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Last Updated June 22, 2005
The Upper East Side of Manhattan, the home today of people with more accumulated wealth than anywhere else in the world, began as much of New York City did--as farmland. Its eastern border was established at Fifth Avenue when work began on Central Park in 1857, but most of the area was still farmland when the park was completed in 1873. During the 1880s, the avenues--Fifth, Madison, Park, Lexington, Third, Second, First--were paved, and rich New Yorkers and many who had made their money elsewhere--Pittsburgh steel baron Andrew Carnegie, Montana mining magnate William Clark--built mansions on Fifth Avenue. Third Avenue, with its elevated train line, was lined with walkups for working class commuters, while the side streets off Fifth Avenue were lined with massive brownstone houses shielded from the industrial haze along the East River. The Upper East Side began taking on its present character in 1913, when Grand Central Terminal was opened and the New York Central rail line was buried under Park Avenue: what had been a filthy railroad cut became a broad boulevard lined with grand apartment buildings. The federal income tax, passed the same year, had the unintended consequence of encouraging New York's rich to dispense with grand mansions and live, quietly and out of sight, in apartment buildings where doormen protected their privacy. The emergence of the modern Upper East Side represented yet another iteration of the pattern noticed by the mid-19th century New York diarists Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong: On such a compact island, it took only a generation or so before buildings were torn down and rebuilt. Even today, New York is being transformed by gleaming postmodern skyscrapers and high-priced storefronts, though its most enduring landmarks were products of the first half of the 20th century: the Flatiron Building in 1901; the Woolworth Building and Grand Central in 1913; the Chrysler Building, Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center in the 1920s and 1930s; and the United Nations headquarters, the world's first glass-fronted skyscraper, after World War II. This area also holds the more humble distinction as the site of the first public housing project in America--the First Houses, built in lower Manhattan in 1935 by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. The 14th Congressional District of New York includes within its irregular borders the Upper East Side and nearly all of these buildings. The district begins at East 96th Street, the historic dividing line between Manhattan's wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods, near where the railroad emerges from its tunnel and comes out in the middle of Park Avenue, and runs all the way down to East 9th Street in the East Village. It includes all of Central Park; much of the midtown corporate district; Murray Hill and Gramercy Park, and also parts of the East Village and the Lower East Side. Midtown Manhattan's skyscrapers and the Garment District are also here. The 14th also takes in Roosevelt Island, a 147-acre expanse in the East River that was transformed in the early 1970s from a hospital-and-prison complex to an ethnically diverse residential neighborhood (and stripped of its old name, Welfare Island). The 14th also includes part of Queens across the East River: Long Island City, Steinway, part of historically Irish Sunnyside and all of the vibrantly Greek Astoria, now with a growing number of Asians, Latinos and Arabs. The institutions of the 14th are famous and powerful--from the United Nations to the New York Public Library to St. Patrick's Cathedral--and its stores of culture are among the world's finest: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney and the Frick, but also a rising arts cluster in Long Island City with the contemporary art gallery P.S. 1 and the American Museum of the Moving Image adjoining the old Astoria movie studios, where most movies were made before the industry moved to sunnier Hollywood. The 14th District is the latest version of the Upper East Side-based Silk Stocking district, originally created in 1918. The Silk Stocking district has always been dominated by its affluent and highly educated voters, leaders in securities, publishing, advertising, entertainment, broadcasting and communications. Historically, the Silk Stocking creed was confidence in its duty to lead the nation and mistrust of the city's (usually Democratic) immigrant masses--the politics of Theodore Roosevelt, the old New York Herald Tribune and Henry Luce's Time magazine. While it did not trust union leaders and Democratic Party politicians, it accepted much of the New Deal. This district believed the nation should be led by the well-educated Protestant gentlemen one saw strolling down Madison Avenue to their clubs, who held high government posts from Theodore Roosevelt's day and past Franklin's. But the attitude of the Manhattan elite was transformed from liberal Republican to leftish Democratic in a way personified by the Silk Stocking district's most famous congressman, John Lindsay. He was elected in 1958 as a liberal Republican, an advocate of civil liberties full of mistrust of machine