A recent New York Times article "Steps Away but Worlds Apart in New York" by Gina Bellafante explores the stark contrasts between poverty and privilege in New York City, often within the same neighborhood, or even street.

For decades, the intersection of Park Avenue and 96th Street has remained one of the city’s most obvious and despairing emblems of disparity, with East Harlem and its challenges spreading out to the north, and a vast gridlock of extraordinary privilege colonizing the acreage below. It is worth debating whether a visit to this corner ought to be mandated for tourists; few spots so profoundly render the truths of New York’s economic extremism. Liberal parents hoping to foster their own political values in their children might consider pilgrimages. When I stood there, as a teenager, for the first time in the early 1980s, I felt a call to fierce and equalizing justice, ready, suddenly, for Latin American guerrilla work and the Red Brigades…

With Social Explorer, you can dig deeper into neighborhoods across the city to learn more about wealth, poverty and other demographics over the decades.  These maps of this Upper East Side neighborhood illustrate the divide along the 96th Street.  The first one depicts median income (the darker shading indicates higher median incomes), and the second one depicts poverty rates.

Income and Poverty on Manhattan's Upper East Side

(Both maps use 2005-09 American Community Survey data at the census tract level)

Click around to view other variables and neighborhoods.

And, coming soon to Social Explorer, you'll be able to explore the latest data with the soon to be released 2010 numbers for the Census and the American Community Survey.