Best Manhattan Neighborhoods for Young Professionals

Read the table by column and the differences between these neighborhoods come down to quiet.

The Upper East Side is the quiet one and gives up the least for it. Its 10021 averages 85 on quiet and 85 on traffic safety, both the best on this page, on transit access of 86, the worst on this page and still strong by any other borough's standard. East 69th Street grades 91 with a quiet score of 97. East 75th Street, six blocks north, scores 70 on quiet and 29 on cleanliness.

Murray Hill is the one that does not trade. Its 10016 pairs a quiet average of 63 with food access of 97, and East 40th Street grades 87 on a quiet score of 98. Its weak column is traffic: East 34th Street, the neighborhood's spine, scores 31 on traffic safety while scoring 82 on quiet. Read the traffic-safety column here even when the quiet column looks settled.

Chelsea and the West Village hold one of the widest one-block swings on this page. West 12th Street grades 89 with a quiet score of 85 and a cleanliness score of 86. West 13th Street, one block north, scores 10 on quiet. Nothing in the neighborhood average predicts which of those two an apartment sits on.

Hell's Kitchen has the best food access in the borough and pays in sanitation and traffic. 10036 averages 99 on food and 43 on traffic safety. West 46th Street holds up at 76 on quiet; West 49th Street, three blocks north in 10019, scores 25 on quiet and 10 on cleanliness.

The East Village is the loud one and the numbers are not close. In our 311 records 10009 averages 30 on quiet, with food access at 95. It also posts the third-best traffic-safety average here, 75. Short blocks and slow traffic are our guess at why.

Harlem pairs Manhattan-level transit with the weakest housing record on this page. 10026 averages 91 on transit and 24 on housing condition, which is built from HPD violation records counted per home. Central Park North scores 87 on quiet and 11 on traffic safety, the lowest crash score of any block named on this page. West 114th Street scores 4 on quiet. Read the housing column here before you read anything else.

The rule every apartment hunter is taught downtown is that the avenue carries the traffic and the side street behind it is where you sleep. In the East Village the complaint records say the opposite.

First Avenue scores 56 on quiet. East 7th Street scores 29, East 3rd Street 30, East 6th Street 19 and East 13th Street 31. The bars, the sidewalk crowds and the arguments at two in the morning sit on the numbered streets between the avenues, and the 311 record puts them there.

The stronger version of the finding sits at the top. Across all 14 graded blocks in 10009, no street scores above 56 on quiet, and the street holding that number is the avenue, whose score covers its whole run up the East Side rather than the East Village stretch alone. So there is no quiet block here to find, only a less loud one, and it faces the traffic. St. Marks Place, the block named in every listing, scores 12 on quiet and 100 on food access.

Narrowed to two neighborhoods? Four checks settle the rest.

Start with the street itself rather than the neighborhood. Every graded Manhattan block returns nine scores.

Then apply one threshold. Every score here is a percentile rank against streets of the same type, so 50 is the middle of a block's own band. Below 50 on quiet the block ranks in the louder half of its type, and noise is the one thing a lease cannot fix. Manhattan's borough average on that score is 43, so a large share of the addresses you will be shown sit below the line.

Read two more columns before you commit. Traffic safety counts injuries and deaths in NYPD crash records against the homes on the block, so it says how dangerous your street is to cross and nothing about crime. Housing condition is built from the HPD violation record on the block, which matters most in a pre-war building with an absent landlord.

Then check the pair, not the street. In this borough the block you almost took is usually one turn away and tens of points apart on quiet: West 12th Street scores 85 and West 13th 10. Run both through the compare tool and read the two complaint records side by side.