Democrats and unions, and in 1965 he was elected mayor of New York. While mayor, he ran up huge debts that led the city to the brink of bankruptcy in 1975, while neighborhoods deteriorated and the city lost 1 million people in the 1970s. He was succeeded as congressman and ultimately as mayor by Edward Koch, whose political travels were the reverse: Koch started as a liberal reform Democrat and became more conservative, and in the process lost the support of elite Manhattan by backing capital punishment, opposing racial quotas and questioning poverty programs. Attitudes have changed again: the troubled mayoralty of David Dinkins led Manhattanites to back Rudolph Giuliani, and they applauded his successes in cutting crime and welfare and taxes. But Giuliani and his successor Michael Bloomberg, who lives in his town house on East 79th Street, are firm cultural liberals on abortion, gay rights and gun control. To the national Republican party of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s and now George W. Bush, who brought the Republican Convention of 2004 to a less than enthralled Manhattan, the Upper East Side is unremittingly hostile: these are people that seem to come from another country. The Upper East Side reacted with similar disdain to Barry Goldwater in 1964, and voted for Lyndon Johnson by a wide margin, as did the entire country; but, when the rest of the country narrowly favored George W. Bush over Al Gore and then John Kerry, the Upper East Side voted for the Democrats by wider margins than it had voted for Johnson. In American politics today, cultural issues trump economics: the affluent Upper East Side votes heavily Democratic (the 10021 zip code was the nation's top zip code for Democratic campaign contributions in the 2004 election cycle) while low-income Mississippi and Montana vote heavily Republican. The congresswoman from the 14th District is Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat first elected in 1992. Born and educated in North Carolina, she visited New York in 1970 at the age of 22, loved it and "just stayed." She worked on welfare education programs during the 1970s, and from 1977 to 1982 she was a legislative staffer in Albany. She was elected to the New York City Council in 1982. For 1992, redistricting made the Silk Stocking district more Democratic and Maloney ran against incumbent Bill Green, a thoughtful liberal Republican who shared Manhattan's cultural liberalism but could not compete with the enthusiasm of a Democratic Party dominated by the feminist left. And he was poorly positioned to appeal to voters in the outer borough neighborhoods that were for the first time added to the district, who liked Republicans conservative on cultural issues but liberal on economics. Maloney lost the Manhattan part of the district 50%-44%, but carried Queens heavily and won 50%-48% overall. Maloney started off in the House with a certain naiveté but stayed to make serious contributions on important issues and has had a liberal voting record. On the Financial Services Committee, she worked to keep banks from controlling other businesses, sought more oversight of the Federal Reserve, added some privacy provisions to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley financial modernization law, and in 2002 added language to the corporate accountability bill that requires a company to disclose publicly whenever its board votes to violate its own ethics code. With an eye to Astoria, she helped found the Congressional Caucus on Hellenic Issues; with an eye to the corporate suites, she voted for normal trade relations with China. A leader of the Women's Caucus, she demanded that the FDA permit over-the-counter sales of morning-after birth control pills, and opposed separating men and women in basic training. In 2001, she delivered a speech on the House floor dressed in a blue burkha to highlight the Taliban's cruel treatment of women. With part of her district in Lower Manhattan and close to Ground Zero, the aftermath of the September 11 attacks kept her busy. She was among the most outspoken House Democrats urging George W. Bush to quickly send New York the $20 billion that Congress approved for cleanup and recovery and she urged him to appoint a coordinator to work with the city. Her proposal to give a $1,000 tax credit to visitors to the city went nowhere. In 2004, she teamed with Republican Christopher Shays to push for House action on the intelligence-reform proposals urged by the commission created to investigate the causes of the September 11 attacks and backed reluctantly by George W. Bush and most Republicans. With Shays, she also sponsored in March 2004 a Remember 9/11 Health bill to provide federal insurance coverage to individuals who were injured or suffered poor health because of the terror attacks. Any doubts that Maloney had a firm lock on the district were dispelled in the Republican year of 1994. Manhattan Councilman Charles Millard spent almost $1 million against her; but the 14th District was voting 78% for Mario Cuomo (who lost his bid that year for a fourth term as governor) and Maloney won 64%-35%. Aside from the perils of redistricting, she has not had to worry about reelection since then.
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