Murray Hill
Neighborhood Intelligence

Murray Hill takes its name from Robert Murray, a Scottish-born merchant whose family farm covered much of the area in the eighteenth century. The neighborhood sits on a steep rise of glacial till, and through the nineteenth century it was relatively isolated from the city's built-up core before becoming an upscale residential district in the twentieth. The official area covered here, NYC Planning's Murray Hill-Kips Bay, extends from East 42nd Street south to East 23rd Street and from Park Avenue east to the East River, so it combines Murray Hill's rowhouse and apartment blocks with the Kips Bay medical and residential district.

Sniffen Court, a small mews of former stables on East 36th Street, is protected as its own historic district. Tudor City, a complex of Tudor-style apartment buildings completed between 1927 and 1930, overlooks the United Nations area from East 42nd Street. Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the United States, and the NYU Langone medical campus line First Avenue, and Waterside Plaza, an apartment complex that opened in the early 1970s, rises between the FDR Drive and the river. Lexington Avenue in the East Twenties, nicknamed Curry Hill, is known for South Asian grocers and restaurants, and St. Vartan Cathedral is a landmark of the Armenian community.