Lenox Hill is a neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side. It forms the lower section of the Upper East Side, closest to Midtown. While it is agreed that the neighborhood ranges from 72nd Street to 59th Street, its eastern border is disputed, though The Encyclopedia of New York City cites Fifth Avenue as the western boundary and Lexington Avenue on the east.
The neighborhood is named for the tenant farm of the immigrant Scottish merchant Robert Lenox (1759-1839), who owned about 30 acres (120,000 m2) of land "at the five-mile (8 km) stone", reaching from 5th Avenue to 4th Avenue and from 74th Street to 68th Street. For the exorbitant sum of $6,420 he had purchased a first set of three parcels in 1818, at an auction held at the Tontine Coffee House of mortgaged premises of Archibald Gracie, in order to protect Gracie's heirs from foreclosure, as he was executor of Gracie's estate. Several months later he purchased three further parcels, extending his property north to 74th Street. "Thereafter these two tracts were known as the 'Lenox Farm'" The tenant farmhouse stood on the rise of ground between Fifth and Madison avenues and 70th and 71st Streets, which would have been the hill, if the property had ever been called "Lenox Hill." The railroad right-of-way of the New York & Harlem Railroad passed along the east boundary of the property.
Robert Lenox's son James Lenox divided most of the farm into blocks of building lots and sold them during the 1860s and '70s; he also donated land for the Union Theological Seminary along the railroad right-of-way, between 69th and 70th Streets, and just north of it a full square block between Madison and Fourth Avenue, 70th and 71st streets, for the Presbyterian Hospital, which occupied seven somewhat austere structures on the plot; He built the Lenox Library on a full block-front of Fifth Avenue, now the site of the Frick Collection.
Lenox Hill Hospital, the former German Hospital, is located in this area. Its renaming in July 1918, as a result of anti-German sentiment during World War I, gave impetus to the name "Lenox Hill" for the area, doubtless on the analogy of fashionable Murray Hill, though the hospital itself, a city block bounded on the north and south by 77th and 76th streets, and on the west and east by Park and Lexington Avenues, does not stand on former Lenox property.
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