They called it Germantown, but the German they spoke was sometimes Viennese. From the 1880s through the 1940s, if you climbed the stairs out of the Second Avenue El at 86th Street, you stepped into a fragment of the Habsburg world. Bakery windows held strudel and Sachertorte. Butchers strung weisswurst and bratwurst above sawdust floors.
Old men argued in the Austrian lilt of Salzburg or Burgenland over a glass of Heuriger wine, and somewhere behind a beaded curtain, a piano played a Strauss waltz. By 1930, more than half of Yorkville claimed German or Austrian heritage. Today, fewer than five percent do.
Yorkville, The Place
Yorkville sits on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, running roughly from 79th Street to 96th Street, between Third Avenue and the East River. For much of the twentieth century it was the eastern edge of New York, hemmed in by the rumble of the elevated trains on Second and Third Avenues and the cold smell of the river beyond.
The housing is tenement brick, low-rise walk-ups, and the broad postwar apartment buildings that rose after the El came down. Lexington Avenue stitches it to the rest of the East Side. The Q train at 86th and Second now runs where Austrian weddings once spilled out of beer gardens onto the sidewalk.
How Yorkville Became Austrian
Before the Austrians
Yorkville started as farmland. By the 1830s it had become a small village around the Boston Post Road, named for the Duke of York. The first arrivals after the village stage were Anglo-Dutch landowners and Irish labourers who came uptown to build the Croton Aqueduct in the 1840s.
Through the 1850s and 1860s, Yorkville was modest, mixed, and quiet, a place of breweries and market gardens at the far end of the omnibus lines. It would take the elevated railways, and then a catastrophe downtown, to remake it.
The Austrians Arrive
German-speaking immigrants had been pouring into Manhattan since the 1840s, settling first in Kleindeutschland on the Lower East Side. Austrians from the Habsburg Empire arrived in their wake. Tyroleans fleeing the Metternich years came early. Vorarlbergers, Styrians and Lower Austrians followed, often pulled across the Atlantic by a brother or a cousin already settled in New York.
The first Yorkville pull factor was rent. After the 1878 opening of the Third Avenue El, working-class German-speaking families could now live thirty blocks uptown and still get to work. Then came the General Slocum disaster of 15 June 1904, in which a chartered steamboat fire on the East River killed more than a thousand parishioners of St. Mark’s Lutheran in Kleindeutschland, most of them women and children. The Lower East Side’s German heart went out of it overnight. The survivors moved north. Yorkville became the centre of German-speaking New York, and Austrian families came up with it.
A second, very different Austrian wave arrived in March 1938. When Hitler’s troops crossed into Austria and the Anschluss folded the country into the Reich, Vienna’s Jews became refugees in a matter of days. Between 1938 and 1941 more than 1,200 ships carried roughly 111,000 Jewish refugees from Central Europe to New York. A large share were Austrian Jews from Vienna, Graz, Linz, and the smaller cities of Lower Austria.
Many of them were doctors, lawyers, psychoanalysts, musicians, professors. The Emergency Committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association, run from New York, helped scores of Vienna analysts cross over, among them Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, Margaret Mahler and Kurt Eissler. Some settled in Washington Heights, others in the Upper West Side, but a significant number landed in Yorkville, where they could still buy a kaiser roll on Sunday and hear their own dialect on the street.
Yorkville at Its Peak
From the late 1920s through the early 1940s, Yorkville was a working-class Old World city set inside Manhattan. East 86th Street was the spine of it, nicknamed Sauerkraut Boulevard, the German Boulevard, sometimes the German Broadway. Singing societies and gymnastic clubs, the Vereine, lined the side streets. Cafes served Viennese coffee with whipped cream. Konditoreis sold Linzer torte by weight.
On Sunday mornings, German-speaking Catholics walked to St. Joseph’s on East 87th Street, founded in 1873 as the national German parish of the Archdiocese of New York. Austrian Catholics from Tyrol and Salzburg sat in the same pews as Bavarians. After Mass, the men crossed Second Avenue to Schaller and Weber for the week’s weisswurst, or up to the bakeries on Third for an Apfelstrudel that tasted like Vienna.
Daily life was specific and granular. Children walked to St. Joseph’s parish school. Mothers shopped on 86th Street and took the streetcar home. On summer evenings, the rooftops filled with families escaping the heat, and somewhere a window opened on a Mozart sonata or a Strauss waltz on a wind-up gramophone. The Austrian sound of Yorkville, slightly softer than the Bavarian one, blurred into a shared Habsburg accent that older residents still recognise.
