West 66th Street is notable for hosting the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts between Broadway and Columbus Avenue.

Founder's Hall, located at York Avenue at the eastern foot of East 66th Street, was the first building opened on the campus of Rockefeller University.

Members have included Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jean Stafford, Helen Hayes, Pearl Buck, Marian Anderson, Margaret Mead, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.

[3] 45 East 66th Street is the site of a red-and-white French Gothic 10-story apartment house completed in 1908 for Charles F. Rodgers as designed by architects Harde & Short.

The design for the 38-story structure included retail space at ground level, a church center on lower floors and 325 apartments.

In 1972, the plan faced opposition from community organizations and Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton who protested against the policy on exclusion of blacks from ministerial roles in the church, which was not ended until 1978.

[12] The West 65th and 66th Streets Block Association, founded in April 2018, seeks to promote neighborhood harmony, quality of life and safety through collaborative planning, community action, and policy advocacy.

[13][14] The park includes a bust of operatic tenor Richard Tucker by sculptor Milton Hebald dedicated on April 20, 1980, consisting of a larger-than-life size bronze sculpture on a 6-foot-high (1.8 m) granite pedestal.

[15][16] The original 1978 proposal for a seven-foot statue of Tucker, depicted in the role of Des Grieux in the opera Manon Lescaut by Giacomo Puccini, had been opposed by a member of Manhattan Community Board 7, who felt that the piece should have been placed in the Metropolitan Opera Hall of Fame, and not on public property.