Lincoln Towers is an apartment complex on the

Upper West Side The Upper West Side (UWS) is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It is bounded by Central Park on the east, the Hudson River on the west, West 59th Street to the south, and West 110th Street to the north. The Upper West ...

of the

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

borough A borough is an administrative division in various English-speaking countries. In principle, the term ''borough'' designates a self-governing walled town, although in practice, official use of the term varies widely. History In the Middle A ...

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

that consists of six buildings with eight addresses on a campus.

Location and description

It is bounded on the south by West 66th Street, on the west by Freedom Place, on the north by West 70th Street, and on the east by Amsterdam Avenue. Each building has a West End Avenue address, although one of the Lincoln Towers buildings has its entrance on West 66th Street, another on West 70th Street, and another is closer to Amsterdam Avenue than West End Avenue. Some buildings have 28 floors and some have 29 floors and between 15 and 20 apartments per floor. Lincoln Towers houses so many people that some buildings are their own polling place. The ground floor of each building is primarily occupied by professional offices and other small businesses; the upper floors are residential.

Features

Within Lincoln Towers there is an outreach program, "Project Open," that supports the elderly with assistance from social workers, shopping services, art classes and educational trips. The private parks, schools, the general appeal of the Upper West Side and proximity of the buildings to Lincoln Center have made the complex desirable to families ranging from singles and young families to empty nesters and retirees. The complex houses a large private outdoor space on the far west side of the property containing a floor hockey court, basketball courts, two playgrounds, and green grass for its tenants. There are other large park-like expanses between and behind the buildings on the east side of West End Avenue.

History

Lincoln Towers is part of the massive Lincoln Square urban redevelopment of the old

San Juan Hill San Juan Hill is a series of hills to the east of Santiago, Cuba, running north to south. The area is known as the San Juan Heights or in Spanish ''Alturas de San Juan'' before Spanish–American War of 1898, and are now part of Lomas de San Ju ...

district of Manhattan that took place in the 1960s and saw the razing of a large area of what were deemed slums by development officials. Researchers at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

recently completed an architectural history of the Lincoln Square redevelopment project.Lincoln Square: Preserving the Modern Architecture of Slum Clearance, Urban Renewal and their Architectural Aftermath
/ref> The development was converted from rental apartments to a complex condominium/co-op structure in 1987. Each building is an independent condominium comprising the residences, the professional units, and the underground garage. The residential portion of each building is, in turn, a co-op. Each of the buildings, comprising eight addresses, is a member of the Lincoln Towers Community Association, an umbrella organization responsible for the maintenance of the grounds and provision of security on the large, parklike campus.

References

{{coord, 40.777, -73.987, type:landmark_globe:earth_region:US-NY, display=title Residential buildings in Manhattan Condominiums and housing cooperatives in Manhattan West End Avenue Upper West Side