Still Developing

The caption on this 1882 picture is obviously wrong.

Jacob Ruppert’s house was at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 93^rd Street, and the big avenue to the right is Park (Fourth) Avenue. You can tell because of those little bridges and the wide center mall: this is the north end of the underground open-cut portion of the New York Central Railroad approach to Grand Central. When the trains were electrified after 1902, the open cut on the upper east side was turned into a proper tunnel, since there was no longer coal smoke to vent.

It’s an easy mistake to make. Ruppert was a brewer and his brewery was in a series of buildings between Third and Fourth Avenues, 90^th and 94^th Streets. In other words, the caption would be correct if it said “Park Avenue as seen from the Ruppert brewery at 94^th Street.”

We see a bunch of rows of houses and tenements, but in the foreground, facing 93^rd Street, are some individual houses that probably date from the 1850s or 60s. This was a suburban area then, served by the 86^th Street station of the Harlem Railroad. The Third Avenue elevated didn’t arrive at 84^th Street until 1878, which is when residential construction began in earnest. Eventually, almost all of the older houses would be torn down to be replaced with tenements or larger apartment houses; after Park Avenue was covered, it became a desirable place to live and very large apartment houses began to be built there.