West Side Rag – News About the Upper West Side of NYC
Na'ama Yehuda | Speech Language Pathologist, Writer, Blogger — musings, anecdotes, stories, quotes, life lessons and growth
Description: History of the Bloomingdale area on Manhattan's Upper West Side
by Pam Tice, member of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group Program Committee
A recent question from a family researcher led me to the 1855 New York State census. As I located our Bloomingdale neighborhood in the city’s 12 th Ward, I discovered how the pages of the census could become a lens into life in Bloomingdale in the mid-19 th century. This was Bloomingdale before the Civil War, the Lion Brewery (1858), the 9 th Avenue El (1879), and before most of the streets were laid out.
New York City historians covering this period characterize the Bloomingdale neighborhood before the Civil War as a place of “country seats,” many developed in the late 18th and into the early 19 th centuries by wealthy merchants. They built in the bucolic Bloomingdale to escape the crowded downtown, especially when a cholera or smallpox epidemic threatened. There’s scant attention paid to the working-class and poor residents of the neighborhood except to note that there was a “village” around 100 th Street
West Side Rag – News About the Upper West Side of NYC
Na'ama Yehuda | Speech Language Pathologist, Writer, Blogger — musings, anecdotes, stories, quotes, life lessons and growth