On a Saturday in September, Fifth Avenue fills with brass bands, dirndls, and the blue-and-white diamonds of the Bavarian flag, marching north toward 86th Street. A century ago this was an everyday sound on these blocks. The accordion music spilled from second-floor dance halls, the smell of roasting pork and fresh rye drifted out of corner shops, and the German you heard on the sidewalk was as common as English. This is the last living echo of the Germans in Yorkville, the Upper East Side quarter that New Yorkers once simply called Germantown.
Yorkville: The Place
Yorkville sits on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, running roughly from 79th Street to 96th Street and east of Third Avenue down to the East River. For decades the Second and Third Avenue elevated trains rumbled overhead, walling the neighborhood off from the wealthier blocks to the west. The housing was modest by Manhattan standards: walk-up tenements, brownstones, and the leafy edge of Carl Schurz Park, itself named for a German immigrant. Today the 4, 5, 6, and Q trains serve it, and glass towers crowd the avenues that streetcars once ran along.
How Yorkville Became Germantown
Before the Germans
Before it was German, Yorkville was farmland and country estates, a sleepy village that first appeared on city maps around 1870. Its name came from an old settlement near the post road that ran up the east side of Manhattan. When the elevated railways pushed north in the 1870s and 1880s, cheap, fast transit suddenly made the area reachable for working families. Rowhouses and tenements went up block by block, and the village filled with people priced out of the crowded wards downtown.
The Germans Arrive
The Germans came uptown from Kleindeutschland, the Little Germany packed into the Lower East Side, where by the 1880s New York held one of the largest German-speaking populations of any city on earth. Second-generation families had already begun trickling north between 1870 and 1900, following the new train lines to roomier streets. They came from across the German states: Bavarians, who were the single largest group, alongside Prussians, Hessians, Württembergers, and Swabians, many of them tailors, brewers, butchers, and craftspeople. You can trace the longer arc of that migration in the story of the Germans in Little Germany on the Lower East Side.
Then came the disaster that broke the old neighborhood. On June 15, 1904, the steamboat General Slocum, chartered by St. Mark’s Lutheran Church for its annual picnic, caught fire on the East River. Of roughly 1,342 aboard, almost all of them women and children from Little Germany, an estimated 1,021 died. It remained the city’s deadliest single-day catastrophe until September 11, 2001.
The grief hollowed out Kleindeutschland. Widowers could not bear the streets that held their families, and survivors followed relatives who had already settled uptown. By the 1910 census only about a tenth of the city’s Germans still lived downtown. The center of German New York had moved decisively to Yorkville.
Yorkville at Its Peak
By the 1910s and 1920s, Yorkville was the beating heart of German America in New York. East 86th Street earned its nicknames: German Broadway, the German Boulevard, and most affectionately, Sauerkraut Boulevard. Cafes, beer halls, butcher shops, bakeries, and dance halls lined the street, and the city’s great German breweries, Ruppert, Ehret, and Doelger among them, rose just to the north.
This was a self-contained world. The Neue Yorker Staats-Zeitung, the German-language daily, sold around 80,000 copies a day in 1938. German-language theaters and cinemas drew full houses, singing societies and gymnastic clubs met in the evenings, and Lutheran and Catholic parishes anchored the calendar. A family could be born, schooled, married, and buried almost entirely in German, all within a dozen blocks.
The neighborhood was never only German, and that texture mattered. Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Austrians lived alongside their German neighbors, sharing the cafes and the same crowded avenues. The story of the Austrians in Yorkville runs in close parallel, often on the very same blocks.
The Change
The 1930s brought a darker chapter that the neighborhood has never fully shaken. Yorkville became the New York base of the German American Bund, the pro-Nazi movement led by Fritz Kuhn, which staged marches on 86th Street and Second Avenue. On February 20, 1939, the Bund packed more than 20,000 people into Madison Square Garden for a rally held under a giant portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas.
Yet the community was deeply divided, and most of its Germans wanted no part of it. Bund marches drew spontaneous counter-protests from residents, and the group’s open provocations toward Jewish New Yorkers triggered street fights. Many German Americans, here and across the country, were appalled by the Bund and said so. The episode collapsed almost as fast as it had risen: Kuhn was convicted of embezzling the organization’s own funds and jailed by the end of 1939, and the movement disintegrated.
The slower decline came from the city itself. The Second and Third Avenue elevated lines were torn down in the 1940s and 1950s, opening Yorkville to wealthier developers and a wave of new apartment towers. Rents climbed, old shops lost their leases, and assimilation did the rest, as German-speaking grandparents gave way to English-speaking grandchildren who moved to the suburbs. By the 1960s the German staples were closing one after another.
The Landmarks of Yorkville
Schaller & Weber (1654 Second Avenue) is the survivor that anchors the block. Ferdinand Schaller and Tony Weber opened their butcher shop and delicatessen in 1937, curing their own wursts and hanging hams in the window. Nearly ninety years on it is still family-run, with Ferdinand’s grandson Jeremy Schaller behind the counter, and its smoked sausages still draw New Yorkers from across the city.
The Heidelberg Restaurant (1648 Second Avenue) sits just two doors south, in a building dating to 1873. The space ran as a cabaret and a Prohibition-era speakeasy, then operated as Cafe Vaterland until 1939, when it reopened as the Heidelberg and never looked back. With its dark timber, antler chandelier, lederhosen-clad waiters, and boot-shaped glasses of beer, it is the last full-service German restaurant left in Yorkville, now run by the third generation of the same family.
