“A sliver of Manhattan bounded by Houston Street, First Street, and First Avenue, Peretz Square marks the spot where the tangled jumble of lower Manhattan meets the regularity of the Commissioners’ Plan street grid,” reads the New York City Parks Department sign, signifying the start of the precisely 127 block run uptown. On the south side of Houston Street is Allen Street and then, curving southeast, Pike Street, delivering boats, trash, and people into or over water at each end all the same. From 23rd Street, where Avenue C ends, until 49th Street, where the United Nations Consulate’s Beekman Place begins, 1st Avenue is the easterly most northbound mixed-used thoroughfare in Manhattan. At its northernmost end, it becomes the Willis Avenue Bridge, funneling drivers, cyclists, and walkers into the Bronx and onto mainland North America. Six lanes of travel fling passengers ahead on 1st Avenue, two of them are reserved for bikes and buses all the way up to 125th Street, en route to their homes, jobs, or escapes. Residents of this secluded-as-can-be Manhattan avenue, whether temporary or legacy, watch as commuters rush by, wondering if they’ll ever slow down. 

Given that 1st Avenue is one of the fastest roadways heading North, there is just as good a reason not to slow as there is to coast or pump the brakes. If one dares to cross the maze of roadway traffic or pulls the yellow Stop Requested cord of the M15 bus, the sensory possibilities are enticing as they are uncharacteristic of the iconographic New York stereotype. (Avoiding claims of authenticity in a decidedly ever-changing and multi-ownership, if really owned at all, the city is important to characterizing 1st Avenue, the conception of authenticity being characterized by outsiders gazing into the everyday practices of 6th and 116th Street residents.) However, it’s no secret that 1st Avenue is devoid of the parks, towers, squares, and restaurants of New York lore: a lowered roadway shadowed by its Western kin and a constant Brooklyn/Queens/Bronx bound view do not lure the flocks of Canadian Goose wearing tourists who migrate to 5th and Madison Avenues. Rightfully so, the people of 1st Avenue have plenty to occupy them that doesn’t involve making nice to strangers. 

From 1st to 14th Streets on the westside, and 6th and 14th Streets on the east side, 1st Avenue retains the architectural feature that has defined this section of downtown Manhattan for more than a century: the tenement. No matter that the Lower East Side, defined by being below Houston Street and East of Broadway, coined the term tenement, the East Village tenements were the setting of punk and pop-culture stars like The Panic in Needle Park, Lucy Sante, and Debbie Harry. Bowery is so 2 blocks over. While highrises tower on Delancey, and are sure to continue rising into the East Village, 1st Avenue’s East Village retains its rusting red fire escapes. What it has gained, on the other hand, is a reputation as a destination for foodies, that deplorable term disdained by chefs around the world. Lucien, the renowned but mediocre French Bistro, sits second in line on 1st Avenue’s starting rowing of restaurants, the cramped dining room only appealing to those eaters who are actively making someone’s life harder at this very moment. To fall back under the guise of authenticity, the actually good and historical eats on the 1st Avenue East Village stretch are the likes of Gena’s Grill, a Nuyorican and Dominican countertop restaurant on the corner of 13th Street, and MàLá Project, the 1990s derived Chinese medicinal hot pot restaurant that sprang up on 7th Street. On line with the aging residents is the East Village’s college population, a facet of the expansion of institutions like New York University and The New School. While these Generation Z residents bring with them a particular sound, specifically the punk-antithetical likes of The 1975, Blondie still sings from 1st Avenue’s clubs and hookah bars. Continuity at last. 

Above 14th Street, the official border of downtown, building elevations rise with the size of their glass panes: 14th to 49th Street becomes an institution alley of hospitals(Mount Sinai, Bellevue, Veteran Affairs, and NYU Langone), dorms (The New School, NYU Dental and Medical, School of Visual Arts), Co-Op Housing (Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, American Copper, and Manhattan Place), and the United Nations. As a result, the selection of food and drink above 14th Street linearly follows the subsistence lifestyles of those occupying the 35-block row. Starbucks, Sophie’s Cuban, Halal carts, and Sweetgreen are never to be ousted. Industry is the keeper of nature in these blocks, secluding area residents from the sun not with trees but towering shadows. The FDR and Queens Midtown Tunnel approaches, quite literally, obliterate the potential for decibel decreases: St. Vartan Park vibrates as trucks descend into the East River beneath it and Robert Moses Playground is poetically empty of humans while full of garbage from an overturned can. There is a hurried but flowing and almost silent nature to hospital row, music surely surrounding the radius with the inappropriate prospects of playing it aloud negated by sickness and sirens. Flags wave as hands shake at the UN and 1st Avenue falls even further below the rest of the city as the under-42nd Street Tunnel begins, Robert Moses’ reign at work. 

