The first two buildings, Nos. 1 and 3 Riverside Drive, in fact, the Frederick C. Prentiss and John S. Sutphen Jr. residences, originally, both designed by C.P.H. Gilbert, give some indication of the high quality of such homes as do several designed and developed in the 1890’s by Clarence F. True at Nos. 40-46, 74-77 and 105-10.7.

The most magnificent home, however, has been lost and had belonged to Charles M. Schwab, a partner of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, whose Fifth Avenue mansion between 90th and 91st Street, is now the National Museum of Design. Carnegie is said to have remarked that Schwab’s house made his own seem "like a shack." The property was formerly the site of the New York Orphan Asylum and had been purchased by Jacob Schiff, the financier, but he sold it to Schwab when he could not convince his wife to move from the East Side, according to Peter Salwen, the author of "Upper West Side Story, A History and Guide," (Abbeville Press, 1989).

In their book, "The A.I.A. Guide to New York City, Third Edition," (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), Elliot Willensky and Norval White said that the Schwab House was "A rare Gallic composition of pinnacles, spires, chimneys, and steeply sloping roofs" and that "Consciously seeking to bring the joys of the French Chateaux to the banks of the Hudson, architect Maurice Hebert adapted the facades of three -Blois, Chenonceaux and Azay-le-Rideau - to the needs" of Schwab. The full-block mansion, which had extensive gardens, was built in 1906. Schwab died in 1939 and the mansion was demolished in 1948 after Mayor LaGuardia turned it down as a gift to the city as a Mayor’s Residence and the site was redeveloped with a massive, red-brick apartment house.

One of the greatest and most prominent apartment developments is directly across from the start of Riverside Drive. It is the Chatsworth, whose addresses are 340 and 344 West 72nd Street and 351 West 71st Street, all with attractive limestone decoration. The Chatsworth, designed by John E. Sharsmith and completed in 1904, originally had a conservatory, a café, a rooftop sun parlor, a barbershop, a beauty salon and electric bus service to Central Park. One of its residents was Irving Berlin, the songwriter. The Clarendon at 137 Riverside Drive at 86th Street was for many years the home of William Randolph Hearst who occupied a 30-room triplex at the top of this 1903 building designed by Charles Birge. Hearst, the fabled publisher and even more legendary art collector, wanted to expand within the building but when the owner declined to ask other tenants to vacate in 1913 he bought the building and forced them out. He sold the building in 1938.

One of the most desirable Riverside Drive apartment buildings is the twin-towered, Art Moderne Normandy at 140 Riverside Drive, completed in 1939 and designed by Emery Roth, who also designed the great San Remo and Beresford apartment buildings on Central Park West.

Some of the buildings on the drive have curved façades such as 160, designed by Gaetan Ajello and completed in 1922, which has a convex frontage, and 171-177, designed by J. E. R. Carpenter, who was the architect of many of the most luxurious Upper East Side apartment buildings. 171-177, which was completed in 1926, has a concave frontage on the drive.

At 346 West 89th Street at Riverside Drive, Isaac L. Rice, a lawyer and chess expert, erected a house in 1901 for his wife, Julia, a physician who was the founder of an organization called the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise that helped create "quiet zones" around hospitals. The mansion, designed by Herts & Tallant, was bought in 1908 by Samuel Schinasi, a partner in a manufacturing company and the next year his brother, Morris, commissioned his own mansion further north on the drive at 107th Street. The Rice mansion, once known as Villa Julia, is now the Yeshiva Ketana of Manhattan.

The park has many statues and monuments including the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument to those lost in the Civil War at 89th Street. Designed by Stoughton & Stoughton and Paul E. M. Duboy, it was modeled on the choragic monument of Lysicrates in Athens. A few blocks north at 93rd Street is the Joan of Arc Statue by Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington.

One of the most interesting buildings is the Cliff Dwellers’ Apartments on the northwest corner of 96th Street at 243 Riverside Drive, a slender building completed in 1914 and designed by Herman Lee Meader with representations of buffalo, snakes and mountain lions as well as Mayan motifs.

West End Avenue, which originally was developed with Romanesque and Queen Anne-style row houses, has many very handsome apartment buildings such as 530 West End Avenue at 86th Street designed in Italian Renaissance palazzo style by Mulliken & Moeller, the Chattauqua at 574 West End Avenue designed by Schwartz & Gross with Sullivanesque ornamentation, the High-Renaissance-style 580 West End Avenue designed by Emery Roth, the neo-Renaissance-style 590 West End Avenue designed by Neville & Bagge with terracotta ornamentation, and several important landmarks such as the West End Collegiate Church, designed in Dutch stepped-gable style, and Collegiate School, designed by Robert W. Gibson and completed in 1893 on the northeast corner at 77th Street. The school is the oldest independent secondary school in the United States and was founded in 1637 and Trinity School, at 139 West 91st Street, which was founded in 1709, claims it is the oldest in continuous operation as Collegiate School was closed during the Revolutionary War.

One of the most interesting church designs in the city is the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew (United Methodist) with its octagonal corner campanile at 540 West End Avenue at 86th Street, designed by R. H. Robertson.

In the early days of the nation, many of the city’s most distinguished families had estates overlooking the Hudson River. Henry Brockholst Livingston, for example, had his estate, Oak Villa, on a bluff at what today is Riverside Drive and 91st Street on part of what had once been the De Lancey estate. Livingston was a lawyer and became a member of the U. S. Supreme Court. This area was then known as Bloomingdale and Oak Villa was in a section known as Striker’s Bay. Not far away from Oak Villa, Valentine Mott, a noted surgeon, lived in a large colonnaded house at what is now 93rd Street.

West End Avenue was originally planned to be a commercial street, serving the grand residential avenues of Riverside Drive and the Grand Boulevard, as Broadway was once called, on either side of it, much like Madison Avenue has served Fifth and Park Avenues. Its southern end was full of stables, silk works, saloons and breweries, but it became a residential street and from 68th to 106th Street around the turn of the century it had more private houses than any other avenue in the city, according to author Salwen.

For a brief while in the 1890’s, it appeared that Riverside Drive and West End Avenue would be lined with impressive single-family residences. "Rumors abounded that the city’s aristocrats would soon descend on the area, and a few upper-crust families - the Altmans, Cuttings, Schiffs - went so far as to actually buy land....but the appearance of the first apartment house, at 83rd Street, in 1895, was the writing on the wall. In an amazingly short time, Riverside Avenue - or Riverside Drive, as it became in 1908, turned into a street of apartment houses," Salwen wrote.

This area has a rich artistic history. George and Ira Gershwin had adjoining penthouses at 33 Riverside Drive painter Marc Chagall lived for a while at 42 Riverside Drive and Edgar Allen Poe enjoyed the river vistas from an area known as Mount Tom in Riverside Park near 83rd Street. Jazz great Miles Davis lived at 312 West 78th Street and Mae West lived at 266 West End Avenue.

In 1989, a major new apartment house, the first in more than three decades, opened on Riverside Drive at No. 222 on the northeast corner at 94th Street. Designed by Fox & Fowle, it is one of the most attractive on the drive with Norman brick, a limestone base, terraces and an attractive canopy.

Although both Riverside Drive and West End Avenue in this area are pretty much fully developed and there are some small historic districts in this area reflecting the attractive sidestreets, this area is now more desirable with the completion of Donald Trump’s Riverside South project to the south.

This area has a great park and is relatively quiet. It also has convenient public transportation and elegant architecture as well as superb neighborhood retail nearby.