I am back in New York trying to do more walking and careful looking at neighborhoods my wife and I haven’t really been in since the start of the pandemic. One day, we find ourselves walking on Lexington in the 70s. It is much less touristy than equivalent blocks on Madison and has few luxury chains and famous boutiques.
Among the numerous vacant shops, it still contains a number of small, distinctive stores—cafes with outdoor tables that offer very good sandwiches, like Corrado Bread & Pastry; a chic French restaurant, Orsay; and a store that sells imaginative and delicately shaped ceramic sculpture, Sara Japanese Pottery. The street is packed with people, including many workers from Lenox Hill Hospital, which extends some blocks in the 70s. As a result, this street’s intense life produces more refuse and chaos (e.g., the cacophony of ambulance sirens) than cooler and more tranquil nearby Upper East Side avenues like Madison and Park. But I like the older New York feeling of the street and find myself moved to walk at a faster pace than usual, as if being there has suddenly revitalized me and made me feel years younger. It is something that happens when I experience a slice of the city that tends to exhilarate me.
On another day, I take a cab down from uptown Park Avenue, passing limestone-clad, handsome art deco apartment buildings like 740 Park Avenue between 71st and 72nd Streets, whose residents included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, developer William Zeckendorf, and fashion designer Vera Wang. There are too many landmark residential buildings on Park to describe, but another neighboring one is a red brick, limestone-trimmed residence at 720 Park Avenue, in which most units span several thousand square feet and feature high ceilings and fireplaces. The residential buildings are mostly inhabited by the very wealthy—it’s an avenue of privilege, devoid of a sign of affordable housing. The existence of these buildings is built on a system of inequality, but, at the moment, I have lost my capacity to feel resentment.
On my wanderings, I pass architecturally unique buildings like the Seventh Regiment Armory, located between 66th and 67th Streets. Medieval Gothic in design, the building is also well known for its ornate interior, which was designed by men like Louis Comfort Tiffany and Stanford White. It’s a building I have been inside often to attend its annual art show. There is also the Asia Society headquarters and Museum, at Park Avenue and East 70th Street—a nine-story building faced in smooth, red Oklahoma granite designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes.
Park Avenue is divided by a manicured green median, separating the traffic running north and south, that in warm weather contains myriad flower boxes with begonias in bloom. Further down the avenue, in the 30s, situated on the part of the median that runs through Murray Hill, one can see Carole A. Feuerman’s monumental, hyperrealist sculptures of swimmers. Park Avenue has never been seen as a must for tourists, but for anybody who appreciates the grace, harmony, and privileged urbanity of a city avenue, it provides a great deal of pleasure.
After such a long hiatus, I know there are many more neighborhoods I should explore again. I hope my energy holds out.
