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Around Town<\/a><\/p>\n \n A series on hyperlocal questions and curiosities.\n <\/p>\n \n Illustration: Emma Erickson; Photo 1103 NYC\/Flickr\n <\/p>\n You\u2019re an asshole!\u201d the young woman is screaming. The guy she\u2019s berating is not saying much in response. They \u2014 or rather, we (because the couple is right below my window) \u2014 are on a corner in the East 30s, about a block from the strip on Third Avenue where the bars are emptying out. It\u2019s after 3 a.m. on a warm Saturday night turned Sunday morning, and I can hear her heels click on the concrete as she stomps away and then returns to give him some more of the business. This is a postcollege breakup, I groggily realize, and it\u2019s going to take a while.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first young couple to have a loud dispute mere yards from my apartment in Murray Hill, and it won\u2019t be the last. Over 35 years of living in this neighborhood (mostly in the same building \u2014 first solo, then coupled up, and now married and a dad), I\u2019ve seen hordes of 20-somethings glide from the dormitory to its not-quite-equivalent, the least edgy version of a \u201cstarter life\u201d in New York. Owing mostly to these young adults\u2019 presence, Murray Hill has become a punch line for postcollegiate uncoolness \u2014 it is the rare New York neighborhood that is young and affluent but also somehow unhip. If anything, Murray Hill is the opposite of hip. I\u2019ve put that \u201cif\u201d there because I\u2019m not sure the neighborhood is actually anything. It may be more accurate to say that it just is.<\/p>\n Recently, Mindy Kaling set a Friends-ish sitcom about a clutch of early-20s people awkwardly chasing careers and coupledom here. The show was first announced under the name Murray Hill but ultimately aired as Not Suitable for Work. (Hulu last week decided not to pick up a second season; Kaling is shopping it around.)\u00a0I suspect that she and the network retitled it because \u201cMurray Hill\u201d as a phrase communicates so little. \u201cSoho\u201d or \u201cthe Upper East Side\u201d or \u201cHarlem\u201d or \u201cBushwick\u201d immediately supplies a familiar narrative and feeling. But \u201cMurray Hill\u201d means almost nothing if you don\u2019t live in the city, and if you happen to be from Queens, where there is another Murray Hill out by the northeast fringe of Flushing, it is just confusing. It is a great drag-king name<\/a>, though.<\/p>\n Murray Hill is broadly defined as the area east of Madison Avenue from 34th to 40th Street, although the boundaries are muddy, particularly the southern one, which fades into the gray zone of Kips Bay\u2013Rose Hill\u2013Gramercy Park. Tellingly, much of what draws people to live in the neighborhood lies outside it. Realtors will say to you, \u201cYou can walk to Grand Central.\u201d \u201cTo the New York Public Library.\u201d \u201cTo the Indo-Pak restaurants and grocery stores of Curry Hill.\u201d\ufeff \u201cTo Koreatown.\u201d You\u2019re also near the jarringly avant-garde array of fashion at Dover Street Market and the vast assortment of doctors in the NYU Langone\/Bellevue\/VA corridor. You can even walk to the Theater District, and I can attest that a late stroll home from Broadway at 11 p.m. when the weather is nice can be a perfect way to wind down an evening.<\/p>\n Within the neighborhood\u2019s tight quasi-official borders, there\u2019s the Morgan Library & Museum, splendid but small, and comparatively little culture beyond that. There is also a widely accepted clich\u00e9 of the Murray Hiller: a native of White Plains or Roslyn or Fairfield or Morristown, freshly graduated from a good school that is neither impeccably prestigious nor artsy (the Auburns and Arizona States of the world rather than the Princetons and Oberlins). It\u2019s a short, parent-approved commute to the job at JPMorgan Chase or D.E. Shaw, or Salesforce, or in fashion merchandising over on Seventh Avenue. The Murray Hill man wears a fleece vest embroidered with his employer\u2019s logo (the bank, the fund) ten months out of the year. The Murray Hill woman has a lot in common with the West Village Girl<\/a>, particularly a shared affection for the Aperol Spritz and the Alo workout set, but her family is not quite as rich. The M.H.G. sometimes heads downtown on the weekends to cosplay as a W.V.G., particularly around brunch hour.<\/p>\n The archetypal Murray Hill couple \u2014 usually a boy and a girl; this is a noticeably un-queer neighborhood \u2014 lives a very short walk from the Morgan Library, but it\u2019s off their radar, whereas Medium Rare, the nearly menuless all-steak-frites-all-the-time restaurant, is a regular stop. (There is often a line to get in, sometimes even on weekdays.) At home, they might stock the fridge with White Claw, but for a while there was also the option of Murray Hill Girl<\/a>, a private-label wine whose label read,\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s Pinot Noir from, like, Slovenia, which is somewhere by, like, Italy.