Yorkville is a neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City, United States.
The Continentals' disciplined northerly retreat led to the successful Battle of Harlem Heights in September 1776.
[8] A hamlet grew near the 86th Street station, becoming the Yorkville neighborhood as gradual yet steady commercial development occurred.
The current street grid was laid-out between 1839 and 1844 as part of the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, so the Eastern Post Road was abandoned.
[9] By 1850, a significant proportion of the inhabitants of the area were the Germans and Irish that helped build the Croton Aqueduct.
Over time, many people of Czech, Slovak, Irish, French Canadian, Polish, Hungarian, and Lebanese descent moved in.
However, by the 1900s, many German residents moved to Yorkville and other neighborhoods from "Kleindeutschland" (Little Germany) on the Lower East Side after the General Slocum disaster on June 15, 1904.
The ship caught fire in the East River just off the shores of Yorkville, leading family members to move closer to the site of the incident.
In the 1930s, the neighborhood was the home base of Fritz Julius Kuhn's German American Bund, the most notorious pro-Nazi group in 1930s United States, which led to spontaneous protests by other residents.
[19] The largest non-German group were the Irish,[20] who mostly lived in an area bounded by 81st and 85th Streets, and Lexington and Fifth Avenues.
Until the late 1990s, New York's St. Patrick's Day Parade ended at 86th Street and Third Avenue, the historical center of Yorkville.
Popular restaurants included the Viennese Lantern, Tokay, Hungarian Gardens, Robert Heller's Cafe Abbazia at 2nd Avenue, Budapest and the Debrecen.
In 1926, the New York Times wrote of Yorkville's changing ethnic makeup: Yorkville, for well-nigh two decades known to connoisseurs of east side life as the exclusive domain of Czechoslovaks, Hungarians and Germans, is slowly giving up its strongly accentuated Central European character and gradually merging into a state of colorless impersonality…[11]In 1928, a one-block section of Sutton Place north of 59th Street, and all of Avenue A north of that point, was renamed York Avenue to honor U.S. Army Sergeant Alvin York, who received the Medal of Honor for attacking a German machine gun nest during World War I's Meuse-Argonne Offensive.
[23][24][25] In March 1936, the German American Bund established its headquarters on East 85th Street in Yorkville.
Thus, in the 1980s, a building for members of the German gymnastic society Turners, at the intersection of 86th Street and Lexington Avenue, was demolished.
The area from East 79th to 83rd Streets, spanning approximately four blocks east-west, is colloquially known as Little Hungary.
[29] Based on data from the 2020 United States Census, the population of Yorkville was 84,046, an increase of 6,104 (7.8%) from the 77,942 counted in 2010.
[49] Yorkville is served by NYC Ferry's Soundview and Astoria routes, which stop at 90th Street.