The Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan extends south from 42nd street to meet the neighborhood of Gramercy (or Rose Hill/Curry Hill as the northern half of Gramercy is often referred to) at 29th street. Its western border is at Fifth Avenue and eastern border is at Second Avenue where it meets the distinct waterfront neighborhoods of Kips Bay and Tudor City.
Murray Hill derives its name from the Murray family, 18th-century Quaker merchants mainly concerned with shipping and overseas trade. Robert Murray (1721-1786), the family patriarch, was born in Pennsylvania and came to New York in 1753 after a short residence in North Carolina. He quickly established himself as a merchant and about 1762 rented land from the city for a great house and farm. The total area was just over 29 acres (117,000 mē). In today's terms, the farm began a few feet (metres) south of Thirty-Third Street and extended north to the middle of the block between Thirty-Eighth and Thirty-Ninth Streets. At the southern end, the plot was rather narrow but at the northern end it went from approximately Lexington Avenue to a spot between Madison and Fifth Avenues. The great house was built on a since-leveled hill at what is today Park Avenue and Thirty-Sixth Street.
The most illustrious member of the family was the oldest child, Lindley Murray (1745-1826). A New York lawyer, he was forced into exile after the Revolution as a loyalist, settling in York, England, where there was a Quaker community. In England, Lindley began writing school textbooks. He wrote 11 of them, beginning in 1798, and became the largest-selling author in the world in the first half of the nineteenth century. His textbooks were widely printed in Britain (particularly his English Grammar) but had their greatest success in the new United States, partly because no international copyright agreement existed and the books could be reprinted without royalties being paid. Some 16 million copies of Murray's books were sold in America and another 4 million in Britain. His most popular work was his English Reader, full of selections from the liberal-minded writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, most notably the Rev. Hugh Blair. Abraham Lincoln praised the "English Reader" as "the best schoolbook ever put in the hands of an American youth." The English Reader utterly dominated the American market for readers for over a generation from 1815 into the 1840s. It was replaced mainly by the McGuffey Readers, a series of reading texts, which began to appear in 1836.
Mary Lindley Murray is credited with delaying William Howe and his army during General Washington's retreat from New York in 1776. As the story goes, Mrs. Robert Murray invited the group to tea at her manion in Inclenberg (now Murray Hill), and, through feminine wiles, succeeded in delaying the British troops for a period sufficient to allow a successful American retreat. Although a further British advance may have been disastrous for the Americans, the legends arising from the incident--with Mrs. Murray playing the role of Circe or a Siren--are probably apocryphal. Evidence suggests the delay at Murray Hill was according to a prearranged British plan.
The standard work on the Murray family is "The Murrays of Murray Hill" (Brooklyn: Urban History Press, 1998) by Charles Monaghan.
During the nineteenth century, this neighborhood was "uptown" with the city ending with the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street covering what today is the New York Public Library and Bryant Park. To the north was for the most part farmland. When J. P. Morgan built his home on Madison Avenue at 36th Street, which is today a part of the Morgan Library it was considered a fashionable uptown address. Madison Square Park, at this time considered a part of Murray Hill was bordered by the fashionable ladies' shops of the day on Fifth Avenue.
For much of the twentieth century, the neighborhood was a quiet and rather formal place, with many well-off older residents. Since the late 1990s, however, many professional New Yorkers in their twenties and thirties have begun to move into the area. The raucous restaurant-and-bar scene along Third Avenue on the weekends particularly reflects this change.
Though housing in the neighborhood is slightly cheaper than in fashionable nearby parts of Manhattan, prices for apartments here rose a great deal during the boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s--as much as 500 percent in a decade.
The area includes 10 East 40th Street, an example of art deco architecture.