From Farm to Warehouse, This was especially true in the southern portion of the neighborhood-to-be, the land where John Somerindyck had once farmed, fished and hunted his vast estate. The 1880s saw an invasion by hordes of cheap, speculative tenements west of Broadway. The land around Central Park remained pretty much empty.

It's easy to see why the southern Upper West Side got off to such a slow start. In the 1880's the place was still on the outskirts of town. The heart of fashionable society lay far downtown along Fifth. Avenue between Madison Square and Murray Hill. Nothing much was happening in Manhattan just below the West Side – except for the slimy doings in Hell's Kitchen and along the docks. The lower Upper West Side was simply a part of a huge tract of land suddenly thrown open for development. The billowing smoke and noise of the ugly but essential El on Ninth Avenue cast a palling cloud upon the area. Farther to the west ran the massive trackworks of the New York Central railroad line, which opened around 1880. Besides adding another dose of smoke and noise, the trains carried livestock to stockyards at 60th Street, and the barnyard stench still another insult to the area.

Hence, despite the aristocratic potential of Central Park West, huge armories soon squatted heavily on Broadway at 67- 68th Street (where the Ansonia Post Office is now), on 66th Street off Central Park, and on 66th Street west of Columbus. An enormous equestrian school trotted onto the site of today's Trump International Hotel. Smack in the center of the Central's track beds and stockyards, at 61st Street near the River, tottered a three-story shack of a hotel.

Constantly surrounded by noise and smell, and with quiet getaway promised by endlessly passing trains, the deeds done there can well be imagined. In the first years of the 20th Century there gathered a gaggle of garages and a wasteland of warehouses – about 40 of them in the mere six blocks hounded by Amsterdam and West End from 59th to 65th Streets. Quite a few more found their way onto lots on or near Central Park West in the low 60s. The area certainly seemed headed for a drab, dreary destiny.