Park Avenue Historic District

Park Avenue between 79th and 96th Streets forms a wide residential corridor in Manhattan's Upper East Side and Carnegie Hill. Most of it is lined with 12 to 18-story brick apartment buildings from the 1910s and 1920s, built to the street line and trimmed with stone and terra cotta. They draw on Italian Renaissance, Georgian, Jacobethan, Art Deco and Moderne styles. Planted median malls cover the sunken railroad tracks running north from Grand Central Terminal and give the avenue its name. Among the few earlier and institutional survivors are 1856 row houses, a late nineteenth century tenement, the Lewis Morris and Reginald DeKoven houses, the George F. Baker complex, St. Ignatius Loyola Church and the Park Avenue Christian Church. The district is recognized for its largely intact collection of early twentieth century apartment architecture, with several 1920s buildings called some of the finest of their type in the country. Its period of significance spans 1856 to 1961, and its landscape resembles its appearance around 1930.