Of late, strange things have been happening in my neighborhood. On Lexington Avenue and 86th Street, I recently noticed that a favorite store had, it seemed, evaporated overnight. Then another vanished two doors down, and still another next to that. On Third Avenue as well, virtually the same sequence of events began playing itself out in a mysterious and inscrutable symmetry.

Being a little slow on the uptake, I only gradually came to understand that the sites were vacated systematically in the name of imminent development. But part of my resistance to this notion was how utterly implausible it seemed. The sites in question, occupying the southeast corners of 86th Street and Lexington Avenue and 86th Street and Third Avenue, are so prominent that I thought no community board would allow a developer to tamper with them. Furthermore, the existing buildings, though devoid of any architectural importance, are more than 100 years old. Surely the Landmarks Commission would never countenance their destruction, either.

Well, it looks as though, through some miraculous convergence of the planets, everything is in alignment for what may well prove to be the fundamental reinvention of East 86th Street, certainly the most incongruous and ungainly cross street on the Upper East or West Side. Whether they have high-rises, midlevel buildings, or row houses, all of the other major cross streets in Manhattan enjoy a fundamental self-consistency that is denied to East 86th Street. Here high-rises stand cheek by jowl with row houses beside single-story structures next to still other high-rises. There is something fundamentally graceless about these unrelenting spikes and cavities, something inorganic and insufficient. Add to this that, however many residential buildings might exist on 86th Street, at ground level it is a steady catenary of mismatched boutiques and large electronics stores competing with street vendors, cheap restaurants, and banks. Altogether, it is a chaos of capitalism and residences that ultimately falls short of that densely integrated commercial energy that you find on 14th or 125th Streets.

This is the condition into which Yorkville began to descend in the postwar years, a process that greatly accelerated in the 1960s and reached its apogee in the 1970s. Once it was the famed German center of New York, the last surviving enclave of that vast migration from the Old World after the revolutions of 1848, when Germans accounted for as much as a third of the population of Gotham. By 1993, however, when I moved into the neighborhood, almost all these fabled German shops and Konditoreien had disappeared or were no longer worth patronizing. Today only a handful, like the Schaller & Weber food store and the Heidelberg restaurant, both on Second Avenue, attest to what once stood here.

The first intimation of a shift from the uncontrolled commerce of the postwar years to something like residential gentrification came in 1989, when Gimbel’s, the down-market department store, was replaced by something that dared to call itself the Park Avenue Court Apartments. A 17-story plinth and setback designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, its Queen Anne use of red brick and white trim conformed to the then-regnant style of postmodern classicism. Given that the building rather aggressively occupies the northwest corner of Lexington Avenue, however, the name never fooled anyone.

This was followed 10 years later by the Ventura, a 22-story glass-and-steel monolith that Davis Brody Bond designed on 86th Street between Second and Third Avenues. Like the Park Avenue Court Apartments, this boxy structure does not appear to understand that anything other than the most basic adequacy of design is an option.

The same cannot be said for at least one of those two cubic masses that will soon begin to rise on the corners of 86th Street at Lexington Avenue and at Third Avenue. A very provisional rendering of the Lexington Avenue site, by the accomplished firm of Cook + Fox, suggests that it will be a cut above what we have seen so far in this part of the city. In massing and surface texture, it recalls this firm’s masterly treatment of 360 Madison Avenue a few years back. But it will be studiously asymmetrical, with competing horizontal and vertical accents, a setback, brise-soleil in the midsection, and at various points, luxuriant green terraces that underscore the environmental concerns that have made Cook + Fox a leader in the green architecture movement.

As for its counterpart on Third Avenue, no renderings have been released as yet. Indeed, even the name of the architect is supposedly a secret, though one person close to the developer told the New York Times that it is to be Robert A.M. Stern. That would seem to be confirmed by the usually accurate Emporis Web site, according to which it too will be 20 stories high.

For my part, I whole-heartedly welcome the changes that are coming to East 86th Street. Let us not hear any laments about the destruction of the neighborhood’s social fabric, which was destroyed decades ago. I do lament the imminent demise of a pet store that has brought joy to my cats, a doughnut shop that rivals Krispy Kreme, and Pastrami Queen, the only good deli on the Upper East Side. But I would ask these establishments to take a lesson from the fabled Elks Candy Company, which stood in a tiny hole in the wall on 86th Street between Second and Third for half a century before giving way to the Ventura. For a year or two it played dead, only to be reborn on Second Avenue and 85th Street, in a singularly beautiful and highly successful new store.

Furthermore, I would hasten to assure those who already miss the old 86th Street that, even though these new developments will command two of the most imposing corners of the Upper East Side, many third-rate buildings remain in Yorkville. Thus, even if, as a result of these improvements, the place begins to look a little better, it will still look bad for decades to come.