63rd St Between 1st Ave and 2nd Ave

In the middle of the posh Upper East Side, this block is an ugly duckling that tries its very best to fit in. While some nice apartment buildings and local businesses make this seem like any other street, the MTA, ConEd and the DOT all have a presence that completely ruin the atmosphere. 

Starting off simply enough, you'll first encounter a large brick and steel-cased wall which seems to hold some ambiguous ConEdison equipment. It's a bit jarring, but if you look hard enough you'll find similar structures all around the city. The next intrusion is a bit harder to recover from: After traveling over a mile from Queens, about 1/3rd of the traffic from the 59th Street Bridge will inevitably end up on the offramp you encounter about halfway down the block. While the ramp graciously leaps over 60 and 61st Streets, 62nd and 63rd both bear the brunt of the noise and traffic, allowing them to go east and west, respectively. Thanks to this, the second half of this block is nothing but cars piled up on each other while they wait to turn on to 2nd Avenue.

Finally, approaching the western end of the block a large MTA Ventilating Tower sits along with an utterly inexplicable green house-like structure. The large tower, which serves the eponymous 63rd Street Tunnel, makes no attempt to fade into the neighborhood. Instead it sits like a sore thumb with its own front yard. The green house-like thing used to hold a public display of the East Side Access Project, though I honestly don't know if that's still the case.

Comments

[Josh]

The "green house-like thing", specifically the prefabbed building in the same lot, is now MTA/construction office space for the 2nd Ave subway project. I believe that plot will be used for another ventilation station for that subway as well.