UPPER WEST SIDE — To some, the neighborhood resembles Sesame Street, to others a collection of European boulevards, and for many, there's precisely the right dose of hustle and bustle mixed with a small-town feel.
This week, instead of focusing on the perspective of one resident, our podcast features multiple voices centered around one theme: Why I Live on the Upper West Side.
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Dana Lerner: I just always felt like the Upper West Side was the place for me.
Donna Nevel: We've loved our neighborhood and our community.
Danny Koch: We'll I'm born and raised here, so I grew up in this neighborhood. I grew up on 73rd and Riverside Drive. I now live on 74th and West End. I made it two whole blocks.
Emily: Oh, so you really traveled.
Bob Leonard: I find the neighborhood more lively than the East Side, more interesting. Broadway's really nice. It's like a European boulevard.
Barbara Adler: The Upper West Side is just a real neighborhood. It's a friendly, let your hair down kind of place. A lot of families chose to raise their children here. We have wonderful schools in the neighborhood. The streets are safe to walk. We have Central Park, we have Riverside Park. It's just a great neighborhood for families and singles alike. It's just a great place to live. I've been happy here for over 50 years and going strong.
Larry Bellone: Small joke: People say the difference between the Upper West and the Upper East is all the babies are in strollers on the West Side and a lot of the people are in walkers on the East Side. It's an older, more sedate, more sterile, not in a negative way, but where this is a more gritty neighborhood place.
Courtenay Harry: The funny thing is a lot of the people are staying here for the schools. Who would have thought we gotten to a point in the Upper West Side, people are staying for the elementary schools? That's why you see all these numbers up. We want to give our kids the best education we can. And if they're staying here than we've done a good job, right? We just have to stay on it to make sure that progress continues.
Joe Fiordaliso: When I was looking for a place to raise a family I was drawn to the Upper West Side, because it seemed to have the best of everything that New York City offers. It offers the hustle and bustle. It offers the proximity to museums and the best cultural institutions in the world. But it's also at its base a collection of small, close-knit neighborhoods. And, it's difficult perhaps, for someone in the suburbs to understand how we could live in small close- knit neighborhoods in the middle of the biggest city and the most vibrant city in the world. But, it's true. And many of those neighborhoods are bifurcated along school lines and surrounding neighborhood and community schools. So it was a natural choice for us when we were looking for a place for us to raise our children. We were both committed to raising our children in the city. We've made it work in large part because of the vibrancy of those neighborhoods, and the fact that they are really at, like I said, at their base small close-knit communities.
Elizabeth Milner: We loved our neighborhood on 91st Street.
Emily: What did you love about it?
Elizabeth Milner: We just loved it. As far as, we had our dog, the brownstone we lived on had a little fireplace and a little outdoor patio. We loved the entrance into Central Park. It's just magical.
Nat Milner: It really was like Sesame Street. We knew all the neighbors. Pedro would sit outside with his Mets hat every day and listen to the radio and hear the game. Mr. Nelson was down the street and our friend Michael lived a few doors down. The famous people from the El Dorado would walk by everyday and we'd get ... It was just an amazing, guest stars coming through our neighborhood. It was great fun.
Elizabeth Milner: Being from Boston I love hearing people say, "This is like my Cheers." I think that's so adorable. The lunch crowd, we have those regular people that come in and it really matches — it’s sort of an age thing. I always say, "They know what table they want." And we love to be certain that table is available and just remember that. We love our little nook. We love Manny's across the street. We love Ivan's. We love the little dollar store. I mean it just seems like we've got...
Nat Milner: And the fruit vendor out here. It's like a nice little friendly little neighborhood of small business owners.
Elizabeth Milner: Those guys have been here since we've had our little kids. They've watched us. We've all watched each other through the years.
Emily: That's nice.
Chris Doeblin: If you go to a playground in Rochester or in Chicago, probably in a lot of places, Boston, there's nobody there. If you go to a playground in New York, there's a hundred kids and there's fifty moms and dads that live in your neighborhood. It's a vibrant, wonderful place to go. That's great. That's part of what we benefit from in New York. Not only that, we have a massively wonderful, on the Upper West Side, series of playgrounds, all up and down — both Central Park and Riverside Park. It's pretty cool.