\u201d Eventually, some of these couples marry, and some of them move to a \u201creal\u201d New York neighborhood, which is to say the Upper East or Upper West Side or brownstone Brooklyn. Others, like salmon, return upstream via Metro-North or the Long Island Rail Road to the suburban headwaters in which they were born, in order to spawn.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t have a ton of celebrities among us these days, but Michael Musto \u2014 longtime columnist at The Village Voice, now at W42ST<\/a> \u2014 lives here, and that is itself a mild surprise. \u201cMy life has often been involved in nightlife, running around town, so you\u2019d think it would be advisable to have a neutral home base, and Murray Hill always had a reputation as the Switzerland of neighborhoods,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s never going to be a very sexy neighborhood, for better or for worse.\u201d He moved here after graduating from Columbia and never quite left; he\u2019s been in his current apartment for 18 years. \u201cPeople are always shocked to hear that I live in Murray Hill \u2014 it doesn\u2019t seem quite fabulous enough, and I consider that a compliment. We did have the cred of having Liz Smith<\/a> here for years, though.\u201d And he completely agrees that the neighborhood is just about the straightest in Manhattan: \u201cThere\u2019s not enough gays! In the old days, there were gay bars \u2014 all over Manhattan, but including in Murray Hill. You see a lot of beautiful guys walking, as if it\u2019s a runway, but they\u2019re walking with their girlfriends.\u201d Ask Musto what the neighborhood has to offer, and he mentions the 24-hour Duane Reade on 34th Street and the new Lidl supermarket.<\/p>\n Although it may not seem like it, I write not to bury my neighborhood but, guardedly, to praise it. For one thing, archetypes are by definition reductive, and there are plenty of people around here who are older, or\u00a0parents, or retired, or indifferent to the bar scene, or all of the above. Even so, I recognize that telling people I live in Murray Hill is a little like calling Sbarro my favorite New York slice joint<\/a>. For the sake of clarity, I usually just offer to outsiders that I live in midtown. If I need to be more specific, I use a stock phrase: \u201cIn Murray Hill. Please do not judge.\u201d They do anyway.<\/p>\n When the subject comes up with my younger Brooklynite colleagues, or the ones who live downtown, I know the look I\u2019ll get: The cocked eyebrow, the unspoken \u201creally?,\u201d the suppressed smirk. To them, Murray Hill is in Manhattan but not of Manhattan; it is neither gritty nor gorgeous nor irreproducible. If (to them, at least) the East Village has a lingering vibe of Tom Verlaine<\/a>, Murray Hill is Billy Joel<\/a>. Gramercy Park and Greenpoint have the two branches of Caff\u00e8 Panna, the ice-cream phenomenon of the moment; we have the world\u2019s last<\/a> Tasti D-Lite<\/a>, the low-cal phenomenon of the Ed Koch years. (It is a few doors down from a branch of its Bloomberg-era counterpart, 16 Handles<\/a>.) We are \u2014 as Peter Kaplan\u2019s fondly remembered New York Observer put it in a front-page story in 2005 \u2014 Murray Hell<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s the thing to do. All of our friends live here,\u201d one local M.H.G. told the Observer\u2019s reporter, Lizzy Ratner<\/a>. The mark of the basic<\/a> beast is 10016.<\/p>\n I did not know that any of this would come to pass when I moved here 35 summers ago. What I did understand was that, on an assistant editor\u2019s salary, I could afford it, at least marginally. I\u2019d wanted to live downtown, but even at a time when rents were vastly lower than they are now, it cost more to live in the West Village. Murray Hill was also relatively safe, which was a major concern in the years of 2,000 murders<\/a>. I drew an imaginary walking-distance circle around the office of the small magazine in Chelsea where I worked, and it led me to a row of brownstones and ginkgo trees on East 36th Street. It felt like the middle of the world.<\/p>\n Before the decade was out, I had bought a place a block away. (You could swing that, back then, on a middling editorial salary. A studio apartment could be had for $50,000 or so, and a one-bedroom for perhaps twice that.) I had not intended to put down roots in the neighborhood. Both times, a good deal had presented itself, and I had simply taken a path of low resistance, which I suppose is the Murray Hiller\u2019s basic way of doing things. Also, I had by then begun working for New York, and its office was on Second Avenue near East 41st Street. The phrase \u201cconvenient to work\u201d comes up a lot in the real-estate pitches for Murray Hill. If you happen to work in Hudson Yards, you can get across in one crosstown bus trip, on the 7 train, or a very short cab ride; if you\u2019re on Wall Street, it\u2019s straight down on the 4-5-6. My commute, back then, was about six minutes on foot, nine if it was snowing. This magazine has moved four times since then, each new office slightly farther from home than the last, but I have not.