The Change
The first crack came from inside. In the 1930s, Fritz Kuhn’s German American Bund, the most notorious pro-Nazi organisation in the United States, set up its national headquarters in Yorkville. The Bund marched in uniform up East 86th Street on 30 October 1937, swastika armbands among the lederhosen, and held its infamous Madison Square Garden rally in February 1939, drawing more than twenty thousand sympathisers and tens of thousands of counter-protesters.
Most Yorkville Germans and Austrians were not Bund members. Many despised it. But the stigma settled on the whole neighbourhood. When the United States entered the war in December 1941, German and Austrian families were watched, sometimes harassed, occasionally interned. Bakery signs that had been in Gothic German script were repainted in English. Some families stopped speaking the old language at home and never returned to it.
After the war, a third Austrian wave arrived. Holocaust survivors, displaced persons, and anti-Communist refugees from the Soviet zones of Austria came through Yorkville from 1945 into the 1950s. But the trajectory was already set.
The Third Avenue El came down in 1955. The Second Avenue El had gone in 1942. With the elevated trains gone, the eastern edge of Yorkville lost its border and was absorbed into the wider Upper East Side.
White-flight suburbanisation pulled second-generation Austrians out to Westchester, Long Island, and northern New Jersey. The 1965 Immigration Act ended the European-quota system that had once channelled Habsburg Catholics here. By the 1970s, the Austrian Yorkville was visibly ageing. By the 1990s, it had become an outline.
The Landmarks of Austrian Yorkville
Schaller and Weber, 1654 Second Avenue. Opened in 1937 by Ferdinand Schaller, a Stuttgart-trained butcher, and his partner Tony Weber, the shop became the unofficial pantry of German-speaking Yorkville. Through the 1940s, 50s and 60s it was a beacon for German and Austrian refugees, who came every week from across the city to stock up on the meats and pickles they remembered from Europe. It still trades from the same storefront near the corner of 86th Street, hand-stuffing sausages on premises until 1960 and to this day curing some of the only American-made bündnerfleisch on the East Coast.
Heidelberg Restaurant, 1648 Second Avenue. The Heidelberg as a German-Austrian restaurant dates to 1939, though the 1873 building had housed cabarets and a speakeasy before then. Eva Matischak’s parents bought it in 1963, and the menu has changed barely at all since. Wiener schnitzel, sauerbraten, kaiserschmarrn, beer in stoneware steins, an oompah soundtrack and lederhosen-clad waitstaff. It is one of the last German-Austrian restaurants in New York City, and on a Saturday night it is full.
Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue. The museum opened in 2001 in the William Starr Miller House at 86th and Fifth, the work of philanthropist Ronald S. Lauder and the Viennese-born art dealer Serge Sabarsky. Its collection is dedicated to early-twentieth-century German and Austrian art and design: Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, the Wiener Werkstätte.
The most famous painting in the building is Klimt’s gold-leaf Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, the Woman in Gold, restituted from Vienna to the Bloch-Bauer heirs in 2006 and bought by Lauder for the Neue Galerie for a then-record price. Walking through the rooms feels, on a quiet morning, like walking into Vienna in 1907.
Cafe Sabarsky, 1048 Fifth Avenue (inside the Neue Galerie). Opened with the museum in 2001, Cafe Sabarsky is a deliberate reconstruction of a fin de siecle Viennese coffeehouse: marble tables, dark wood, Adolf Loos chairs, Josef Hoffmann lighting, and a menu of Sachertorte, Esterhazy torte, Linzer torte, and Mozart-era coffee drinks. Named for Serge Sabarsky, who came to New York as a Viennese-Jewish refugee, it is the closest thing in the city to a working monument to the Vienna that Yorkville’s 1938 refugees remembered.
St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, 404 East 87th Street. Founded in 1873 to serve the German-speaking Catholics of Yorkville, St. Joseph’s was the spiritual home for Austrian Tyroleans, Salzburgers, and Burgenlanders for nearly a century. The parish school next door educated generations of Austrian-American children. A German-language Mass is still celebrated there once a month, though the congregation that hears it is much smaller and much older than it was in 1950.
Mocca Hungarian Restaurant, 1588 Second Avenue (closed 2004). Mocca, whose name simply means coffee in Hungarian, was one of the last Habsburg-era restaurants on the avenue. It opened in the 1950s and shut its doors at the end of 2004 after roughly five decades, a victim of rising rents and the dwindling Central European clientele. It is a Sichuan restaurant now. Most of Austrian Yorkville’s beer halls and cafes left the same way: with a final New Year’s Eve, and a new sign in the window the following month.
