The Holland Society will be offering a walking tour again this year with historian Joyce Gold.  Scheduled for Sunday November 10^th, 2:00-4:00pm, Joyce Gold has designed a special tour for us of the Upper West Side, the neighborhood of the Society’s new permanent home on W 86^th Street, off Amsterdam Avenue, where the tour will start and end.

West 86^th Street has been a fashionable address since the 1860s. Our ‘West 86th Street – From Seneca Village through the Roaring 20s’ tour will highlight architecture and stories of the renowned musicians who lived in the area.

Elegant, single-family townhouses still grace the street. In addition, we’ll see beautiful early apartment houses that became the new standard for middle- and upper middle-class families.

In the 1830s, before the development of West 86^th 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’ll briefly visit the area and see the historical markers that have been placed to educate visitors.

One block away, West 85^th 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.

Highlights include
—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

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