<\/p>\n I hasten to add that, at the time I arrived, Murray Hill was not yet the fratty, bro-ey neighborhood it was to become. Instead, Murray Hill was \u2014 if I can put it a little flatly \u2014 an old-lady neighborhood. There were days when I felt like the youngest person around by several decades. A trip to the supermarket on a weekday afternoon would put me in the company of lots of tiny elderly well-dressed women with tiny elderly well-dressed dogs. There was also an odd-looking guy, I remember, who shuffled around the neighborhood very slowly, daily for many years, his face nearly expressionless, his pants hiked up like Ralph Kramden\u2019s<\/a>, his bent arm raised and rigid as he held a cigarette a few inches from his lips, its ash lengthening with each block he covered. Now that I think about it, I haven\u2019t seen a proper New York weirdo around here in a long time. It\u2019s said that when you are at a poker table, if you can\u2019t spot the sucker, it\u2019s you. Perhaps I have aged into being the street eccentric myself.<\/p>\n A theory I have about the elegant-elder population in which I landed in the early 1990s is that they were holdouts from the long era when Murray Hill was chic. It was, for many years, where the swells lived. From Edith Wharton\u2019s time up until not too long before I got there, this was a patrician area, corresponding roughly to today\u2019s affluent Sutton Place. J.P. Morgan himself built his house here<\/a>. A few feet away, J.P. Jr. did the same (his brownstone is now the landmark corner property of the Morgan Library), and so did a variety of Phelps-Dodge-Stokes importing-and-mining heirs. When Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt married in 1904 \u2014 she the niece of a president, he a future one \u2014 they lived here, barely a block from Morgan himself, before moving uptown. A little later, in the 1940s, Jessica Tandy and her husband and co-star Hume Cronyn moved to East 35th and stayed for decades. Cole Porter lived in one of the little converted carriage houses on Sniffen Court, a tiny mews off East 36th Street. New Yorker writers lived in Murray Hill, both in their fictionalized lives<\/a> and their real ones<\/a>. So did that magazine\u2019s founding editor-in-chief, Harold Ross, in the penthouse at 22 East 36th. A play titled Murray Hill ran on Broadway in 1927, starring and written and directed by Leslie Howard, the man you may know as Ashley Wilkes from Gone With the Wind. He played an Englishman visiting his three elderly unmarried aunts who occupy a Victorian townhouse you-know-where. That was wealthy life.<\/p>\n There is even elegance in the details of the neighborhood\u2019s founding myth, which played out exactly 250 years ago. Robert and Mary Murray lived out in the country, north of British New York, at the future intersection of 37th and Park, atop an actual hill. Robert had made a bunch of money in the importing business and was a loyalist to the king; Mary, perhaps without her husband\u2019s\u00a0knowledge, supported the colonist rebels. During the battle of Kips Bay<\/a> in September 1776, Mrs. Murray distracted the English generals with tea and wine and cakes served at her home, buying the Americans several hours to retreat and regroup. Had she not done so, the American Revolution might well have been finished off that day. Mrs. Murray\u2019s tea party continues to figure in patriotic lore, a bite-size moment of resistance from a \u201cmy businessman husband votes Republican\u201d spouse.<\/p>\n I can\u2019t put a precise year on the neighborhood\u2019s turn from sedate-burgher comfort to post-fraternity row. It happened in tandem with the real-estate boom that began in the mid-1990s and has, despite a few brief pauses, never stopped. Some of the change was natural\u00a0evolution owed to rising rents; long-established residents and business were replaced by less interesting, more transient ones. I watched the\u00a0ancient butcher shop on Third Avenue, a sawdust-on-the-floors place with a big wall of solid-oak refrigerator doors behind the counter, become a corner deli, then a burger restaurant, then a different burger restaurant, and then an upscale New American place. The wine-and-liquor store a block up, in place at least since Prohibition, has in the last 30 years become a Chinese restaurant, then another Chinese restaurant, then a third Chinese restaurant, and then a pile of rubble where a dead-eyed new apartment building is now rising.