Yorkville, Manhattan
Encyclopedia : Y : YO : YOR : Yorkville, Manhattan
Yorkville is a neighborhood within the Upper East Side of the borough of Manhattan in the city of New York City. Roughly speaking, it is bound by 79th Street on the south, the East River on the east, 96th Street (i.e., Spanish Harlem) on the north, and Third Avenue on the west. The neighborhood's main artery, East 86th Street, was sometimes called the "German Broadway."
For much of the twentieth century, Yorkville was a middle to working-class neighborhood, inhabited by many people of German and Hungarian descent, with many German and Hungarian restaurants and bakeries. In the 1930s, the neighborhood was the home base of Fritz Kuhn's German-American Bund, the most notorious pro-Nazi group in 1930's America. As a result of their presence, Yorkville in this period was the scene of fierce street battles between pro- and anti-Nazi Germans and German-Americans. Today there are rare remnants of Yorkville's German origins (Schaller & Weber grocery shop, Hungarian Meat Market and Delicatessen, Orwasher's bakery), but it has largely become an upper middle class residential neighborhood. Since the 1990s, Old World merchants, such as the Elk Candy Company, Kleine Konditorei bakery and Bremen House market (all German), as well as the Rigo bakery and Mocca restaurant (Hungarian) have closed. The Von Steuben Day Parade still wends its way through the neighborhood, however.
Yorkville includes Gracie Mansion, the official home of the mayor of New York City, and Carl Schurz Park.
Yorkville is the birthplace of baseball legend Lou Gehrig, in 1903. Actor James Cagney also grew up in the neighborhood.
And Yorkville is also the birthplace of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, circa 1920, founded by eleven local business men.
Yorkville was the home of the Marx Brothers at 179 East 93rd street.
References
1External links
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.