Off to the Upper West Side, lower part...first of a series

I feel kind of remiss that I have not made hardly any excursions at all to the Upper West Side or to Harlem, but hope to correct that...

Of course, Midtownblogger was conceived as just being a pretty small scale blog about the Midtown area --yet after four years or so it seemed to me it was time to at least start acknowledging other areas of Manhattan.

Who knows,  I may get to Brooklyn or even Long Island City yet...

Furthermore, this is not the best of times to be gallivanting around Manhattan, as a new July heat wave is upon us and wandering further and further away from home seems less and less appealing.

Anyway---

 The first thing you notice on Broadway ( besides the grand boulevard effect of the street) is the way the big, often highly ornate apartment buildings tower overhead and march seemingly endlessly Northward...

This is not a surprise, because Broadway here was the route of  one the very first subways built in Manhattan,  and besides that had always been the traditional spine the city moved its way Uptown on...

What happened, though, was that the rich took a turn onto Fifth Avenue after Midtown Manhattan and built their mansions on the Eastern Edge of Central Park, way up to where Andrew Carnegie had his sprawling estate on the hill that now bears his name..

Broadway, however, and Central Park West, too, were built to house the burgeoning middle and upper middle class families of the City, including many who had previously lived downtown and no longer wanted to be in such a commercialized area. 

By the way, even the newer apartments being built on Broadway are pretty conservative in their architecture--this is NOT SoHo or Tribeca, that's for sure

 The one thing that has not been Conservative here is politics...traditionally liberal, even today,--many attribute this to the high number of Jewish people who live on the Upper West Side who found they could not forget the days when they were poor and maintained many attitudes about society from those days.

Just over to the West, West End Avenue and Riverside Drive were also home to big houses and then big apartment buildings...for some reason, the apartments up here were bigger --the rooms themselves were just bigger-- than downtown or on the East Side, and the only tenements that got built were on Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues..

West End Avenue became a very fashionable address in the late 1920's..with big apartment  buildings coming in and often displacing big elegant homes, some of which survive to this day (below)

   Oh yes, the other thing that strikes you forcefully is that how all the businesses and shops are on Broadway, and how determinedly strictly residential West End Avenue and Riverside Drive are...

Riverside Drive begins at 72nd Street and then winds its way up facing the park between itself and the Henry Hudson Parkway which runs next to the East River...further up, the Park becomes bigger in area, but down here it is just a strip of greenery...

 
 Meanwhile, Riverside Drive starts off as old mansions but then the apartment buildings quickly take over, just leaving remnants of the big old houses...

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 Finally, let me mention all the side streets that run from Riverside Park to Broadway...big, heavy houses on the whole, with a big heavy synagogue popping up sometimes, and a traditional Fire Engine and Hook and Ladder companies...

 OK, let me just end here and now go on to an analysis of the Politics of the Upper West Side and its demographics...