All tagged Riverside Drive

Uptown Girls: Former Country Villas and Magnificent Mansions on the West Side between 99th and 114th Streets.

As Manhattan’s population surged northward during the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the formerly rural far reaches of the Upper West Side changed remarkably in character.  By 1900, one could find an interesting hodge-podge of former summer homes dating back a century, along with brash newer mansions, middle class townhouses, and apartment buildings. Thanks in large part to the digitization of the photo archives at the New York Public Library and the Museum of the City of New York, this post will look at some the grand homes around Bloomingdale and Morningside Heights as well as what replaced many of them (almost all would disappear by 1930).