Walk Second Avenue in the high 70s on a winter afternoon and the smell is gone now, but old neighbors will tell you it used to stop you on the sidewalk: paprika and smoked pork drifting out of butcher doorways, sweet poppy seed and vanilla from the bakeries, coffee thick enough to chew. For most of the twentieth century this slice of the Upper East Side answered to a different name. New Yorkers called it Goulash Avenue, and the people who made it were the Hungarians in Yorkville.
They built churches and a meat market with its own smokehouse, a spice importer that supplied half the city’s Hungarian kitchens, and restaurants where the gulyas came with a bowl of strudel and a long argument about home. Most of it is gone. Some of it, stubbornly, is not.
Yorkville: The Place
Yorkville runs along the eastern edge of the Upper East Side, roughly from 79th Street up to 96th, between Third Avenue and the East River. For decades it was working-class and walk-up, a district of tenements and modest brownstones shadowed by the Second and Third Avenue elevated trains. The Hungarian heart of it sat on Second Avenue between about 78th and 86th Streets, a few blocks east of the German and Czech stretches, all of it now served by the Q line on the Second Avenue subway.
How Yorkville Became Little Hungary
Before the Hungarians
The Hungarians were not first. Through the nineteenth century Yorkville was a German town, the largest concentration of Germans and Austrians in the city, with beer halls and shooting clubs and singing societies along 86th Street. Czechs and Slovaks settled the blocks to the south, around 72nd Street between First and Second Avenues. When the Hungarians arrived they slotted into a Central European quarter that was already dense, already layered, already speaking half a dozen languages on a single block.
The German community that defined early Yorkville set the template the later arrivals followed: church, social hall, butcher, bakery, newspaper, repeat. The smaller Austrian presence woven through the same streets blurred the line further, since to an outsider a Viennese cafe and a Budapest one looked very much alike.
The Hungarians Arrive
New York’s first Hungarian quarter was downtown, not uptown. In the 1880s and 1890s economic emigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire crowded into the Lower East Side, clustering on a stretch of East Houston Street that the city nicknamed Goulash Row. Its anchor was a restaurant called Little Hungary at 255 to 263 East Houston, a candlelit cellar of casks and gypsy music that drew slumming millionaires and reform politicians alike. Theodore Roosevelt dined there as police commissioner and again, after winning the White House, returned for a banquet in his honor.
Then the neighborhood emptied uptown. As Germans moved from downtown to Yorkville, Hungarians followed them north into the less crowded tenements above 79th Street, carrying their churches, bookshops, bakeries and restaurants with them. By the 1910s the center of Hungarian New York had shifted from Houston Street to Second Avenue, and Prohibition finished off what remained of the old downtown Little Hungary in 1920.
Yorkville at Its Peak
The community kept arriving in waves, and each wave deepened it. The economic migrants of the prewar decades were joined after 1945 by displaced persons fleeing a Europe in ruins, and then by the largest and most famous wave of all. When the Soviets crushed the Hungarian Revolution in the autumn of 1956, some 200,000 people fled the country, and the United States admitted about 38,000 of them under President Eisenhower’s emergency parole. Most were processed at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, a short train ride away, and a great many ended up in Yorkville because that is where the language, the churches and the jobs already were.
By the 1950s and 1960s Second Avenue was at full strength. Hungarian was spoken in the shops. The butcher counters sold six kinds of bacon and a wall of sausage, the bakeries turned out dobos torte and poppy seed strudel, and the restaurants served three-course lunches for a few dollars. Children went to a Saturday Hungarian school, scouts met in church basements, and the whole apparatus of an immigrant world ran in miniature along eight blocks.
The Change
What undid it was partly success and partly real estate. The immigrant families prospered, their American-born children assimilated, and the next generation left the walk-ups for the suburbs. When the city tore down the Second and Third Avenue elevated trains, the blocks they had darkened suddenly turned desirable. Rents climbed, brownstones were sold, and through the 1970s and 1980s the name on the neighborhood quietly changed from Yorkville to Upper East Side.
The Hungarian businesses thinned out one by one. A landlord raised a rent, an owner retired with no child to take over, a lease ran out and a bank branch took the corner. By the time the century turned, Goulash Avenue was a memory carried mostly by the people who had eaten there.
The Landmarks of Little Hungary
St. Stephen of Hungary Church, 414 East 82nd Street. The parish was founded in 1902 by Father Lászlo Perényi, a priest sent to serve the swelling immigrant population, and it worshiped first in a borrowed church on 14th Street before building its own Romanesque Revival home in Yorkville in 1927 and 1928. For generations it was the spiritual center of Hungarian Catholic New York, the place families came for baptisms, weddings and the August feast of the patron saint-king. In 2015 the archdiocese merged the parish into nearby St. Monica, but the building survives and still hosts a Sunday Mass, and 82nd Street now carries the honorary name St. Stephen of Hungary Way.
The First Hungarian Reformed Church, 344 East 69th Street. The Protestant counterpart to St. Stephen’s, this congregation organized in 1895 among downtown immigrants and moved uptown with its flock. Its stucco-faced church, completed in 1916, is the only house of worship designed by the Hungarian-born architect Emery Roth, better known later for his grand apartment towers on Central Park West. New York landmarked the little building in 2019, recognizing it as a rare survivor of immigrant Yorkville.