Glaser’s Bake Shop (1670 First Avenue) was the neighborhood’s heart for 116 years. German immigrants opened it in 1902, and it is widely credited as the birthplace of the black-and-white cookie, that half-vanilla, half-chocolate New York icon. Cash-only and without air conditioning to the end, with its original tile floor intact, Glaser’s closed on July 1, 2018, and a line wrapped the block for a last taste.
The Yorkville Casino (210 East 86th Street) was the social engine of German Broadway. Built in 1904, it was a sprawling entertainment complex with a ballroom of more than 15,000 square feet, a German-language theater, dancing, and film, sometimes called the German Madison Square Garden. Generations courted, celebrated, and argued politics under its roof before it too vanished.
Cafe Geiger and Kleine Konditorei were the genteel face of the boulevard. Cafe Geiger was a Konditorei where you could take Sachertorte and strong coffee while a pianist played Schubert, and Kleine Konditorei offered the same Old World pastry-shop calm. Both have closed, but for decades they were where families went to mark a Sunday or a name day.
The Lorelei dance hall, upstairs near the corner of Lexington Avenue, was where the boulevard let its hair down. Alongside spots like Cafe Mozart and Maxl’s, it kept 86th Street loud and lit late into the night, the music fueled by the neighborhood’s famous breweries. The dancing is long gone, but the names still surface whenever old Yorkville is remembered.
Zion-St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church (339-341 East 84th Street) carries the neighborhood’s deepest scar. The St. Mark’s congregation lost much of its membership on the General Slocum and never recovered, and in 1946 it merged with Zion, the German Lutheran church of Yorkville. The congregation has kept the Slocum’s memory alive through memorial services and preserved photographs of the dead.
Where the Yorkville Germans Came From
The Germans of Yorkville did not come from one place but from a patchwork of nineteenth-century German states. Bavarians formed the largest single contingent, joined by Prussians, who made up close to a third of the city’s German-born population by 1880, along with Hessians, Württembergers, and Swabians from the southwest. Many were tradespeople, weavers, tailors, brewers, and bakers, pushed out by rural poverty and the upheavals that followed the failed revolutions of 1848.
Chain migration did the rest. One brother would establish himself, then send word and passage money home, and soon an entire village’s worth of cousins and neighbors had resettled within a few Yorkville blocks. The same pattern of village-to-street migration shaped German enclaves far beyond New York, including the Germans of Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, another great German-American quarter built brick by brick on family ties.
Yorkville Today
Yorkville in 2026 is an ordinary, expensive slice of the Upper East Side. Glass towers line Second Avenue, the new subway runs beneath it, and most newcomers have no idea the neighborhood was ever called Germantown. The cafes, the dance halls, and nearly all the breweries are gone, their buildings replaced or repurposed.
What remains is concentrated and stubborn. Schaller & Weber still cures sausage on Second Avenue, the Heidelberg still pours dark beer two doors down, and Zion-St. Mark’s still keeps its Slocum memorial. Each September the German-American Steuben Parade, first held in 1958 and now in its seventh decade, marches up Fifth Avenue toward 86th Street, drawing bands, clubs, and dirndls back to the old boulevard for a day.
The Germantown of 86th Street is no longer a place you can live in, only one you can taste, hear, and remember. But on a butcher’s counter, in a beer hall’s antlered gloom, and in a parade that still turns toward the old neighborhood, the Germans in Yorkville are not quite finished writing their chapter of New York.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Germans settle in Yorkville?
German families began moving to Yorkville from the Lower East Side in the late 1800s as new elevated train lines made the Upper East Side cheap and easy to reach. The migration accelerated sharply after the 1904 General Slocum disaster devastated Little Germany. By 1910, the Germans in Yorkville had made it the new center of German New York.
Is Yorkville still a German neighborhood today?
No, Yorkville is now a typical, high-rent stretch of the Upper East Side, and the German community largely dispersed by the 1960s. A few institutions survive, including Schaller & Weber and the Heidelberg Restaurant on Second Avenue, and the Steuben Parade still marches each September. They are the last working traces of what was once called Germantown.
What were the most famous landmarks of German Yorkville?
East 86th Street, nicknamed Sauerkraut Boulevard, was the commercial heart, lined with the Yorkville Casino, Cafe Geiger, the Lorelei dance hall, and Kleine Konditorei. Glaser’s Bake Shop on First Avenue, opened in 1902, is credited as the birthplace of the black-and-white cookie. Schaller & Weber and the Heidelberg Restaurant remain the best-known survivors.
Where did the Yorkville Germans come from?
They came from across the nineteenth-century German states, with Bavarians the largest group, followed by Prussians, Hessians, Württembergers, and Swabians. Many were tradespeople driven out by rural poverty and the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. Chain migration meant that whole villages often resettled within the same few blocks of Yorkville.
When did Germans first arrive in Yorkville?
Second-generation German New Yorkers began settling in Yorkville between 1870 and 1900, as the area developed along the new elevated railways. The community grew rapidly after the 1904 General Slocum fire pushed survivors uptown from Little Germany. By the 1910s, the Germans in Yorkville had built a self-contained neighborhood around East 86th Street.
If your family’s story passed through the cafes, churches, or tenements of Yorkville, those streets are part of who you are. Tracing them back to a Bavarian village or a Lower East Side pew is how a neighborhood becomes a personal history again.