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Block by Block: East 71st Street

“We left absolutely elated,” Ms. Morrison said, “because the whole thing felt like the first time we rented a store, our Mott Street shop. It felt like old times.”

That first time was in the mid-1990s, in NoLIta, only a few miles south, but a world away from 10021 in any era.

Yet here their new store is, just off Madison Avenue, two steps down from the street, in what might once have been a dentist’s office but is now a kind of secret living room, where you can sit on a midcentury modern cowhide chair, flipping through the pages of an Assouline book, surrounded by the intricate cut-paper works of Dan Funderburgh or some Jody Morlock flower paintings.

With the opening of the new shop a few months ago — alongside another transplant from the lower districts, 45rpm — an arty downtown sensibility has alighted on East 71 Street, unlikely as that might seem.

The three blocks of 71st Street stretching east from Central Park might look like wall-to-wall limestone at first glance (see No. 22, a gargantuan 1920s mansion on the market for $75 million). But in fact there are plenty of surprises behind the pricey residential facades.

First, you have to get into the right mindset. The street is, of course, home to 740 Park Avenue — called the richest apartment building in the world in the 2005 book by Michael Gross — and lots of other impenetrables. Consider this language from the listing for 106 East 71st Street, a 17-room town house with over 10,000 square feet, on the market for almost $29 million: “For service, there is a separate entrance leading to the garden level consisting of two staff rooms, staff bath, laundry room and multiple rooms for storage.”

Broadly speaking, life is pretty rarefied on the Upper East Side, where there’s at least one private, by-referral-only dry cleaner down a gated alleyway, where a Cobb salad can cost $29, and where an unremarkable two-bedroom rental can go for $15,000 a month.

But walk up the steps of St. James’ Church, on the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and 71st, and you start to get a sense of the street’s rich layers. While tourists swarm St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and Trinity Church at Wall Street, here the pews are empty on any given day, and thus allow visitors a quiet view of the pristine apse, the new marble mausoleum (inside the front door, to the right), and the skylight above the stairs that connect the parish house to the church itself.

There’s exposed brick that dates back to 1810, when the Upper East Side was a summer colony. Ducking out through the side door and stepping onto the residential street provides a thrill, like jumping onto a bullet train just before it leaves the station.

The leafy swath from Fifth to Lexington Avenue almost hides in the shadow of its neighbors. Busy 72nd Street captures most of the east-west flow, the entrance to the Frick Collection lures people onto 70th Street, and there’s a healthy scurry up and down Madison Avenue as shoppers beat a path from Barneys to Yves Saint Laurent.

But few seem to venture onto 71st, save for the construction workers at No. 120, a short brick town house that sold in 2009 and is now under head-to-toe renovation. Or maybe the footman of the private money manager Jeffrey Epstein, out doing reconnaissance in front of No. 9, one of the largest houses in Manhattan.

Across the street from the soaring (and heavily surveilled) arched door of No. 9 is the back of the Frick, a solid holding wall. But on closer inspection, what’s this? The Frick Art Reference Library (10 East 71st Street), marked by a discreet red sign and a recessed wooden door. The library, which is open to the public, has its own exhibits — a collection from the art historian Frits Lugt, for example — and a wood-paneled third-floor reading room that’s like a little pocket of the Ivy League.

With an archive of more than a million photographs and a vast auction catalog collection, the library is famous among art historians but otherwise little known, even to native New Yorkers. It serves upward of 6,000 readers a year: graduate students, collectors, officers from auction houses, and researchers, some from very nearby.

“I’m working on a paper I’m giving in Moscow in June, which involves the French Academy in Rome,” said Anne L. Poulet, the director of the Frick Collection.

A ride up to the third floor in a small rickety elevator reveals an oasis within an oasis: dark wood tables, hushed tones, card catalogs, Venetian School oils, and views over the copper tops of real estate that is, as Leighton Candler, an associate broker at Corcoran, said, “as blue chip as you get in New York.”

Back at street level and down the block at No. 17 is 45rpm, whose original New York outpost is on Mercer Street in SoHo. It is a raw-wood two-floor showcase for jeans and oxford shirts, elevated to the level of art, that’s curiously aromatic and has a tiny creek running amid the floorboards.

The proprietor, Tadao Fujimoto, owns the entire town house and rents space to a Korean ceramics gallery and a hair salon. Not just any hair salon, though: Sharon Dorram Color at Sally Hershberger. The clientele is high Hollywood, and it comes for Sharon’s way with blondes and Sally’s rock ’n’ roll wielding of scissors.

Opened in 2009, the salon is a Parisian sort of perch on the fifth floor, designed by Daniel Romualdez and inspired, naturally, by Ms. Dorram’s favorite Birkin bag. It has south-facing French windows, a central upholstered leather tuffet over which hangs an excellent crystal chandelier, and the kind of natural light for which a painter would trade a truckload of stretched canvases.

Then there’s the priceless vantage onto this street of secrets, where properties — like the Elsie de Wolfe minimansion at No. 131 — often date to the early 1900s and may have changed hands only twice since.

Cost of entry: Highlights start at $250.