I've mentioned before how sometimes it's easy to forget my neighborhood's Yorkville history, especially when old row buildings have been torn down at a rapid rate and replaced with shiny new condos and amenities for people who live in them, like a constantly multiplying number of bank branches. 86th street has become more or less a mini-mall lined by chain-stores: Best Buy, T-Mobile, Victoria's Secret... people professed sadness when an former-tenement with a donut shop that had been there for ages was torn down on the corner of 86th and Lexington, but now the glass building that replaced it houses an H&M, a Sephora, and a new Barnes and Noble, and the complaining seems to have stopped.
It's hard to imagine now that for much of the 20th century Yorkville had a "village" feel, and that through the 1970s the 86th street area had a whole collection of German businesses: cafes, restaurants, bars, bookstores, dance-halls. Now all that's left of the bunch are Schaller and Weber and the Heidelberg Restaurant, both on 86th street and 2nd Avenue. Apparently these businesses have managed to remain only because the owners bought the buildings they stand in when prices were still low. I'm grateful that they did, though I can't say I have eaten at the Heidelberg more than once; I think my husband got a bit too jealous of the way I was checking out the waiters in their leiderhosen. Schaller and Weber has many more interesting finds, including one of my favorite kinds of chocolate.
But... not too long ago, I turned up 84th street between first and second, and I noticed this:
The Zion-St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church, still reading "Deutsche Ev. Kirche: Yorkville" in gilded letters on its front, and offering bilingual masses on Sunday in both English and German.
I must say that I was quite surprised, because I had never noticed it before, and it was not the sort of thing I expected to see, still on a side-street on the upper east side.
Apparently it has been there since 1888 (more or less the dawn of time in New York City terms), and after 1904 combined with the remaining congregation of the Lutheran church on the Lower East Side that had been greatly reduced by the General Slocum Disaster, the event that inspired many German immigrants to move uptown to Yorkville.
Next to it, and also across the street, there are still some row-houses that I like to think have been there for nearly as long. The street is narrow enough and so filled with parked cars that I couldn't manage a picture that showed them from top to bottom, but I particularly liked these slate, scale-like tiles on the rooves, which I don't see very often (and appear to be falling off!)
I like that there are still a few buildings left that connect my current, somewhat nondescript neighborhood to its more colorful past. There are so many layers to this city... and you never know when you're going to stumble upon one of them!
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