Historic Walking Tour of the Holland Society’s new Upper West Side Neighborhood
November 10th, 2024
Historian Joyce Gold led a walking tour especially designed for the Holland Society of the Society’s new permanent home on W86th Street, off Amsterdam Avenue where the tour started and ended.
Dutch settlers named the area ‘Bloemendaal’ (flower valley) after Holland’s tulip region
Since the the 1860s West 86th Street has has been a fashionable address. Elegant, single-family townhouses still grace the street. In addition, we saw beautiful early apartment houses that became the new standard for middle- and upper middle-class families.
In the 1830s, before the development of West 86th Street, a nearby area now part of Central Park was a residential haven for many Blacks. Seneca Village grew to be an organized neighborhood that included three churches and an Irish section. We briefly visited the area and saw the historical markers that have been placed to educate visitors.
One block away, West 85th Street still looks much the way it did in 1900. Architects were borrowing styles from all over Europe, hence the remarkable variety of designs, textures, and rooflines. Thanks to landmarking, we have this serene scene of well-preserved homes on a quiet street.
Tour highlights included:
—Homes of composers George M Cohan, Yip Harburg, and Richard Rodgers,
—The site of one of the earliest New York concentrations of Black landowners
—Transportation and how it changed the neighborhood
