79th Street (Manhattan) - Notable Locations

Notable Locations

• At Broadway stands The Apthorp (Clinton and Russell, architects, 1908), one of the West Side's classic apartment blocks, and the First Baptist Church in the City of New York (George M. Kaiser, architect, 1891).
• Between 6th and 7th Avenues, on the line of West 79th Street as it was drawn through what became Central Park was the south end of the Receiving Reservoir, a vital storage part of the Croton Aqueduct of 1842. Water was piped down from Westchester County, over the Harlem River and down the west side to the Receiving Reservoir, located between 79th and 86th Streets and Sixth and Seventh Avenues in an area then known as Yorkville. The Reservoir was a fortress-like building 1,826 feet (557 m) long and 836 feet (255 m) wide, and held up to 180 million US gallons (680,000 m3) of water, 35 million US gallons (130,000 m3) flowed into it daily from northern Westchester.

• Mayor Michael Bloomberg lives in a five-story townhouse at 17 East 79th Street, between Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue. Other notable residents of 79th Street include Tom Wolfe, Art Garfunkel and Eliot Spitzer. Socialite Nan Kempner lived on 79th Street at Park Avenue.

• The south side of the block between Fifth and Madison is protected as a rare unbroken row of townhouses. It begins at the corner of Fifth with the French Renaissance Harry F. Sinclair House (1897-98), now housing the Ukrainian Institute.

• The New York Society Library, at 53 East 79th street, is the city's oldest (1754) circulating library; it occupies a double-width townhouse built for John S. and Catherine Dodge Rogers, (Trowbridge & Livingston, 1916-18).Christopher Gray, "The New York Society Library: The John S. Rogers House", 2008
• East 79th Street is an unnumbered southbound only entrance to the FDR Drive.
• East 79th Street is the southern end of East End Avenue, which runs north-south to 90th Street.