Donna Nevel: Unfortunately, it has been gentrifying. We've seen displacement of families who've actually lived her for quite some time. But it still remains a neighborhood that's really reflective of many different communities and backgrounds in New York City. I think this area, which is we’re in Manhattan Valley, it's been a very special community. Again, it's been threaten with gentrification, with displacement. I feel it's been a wonderful community to be a part of and would like to be able to ... I think all of us would like it to be able to remain a community that really does serve families from all backgrounds, racially, economically, and not just increasingly for those with resources.
Julie Kowitz Margolies: This neighborhood is still a real mix of class and race and ethnicity. I don't think that has really dramatically changed and that's a positive thing as compared to some other areas of the city. That's something that I really valued here when I moved here, and still value now.
Jacob Hadjigeorgis: The Upper West Side is extremely special. I think it was always recognized as being special by the people who knew the Upper West Side. For me, it always had a little bit of a Hudson Valley feel. In the sense of a good food culture. In the sense of being surrounded by nature as much as possible in New York City. I love being near the water. The sense of community. The lack of as much as possible, the lack of gentrification on the Upper West Side, especially at that time when we came in 2011. It still had a local business feel to it. It just felt like the type of place that I would want to be in.
Larry Bellone: The neighborhood wasn't all that much different. It seems to have gotten much more desirable these days as sort of the destination. When we were on the West Side, the East Side was the hot place. No one even thought about downtown yet.
Emily: Really? So the Upper East Side was where everybody wanted to be?
Larry Bellone: Yeah, that was the fancy area. The West Side was nicer, you know it was a little more real. And Downtown still really wasn't a big thing yet
Dana Lerner: I will always have fond memories of being here in this area with my children.
Linda Alexander: The Upper West Side is a neighborhood. It's one of the few real neighborhoods that really represents multi-generations in the city. It's one of the few left. I think that's an important point.
Nat Milner: We're just having a good time and we're here for the neighborhood.
For some people though, the neighborhood has forever lost that homey feel it had a generation ago.
Danny Koch: The guy who ran the news stand on 76th Street and Broadway was the dad of someone we went to school with. The pizza place, Izmir Pizza, was a neighborhood place. All of these places you sort of had a contact person.
Emily: You had a relationship.
Danny Koch: People knew you. You shopped in stores because you knew the people. You would go to Morris Brothers and you could get everything you needed. It was just a really great little shtetl of stores and restaurants that everyone ... It was like Teacher's Restaurant across the street was like Cheers. You would walk in, it would take you eight minutes to get to your table because you had to stop at every single table because you knew every single person who was eating in the restaurant. I mean, you still run into people these days but not like that. There was real sort of heart and soul to the neighborhood. People were very political. People were very involved. People were very involved in the schools. Over the years, it's changed dramatically.
Emily: Are there any gathering places where you still run into everyone all at one time, that you know?
Danny Koch: You know, it's really sad. The answers is really — it’s really, no. It's not the same. With the apartments costing what they cost now. There's a lot of new money that all of sudden just arrives, paying $5 million cash for the newest three-bedroom apartment that just went up for sale. It's a little bit of a different feeling in the neighborhood. We still love being here. We still have a very loyal clientele but in the old days I would say I knew eight out of 10 customers who shopped in the store and now I probably know four or five out of 10.
Julie Kowitz Margolies: In many ways it's different and in many ways it's the same. There clearly are some dramatic changes in terms of things. I'm sure we'll talk about more like the changes on West End Avenue, in terms of traffic patterns, the bike lane. Those are major changes and have made ... And some of the pedestrian bump outs, etc. All those things have really changed the streetscape and have in many ways changed the feel of the neighborhood. We have a Whole Foods now, which changes the feel of the neighborhood. Probably raised real estate values in this neighborhood. We have some more mom and pop shops, but like everywhere in the city we have, even though New York is under banked, we have tons of banks and drugstores and every time a small shop goes under and then you see Radio Shack or 7-Eleven, you want to throw yourself out a window. Just kidding. But you know I'd rather see a small local coffee shop than see that. I think in that sense we are probably similar to a lot of neighborhoods in New York.
We want to know what you think:
Why do you live on the Upper West Side?
What makes the neighborhood special to you?
And do you agree with those who say it’s lost some of its essential characteristics and charm along the way?
Let us know on our Upper West Side Facebook page or on Neighborhood Square.
You can also reach out to me Emily Frost on Twitter at @efrost1 or by email at efrost [at] dnainfo.com.
