At noon, marching bands and dance troupes in dirndls and lederhosen stepped off from East 68th Street and headed up Fifth Avenue, the way they have every third Saturday of September for close to seven decades. The German-American Steuben Parade passed the Metropolitan Museum, curled along the low stone wall of Central Park, and ended at 86th Street, the block that Yorkville old-timers still call German Boulevard.
The parade's endpoint connects it with Yorkville's German-American history, which is also reflected in two longstanding local businesses. Together, the parade and those businesses offer a way to consider how the neighborhood remembers its past.
How a Queens Anniversary Became Yorkville's Signature Day
The parade did not start on the Upper East Side. In April 1956, German-American organizers in Ridgewood, Queens put together a weekend celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the Brooklyn Boys and Girls Chorus, complete with a concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and a parade down Myrtle Avenue. The turnout convinced the organizers to make it annual, and by 1957 the event had moved to Manhattan, landing in Yorkville, which at the time was informally known as Germantown or Little Germany.
The organizers named the day after Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the Prussian-born officer who trained the Continental Army at Valley Forge and later helped shape the curriculum at West Point. Every year since, the parade has stepped off led by cadets from the German Language Club of the U.S. Military Academy, the school von Steuben himself helped found.
The route and timing this year were as follows:
- Fifth Avenue from East 68th to East 86th Street
- The parade stepped off at noon and ran roughly three hours
- Oktoberfest celebration followed immediately at Central Park's Rumsey Playfield, with beer and sausages
That last detail, ending at 86th Street, is not incidental. It is the parade pointing itself, every single year, back at the block that used to be the actual center of German New York.
What German Boulevard Used to Mean
Yorkville earned its Germantown nickname honestly. By the mid-19th century, New York had the third-largest German-speaking population of any city in the world, and after the General Slocum steamship disaster of 1904 killed more than a thousand people from the Lower East Side's Little Germany, many of the surviving families resettled uptown in Yorkville. East 86th Street became the neighborhood's main commercial spine, nicknamed both German Boulevard and, less formally, Sauerkraut Boulevard.
That stretch once held German shops, konditoreis, biergartens, social clubs known as vereins, theaters, restaurants, a German-language newspaper, and dance halls where you could hear the language spoken on the sidewalk as easily as English. It was a functioning immigrant commercial district, not a theme.
World War I and then World War II hollowed most of that out. German-American identity became something people were cautious about displaying in public, and much of the language and the storefronts that carried it quietly disappeared over the following decades. The Steuben Parade, when it launched in 1957, was in part an answer to that erasure: a public, annual reassertion that German-Americans, one of the largest immigrant groups in the country, had a right to celebrate their heritage in the open.
Two Longstanding German Businesses in Yorkville
Two businesses from Yorkville's former German commercial district remain at their longstanding locations.
Heidelberg Restaurant, at 1648 Second Avenue, has occupied that address since 1939, when it opened as a successor to a cabaret and then Cafe Vaterland that had run in the same building since before the 1920s. Eva Matischak's parents bought the restaurant in 1963, after her mother had worked there as a cook, and Eva ran it herself starting in 1988 before her son Andreas took it over in 2018. The bar and dining room still look close to how they did decades ago, and the menu still runs on sauerbraten, schnitzel, and a rotating list of German beers.
Next door, Schaller & Weber has held its ground as the neighborhood's German butcher and deli, and its adjacent sausage bar, Schaller's Stube at 1654 Second Avenue, serves bratwurst and currywurst made from the same meat counter. Between the two of them, they are frequently described as the last surviving remnants of a commercial district that once ran for blocks in every direction.
Everything else on that list, the theaters, the dance halls, the German-language paper, is gone. Those two businesses remain as Yorkville has changed around them.
The Storefronts the Parade Actually Passes Now
The businesses near 86th Street reflect Yorkville's current mix of restaurants and shops. A Coffee Project New York location recently opened nearby with a free-coffee grand opening, and Bluestone Lane has been expanding toward a second Upper East Side location. Mimi's Frozen Yogurt opened an outpost that drew a following online before its doors even opened. A Greek restaurant called KALÓ has been preparing its Upper East Side debut. Meanwhile Adria, a seafood-focused Italian spot, closed after two years, and Doria, a much-anticipated Italian restaurant nearby, has been delayed by ongoing renovations.
The neighborhood's German-American history is also reflected in the two businesses described above. Their continued presence alongside newer businesses offers a view of how Yorkville's commercial life has changed.
The Same Saturday, Two Blocks Over
This year, the parade shared its date with something else that took place in the same stretch of the neighborhood. The Third Avenue Festival, organized by the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce and billed as one of Manhattan's longest-running street fairs, returned that day as well, closing 20 blocks of Third Avenue from East 66th to East 86th Street to traffic, with vendors, food stalls, and a full day of music running from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The two events offered different ways to experience Yorkville. The parade connected with the history of the German-American community, while the Third Avenue Festival featured vendors, food stalls, and music on the avenue. Both were part of the neighborhood's public life that Saturday.
The parade also offered a chance to walk past Heidelberg or stop at Schaller's Stube before or after watching the floats go by, connecting the event with two businesses tied to Yorkville's German-American history.
If you have lived in Yorkville long enough to remember when there were more than two German storefronts left, or if you are new enough that today is the first time you have heard the term German Boulevard at all, either way you are standing in a neighborhood that keeps its history in strange, specific places. Patricia Levy has spent more than two decades getting to know those places block by block, from the buildings along the parade route to the co-ops a few streets over. If you want a conversation about what a particular building or block here has actually seen change, and what it hasn't, Let's Connect.