Perceiving the numerical shift uptown would be difficult without the ornate and oval-shaped overhead light fixtures on the 59th Street Bridge underpass or the “Doormen are awesome” comments emitting from the English-accented, parka-clad couple on 53rd Street. The buildings don’t fall down and the materials remain similar if not more well kept, signaling the shift from industry to the personal reepings of industry on the Upper East Side. Music remains absent from the 50s on, no doubt a nod to the respectability politics that accompanies living across from the Terence Cardinal Cooke Building of the Archdiocese of New York. Parks line the city in either direction, with Carl Schurz Park to the east and Central Park due west, but you wouldn’t know it from 1st Avenue. Private buildings carry private sculptures into public spaces and call it a private park on the Upper East. Generic culinary terms, such as Deli and Ristorante, line the tops of smushed storefronts, lacking inspirational typographies or menus: these seemingly unremarkable restaurants undeniably carry communities with staple foods, neighborhood owners, and the hardest working kitchen and delivery staff. 2nd Avenue Deli, even in the wrong location, is actually notable enough to stop in, even if just for a plate of half-sour pickles. Ambulantes and their accompanying fruit stands seem as essential to UES residents as the requisite Gristedes and Morton Williams supermarkets, with each stand being carefully prodded and scanned for the day’s produce by scarf-wearing patrons. Nothing, however, is as dominant in the 46-block expanse from 50th to 96th Street as the Amazon and Whole Foods delivery workers pulling or pedaling carts full of brown grocery bags and Amazon liveried packages. These contracted workers enter the street without prudence because, really, who is going to hit the guy delivering their presents and perishables? 

The buildings break at 96th Street as the roadway levels flat, the salty blue Triborough Bridge and browning Hells Gate railroad bridge peeking out beyond the 3-4 story roofed homes. East Harlem, colloquially referred to as El Barrio or Spanish Harlem because of the continual influx of Puerto Rican and Mexican immigrants following World War I, is rife with controversy over zoning, though none of this controversy is carried out by the Buildings or Land Use departments. Rather, this territorial divide has stewed over perceived neighborhood beginnings and the racial enclaves that follow. “East Harlem has always suffered the indignities of racial essentialism – the belief that the Italians, the Puerto Ricans, or any other ethnic group was somehow monolithic and usually hardwired for social dysfunction,” writes Heather Harris of Seton Hall University, “Common sense would suggest that any individual might diverge from the collective stereotype, or indeed that no single individual would match the stereotype at all.” Once such stereotype that plagues the East Harlem narrative today is the presence of the New York City Housing Authority, the shorthand term for public housing projects, “projects”, being used to derogatorily denigrate the affordable housing provided to 600,000 New Yorkers around the city.

The NYCHA run John Haynes Holmes and Isaac Houses Holmes, East River, Thomas Jefferson, and Wagner Houses line 1st Avenue in chronological order from 91st to 124th Streets, in company with the sandy stone colored pre-war walk-ups and glass box developments that threaten the very name El Barrio. The City organization is no saint in and of itself, with toxic lead paint and mold filling the walls of the failing elevator buildings, though the New York Post headline warnings of violent danger and impending doom don’t exist. What does exist is the presence of brassy horns and the twisting tongues and booming rhythms of Banda and Bomba music, the sound of which incessantly emits from a JBL speaker or Honda Accord stereo on a summer night. Fruits go from whole to artfully sliced on 116th Street, ambulantes perfectly packing Cucumber/Mango/Watermelon cups with a touch of Tajin, a fork, and the residual juice collecting at the bottom. Changes do happen rapidly in the neighborhood, even in the culinary arena. Blue Sky Deli, previously known as Haji’s, markets the Harlem-born Chopped Cheese sandwich, in an effort in giving visibility to their resident-less bodega surrounded by a Con Edison plant and a Manhattan Mini Storage while appealing to newer Harlem audiences in order to survive. 

Ideally, life goes beyond surviving. While 1st Avenue has always served and will continue to serve an express purpose, namely being an escape route out of the city, the residents of its 127-block span are unlikely to voluntarily depart. Without the clubs, parks, and general bustle of centralized city avenues, the literal and personified levels of noise fall, a facet of 1st Avenue that residents have fought valiantly to keep, tilting against windmills like Con Edison. Immigrant communities have found their way at the Southern and Northern terminuses of 1st Avenue, clinging onto language, art, dance, music, and food in the face of destructive assimilation and individualism. Even amongst the affluent and more presumed upon areas of 1st Avenue, visible demonstrations of familiarity occur; the noticing of a 3-buildings-down neighbor’s haircut or a questioned update on the restaurant server’s mother. All of that is to say that 1st Avenue relishes its structural seclusion, creating its own worlds in spite of the bridges, tunnels, and glass box constructions that encroach upon it.