In New York City real estate, the Upper East Side conjures up some very specific images, from palatial co-ops on Fifth Avenue to sprawling, pre-war condominiums on Park Avenue. All of which are very nice, but none of which have much to do with Yorkville, the small, endearingly unpretentious and less ostentatiously upscale sub-neighborhood that runs between Lexington Avenue and the East River on the easternmost edge of the Upper East Side. Yorkville has plenty of luxurious apartment listings of its own, and a notably wider array of new construction luxury condos than on the proper and largely pre-war Upper East Side itself. But Yorkville also offers many things that the more posh Upper East Side doesn't. An authentically welcoming neighborhood nestled next to Manhattan's most luxurious real estate, Yorkville is something of a secret even to those steeped in the NYC real estate scene.
Yorkville was once primarily a German and Hungarian neighborhood, and traces of that old identity remain in the form of Yorkville's numerous German restaurants, bakeries and delicatessens and the Hungarian churches along Yorkville's tree-lined side streets. Nowadays, though, it's just as easy to find high-end sushi or authentic tacos or upscale vegetarian cuisine in Yorkville, as befits the neighborhood's emergence as a younger and more diverse neighbor of the Upper East Side. Which means that while Yorkville offers everything else that the Upper East Side does -- from world-class restaurants to Central Park access (and a lovely park of its own in the East River-hugging Carl Schurz Park) to historic architecture -- it also boasts a lively nightlife scene on Second Avenue, funky boutiques, and unpretentious ethnic eateries. And, in place of the signature Upper East Side co-op, Yorkville features new construction luxury condos -- lots of them, from the Robert A.M. Stern-designed Brompton to the ultra-modern spa-inspired Miraval Living to LEED-certified green condominiums such as The Lucida and The Laurel. In short, Yorkville manages to offer everything the Upper East Side offers -- right down to a location on Manhattan's upper east side -- while being very much a neighborhood unto itself. The secret is out.