Paprikás Weiss, 1546 and later 1576 Second Avenue. For nearly a century three generations of the Weiss family ran this spice importer and gourmet shop, its bins fragrant with paprika and caraway, its shelves stacked with Hungarian crockery, linens and hard-to-find groceries. It supplied home cooks across the city and published its own cookbook, becoming shorthand for the whole neighborhood. The store closed in 1995, one of the great losses of the fade.
The Hungarian Meat Market, 1560 Second Avenue. Opened around 1950 when the avenue was still a Hungarian stronghold, this butcher ran a licensed smokehouse on the premises and turned out Gyulai, Csabai and Debreceni sausage, smoked bacon and fresh hurka for a clientele that knew the difference. Brothers Lászlo and Ferenc Gubicza bought it in 2001 and kept the smoke going. A fire gutted the shop in June 2011, and it closed for good soon after, the last working remnant of Goulash Avenue’s meat trade.
Mocca, 1588 Second Avenue. Its name meant coffee, and for more than twenty-five years it was the neighborhood’s living room, a plain-fronted restaurant where the chicken paprikash and the elderly regulars both seemed to predate the menu. By its final years it was the last Hungarian restaurant left on the avenue, the Red Tulip and the others already vanished. Mocca closed at the end of 2004, and a Sichuan kitchen took the room.
The Hungarian House, 213 to 215 East 82nd Street. In two Civil War-era townhouses that had once belonged to a German athletic club, three Hungarian organizations opened a cultural center in 1966. Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, the symbol of Hungarian resistance to communism, visited in 1974, and over the years the building hosted prime ministers, presidents and the physicist Edward Teller. It still runs concerts, lectures, folk-dance nights and language classes, and it shares its address with the American Hungarian Library.
Where the Yorkville Hungarians Came From
The earliest arrivals came mostly as economic emigrants from across the old Kingdom of Hungary, a sprawling realm that then took in much of present-day Slovakia, Transylvania and the Banat as well as Hungary proper. Many were small farmers and laborers from the countryside, leaving land that could not support them, and they often shared boats and blocks with Slovaks and other subjects of the same crown, which is why the early quarter felt as much Central European as strictly Magyar.
The postwar arrivals were different. The displaced persons of the late 1940s and the refugees of 1956 included tradespeople, students, professionals and intellectuals, urban Hungarians who had fled Budapest and the larger towns ahead of the Soviet tanks. They gave the later neighborhood a more political, more cosmopolitan cast, and many of them built the institutions, the school, the scouts, the Hungarian House, that still carry the community today. For the wider arc of this migration, it is worth reading how Hungarians settled the mill towns of New Brunswick, New Jersey and the great industrial colony in Cleveland’s Buckeye neighborhood, both of which drew from the same villages and the same revolutions.
Yorkville Today
Goulash Avenue is not coming back, and the neighborhood does not pretend otherwise. The butcher shops and the spice importer are gone, the restaurants are mostly Italian and Japanese now, and the walk-ups that housed waves of immigrants have been renovated past recognition. A newcomer could walk the whole stretch and never guess what it was.
And yet the bones are there for anyone who looks. St. Stephen’s still rings on Sundays under its honorary street sign, the First Hungarian Reformed Church stands landmarked on 69th Street, and the Hungarian House on 82nd is busier in its sixth decade than a lot of younger institutions, with folk dancing, a library and a Saturday school that has taught Hungarian to children without a break since 1963. Every March 15 the community still gathers to mark the 1848 revolution, sometimes at the Kossuth monument that Hungarian New Yorkers raised on Riverside Drive at 113th Street in 1928.
The Hungarians in Yorkville did what immigrant New York always does. They built a world, lived in it, prospered out of it, and left behind a handful of stubborn landmarks and a memory of how a single avenue once smelled of paprika. The smell is gone, but the people who remember it, and the children learning the language on Saturday mornings, are keeping the address alive.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Hungarians settle in Yorkville?
Hungarians first settled downtown on the Lower East Side in the 1880s and 1890s, then followed the German community uptown to Yorkville after 1900 in search of less crowded tenements. The Hungarians in Yorkville concentrated on Second Avenue, where churches, shops and jobs drew each new wave of arrivals, including the 1956 refugees.
Is Yorkville still a Hungarian neighborhood today?
Not in the way it once was. The shops and restaurants that made up Goulash Avenue have nearly all closed, and the area is now part of the broader Upper East Side. But St. Stephen of Hungary Church, the First Hungarian Reformed Church and the Hungarian House all survive and keep the community’s traditions alive.
What were the most famous Hungarian landmarks in Yorkville?
The best known were Paprikás Weiss, a spice importer that ran for nearly a century until 1995, and the Hungarian Meat Market on Second Avenue with its on-site smokehouse. St. Stephen of Hungary Church on 82nd Street and the Hungarian House cultural center are the anchors that remain standing.
Where did the Yorkville Hungarians come from?
The earliest came as economic emigrants from across the old Kingdom of Hungary, including rural areas of present-day Slovakia and Transylvania. Later waves were displaced persons after 1945 and refugees from Budapest and other cities after the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution, many processed at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey.
When did Hungarians first arrive in New York?
The first significant Hungarian arrivals came in the 1880s and settled around East Houston Street on the Lower East Side. The Hungarians in Yorkville established their uptown quarter after 1900, and the community reached its peak strength on Second Avenue in the decades after the 1956 refugee wave.
If your family’s story passed through the walk-ups of Yorkville or the cellar tables of old Goulash Avenue, the streets still hold more than they let on.