The Upper West Side may very well be the cultural and academic epicenter of New York City. From Lincoln Center and The Museum of Natural History to The Julliard School, The Met, and City Ballet to Columbia and Barnard Universities, The Upper West Side has long housed some of the country’s preeminent cultural institutions. It’s no wonder then that the UWS is among NYC’s most iconically depicted nabes across pop culture genres: San Juan Hill, a neighborhood that gave way to Lincoln Center, was the setting of the greatest American musical of the 20th century, West Side Story. The neighborhood was practically one of the main characters in the movie You’ve Got Mail, which featured grocery staple Zabar’s on Broadway, and Tom Hank’s character Joe Fox’s apartment at 210 Riverside Dr.
The beloved green spaces Central Park and Riverside Park serve as the neighborhood’s horizontal margins, with NYC’s most iconic coops, Dakota, the San Remo, and the El Dorado adorning Central Park West. The luxury shops of Columbus Circle highlight the southern border of West 59th St.
The Upper West Side as we know it came to be as a result of the city’s subway opening in 1904, which included many stops along the neighborhood. Indeed, when the Dakota was built in the 1880s, it was given the name because it was so far uptown it may as well have been in Dakota Indian territory. Further 20th century contributions to the neighborhood’s current character were the prewar residential construction of Emery Roth, Schwartz & Gross, and Rosaria Candela (especially in the Blomingdale area), the Eighth Ave subway line and Westside Highway (Robert Moses’s contribution to the neighborhood), both of which opened in the 1930s, and the urban renewal project which included Lincoln Center in the 1960s.
