There is something paradoxical about life in New York.

On the one hand, the city allows people of various ethnicities to blend into the life of the city and to share its resources.

On the other hand, New York is also very provincial. It is a city where people of the same race and similar income levels often cluster in neighborhoods, where they find comfort in their own foods and cultures.

The 2000 Census documents many neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs with a median household income of more than $180,000 a year--nine times the income of an average poor family. Some households exist on way below that level.

In most cases, such dramatically contrasting neighborhoods are not very close to one another. In Brooklyn and Queens, neighborhoods with high income levels typically border parks and meadows, like Jamaica Estates and Kew Gardens, or abut the sea, like Brooklyn Heights. The Bronx's posh Riverdale section is secluded in the hills of the southwestern tip of the borough. In all of those areas, the residents do not live adjacent to people at the lowest end of the income spectrum. (click here to link to a nyc gov map showing income disparities)

There is one area of Manhattan, however, where rich and poor neighborhoods have an abrupt demarcation line -- East 96th Street -- where the Upper East Side ends and East Harlem starts. Here,within a few blocks, the median household income changes dramatically. (more…. ).

Suzanne Wasserman, associate director of the City University of New York's Gotham Center for New York History, said the disparities across East 96th Street haven't changed like other parts of Manhattan in recent years. Wasserman noted the changes that have taken place in neighborhoods like Hell's Kitchen and the area northwest of the Lower East Side, but these neighborhoods changed from industrial to residential.

She said that once the ports and garment industries declined, these two working class neighborhoods became valuable real estate and were gentrified with developers christening them Clinton and East Village.

Wasserman was uncertain why East 96th Street was a relatively impermeable barrier.

Pedro Pedraza, research director at Hunter College's Center for Puerto Rican Studies, said the boundary has stayed resilient because of the contrasting income levels. He said that developers want to maintain the Upper East Side's real estate prices at high levels. They move north only if they can get a good price for their development projects in areas being redubbed as Upper Yorkville and Upper Upper East Side as a way to feed off the Upper East Side's prestige and value.

East 96th Street, as a boundary, is symbolic of the economic and ethnic divisions among the people of New York. In effect, this small area is a microcosm of the current class differences across the entire city.

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