<\/p>\n But I think there were also inherent qualities that pushed Murray Hill into second-tier-neighborhood status. The West and East Villages have their respective arts and punk pasts, allowing you to persuade yourself that you\u2019re following in the footsteps of Djuna Barnes<\/a> or Richard Hell<\/a> as you go off to work at McKinsey & Co. By contrast, Murray Hill\u2019s past was plain old bourgeois, and has been for a century. I couldn\u2019t begin to tell you when (if?) we last had a new culture-adjacent business like a bookstore or a guitar shop or even a stationer\u2019s. (We had a lovely rare-book dealer and a ballet-supply boutique on Madison Avenue near 35th Street; those storefronts are now both vacant, with a vape store in between.) There is also almost no green space at all. St. Vartan Park, over on First Avenue, is useful and pleasant, but it\u2019s mostly pavement, playground, and artificial turf.<\/a> There is also too much car traffic around, owing to the presence of the Queens\u2013Midtown Tunnel, for Murray Hill to be truly cozy. The heart of the Village is Washington Square; the heart of Murray Hill is nonexistent.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also a shortage of lively neighborhood businesses. Consider the eastern side of Third Avenue above 35th Street. It now goes, from south to north, as follows: nail salon, weed shop, haircutter, weed shop, haircutter, sandwich shop, nail salon, haircutter. There\u2019s yet another nail salon across the street, with three more within a block or so. I would pretty nearly kill for one of those cultural businesses \u2014 or a good fishmonger, or even a shoppy shop<\/a> \u2014 around here, but the economics seem hopeless unless you\u2019re in the business of trimming keratin<\/a>. Or, weirdly, selling pastrami: In an five-block radius, we have the 2nd Avenue Deli,\u00a0a new place about to open at 40th and Lex, and Sarge\u2019s Deli. (I hesitate to say this, lest I get shoved aside at the counter, but Sarge\u2019s \u2014\u00a0which isn\u2019t nearly as famous as Katz\u2019s or 2nd Avenue \u2014 is at least as good and very possibly better. It\u2019s a goddamned civic treasure.)<\/p>\n What we also have, in quantity, is bars. That at least has some continuity with the old days, because Third Avenue\u2019s saloons at mid-century were where the sots washed up, like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. The men slumped in those long-ago joints would not be at home in a Murray Hill bar these days, however. Most are now sports bars, with big TV sets and a lot of noise, especially on a playoff night. (A few have in the past few years matured, with age, into upscale-cocktail-bar territory.) It surprised me, as I watched Not Suitable for Work, how little of that scene showed up onscreen. There wasn\u2019t really a\u00a0third-place hangout of the Central Perk<\/a> or MacLaren\u2019s Pub<\/a> variety. A South Asian restaurant (of which we have many<\/a>) made repeat appearances, yet it was called Royal Bangladesh, a name that references an old place on 6th Street<\/a>. Most unexpected of all, the exterior shots outside the principal characters\u2019 apartment building were made on West 11th Street. In real life, Murray Hill sometimes serves as an also-ran alongside its chic cousin, a Walmart Great Value version of the Village, but in this TV version, the opposite somehow came to be.<\/p>\n And there, hidden in that odd inversion, you can spot the Secret Weapon of Murray Hill. Beloved, obsessed-over neighborhoods, from the Village to Greenpoint, have all been commodified and branded within an inch of their lives, to the point where they\u2019re becoming stage sets of themselves. The W.V.G.s have all but crowded out the last gray-ponytail elders from Greenwich Village, and its turnover will soon be complete. The Upper East Side\u2019s affluent parents just grow more affluent, their Hamptons lawns more manicured, their strollers taller and more Danish-looking, their immense consumption ever more BPA-free. If you were to make a TV show out of any of these neighborhoods, you\u2019d have to exaggerate those cultural stereotypes to make it work.<\/p>\n Murray Hill, by contrast, can\u2019t be a stage set of itself, because it\u2019s not distinctive enough. (As my editor once said some years ago when I mentioned where I live, \u201cWhat a non-neighborhood.\u201d) I suspect that Not Suitable for Work skipped creating a real-life local hangout for that very reason: You\u2019d have to invent, out of whole cloth, whatever it is. There may be a clich\u00e9 of the postcollegiate Murray Hill resident who spends a few years here before moving on, but there is (Slovenian Pinot Noir aside) no Murray Hill brand, or at least there isn\u2019t one yet. That, oddly enough, is itself distinctive. When so many pieces of New York have been relentlessly framed as an out-of-towner\u2019s idea of themselves, Murray Hill just keeps being its everyday nail-salon-next-to-a-weed-shop self. There\u2019s a name for that quality: authenticity. I live in what may be the last slice of lower Manhattan that is underpackaged, and that leaves it manageable and steadily, uncomplicatedly livable. Let the junior executives\u00a0pass through, coming and going; I\u2019m staying right here. Probably forever.<\/p>\n Sign Up for the Curbed Newsletter<\/p>\n A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n