The German-American Steuben Parade, East 86th Street. Founded in 1957 in Ridgewood and moved the following year to Yorkville, the Steuben Parade was for decades the public expression of the neighbourhood’s Habsburg heritage. Austrian and Swiss groups marched alongside Germans up Fifth Avenue, across 86th Street, and down Second. The parade now starts further south on Fifth Avenue and no longer descends along Second, but it still passes through the old neighbourhood every September.
Where the Yorkville Austrians Came From
The Austrians of Yorkville did not come from one province. They came from a Habsburg Empire and, later, a small Republic that contained dozens of distinct dialects, cuisines and confessions. The largest single source was Vienna, especially after 1938, when the city’s Jewish community of roughly 180,000 was driven into exile within months.
Earlier waves came from Lower Austria and Upper Austria, from Styria and Carinthia, from Tyrol and Salzburg, from Burgenland on the Hungarian border. Many of the early-twentieth-century arrivals were Catholic farmers and tradespeople from rural valleys. The 1938 refugees were overwhelmingly urban: Vienna’s doctors, Vienna’s lawyers, Vienna’s psychoanalysts, Vienna’s musicians and writers. The two waves spoke the same language, sometimes the same dialect, and rarely sat at the same cafe table.
Yorkville Today
Yorkville in 2026 looks like a wealthy Upper East Side neighbourhood that happens to have a few very stubborn Austrian-German anchors. The walk-ups are still there in patches. So are the postwar towers. The Second Avenue Subway, finally open in 2017, has poured fresh money into 86th Street and pushed rents up another notch. Chipotle, Chick-fil-A, Krispy Kreme and Sweetgreen line the avenue where the konditoreis used to be.
What survives is concentrated in four addresses on two avenues. Schaller and Weber still sells weisswurst over a marble counter. Heidelberg still pours beer in steins. Cafe Sabarsky still serves Sachertorte under Hoffmann lamps. The Neue Galerie still holds the Woman in Gold. Once a year, the Steuben Parade comes through. Mass in German is said monthly at St. Joseph’s.
The community that built all of this is mostly gone, or aged, or scattered to the suburbs. But the buildings have refused to leave, and a new generation of New Yorkers, many with no Austrian connection at all, comes to them precisely because they feel different from the avenue around them. The Habsburg Yorkville is no longer a place where people live. It is a place where Austrian Vienna can still be tasted, an hour at a time, in the few corners where the lease was held.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Austrians settle in Yorkville?
Austrians settled in Yorkville from the 1880s because it was the German-speaking quarter of New York and they shared the same language, churches, newspapers and trades as the larger German community already there. Cheap rent along the elevated trains, the General Slocum disaster of 1904 that pushed Kleindeutschland uptown, and chain migration from Tyrol, Styria, Burgenland and later Vienna all concentrated the Austrian community on the streets around East 86th.
Are there still Austrians in Yorkville today?
Very few. Decades of suburbanisation, the death of the immigrant generation, and gentrification have left Yorkville with less than five percent of residents claiming German or Austrian ancestry, where the figure was above fifty percent in 1930. What remains is concentrated in a handful of surviving Austrian and German businesses on Second and Fifth Avenues, and in a small number of older families who never moved.
What are the most famous Austrian landmarks in Yorkville?
The surviving anchors are Schaller and Weber at 1654 Second Avenue, the Heidelberg Restaurant at 1648 Second Avenue, the Neue Galerie at 1048 Fifth Avenue, and Cafe Sabarsky inside it. St. Joseph’s Catholic Church at 404 East 87th Street remains the German national parish of the Archdiocese of New York. Ghost landmarks include Mocca Hungarian Restaurant and dozens of Austrian beer halls and cafes that closed between the 1960s and the early 2000s.
Where in Austria did the Yorkville Austrians come from?
The Yorkville Austrians came from across the Habsburg lands and later the Republic of Austria. Early waves were dominated by Tyroleans, Vorarlbergers, Styrians, Carinthians and Burgenlanders, mostly rural and Catholic. The post-1938 refugee wave was overwhelmingly Viennese and Jewish, with smaller numbers from Graz, Linz and Salzburg.
When did Austrians first arrive in Yorkville?
Austrian-speaking Habsburg subjects began settling in Yorkville in significant numbers from the 1880s, as the German-speaking community shifted uptown from the Lower East Side. The pace accelerated dramatically after the General Slocum disaster of 1904, peaked in the 1920s and 1930s, and surged again with the 1938 wave of Austrian Jewish refugees fleeing the Anschluss.
If your family’s story passed through Yorkville, or any of the places Austrians made home in the United States, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Vienna ringstrasse apartment or a Tyrolean valley to East 86th Street, to wherever your story continues now.