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Manhattan below Madison Square was the virtual edge of New York City in 1836.

as the map below shows. Although the grid plan had been adopted and some streets above Madison Square had even been built, the population only slowly followed. In 1840, four years after the map below was published, the Census counted 312,710 residents of New York. Of these, only about 11,000 lived north of 26th Street. Twenty years later over 230,000 New Yorkers (of 805,000) called home somewhere above Madison Square and the numbers continued to accelerate. Today more than two thirds of Manhattan’s 1,630,000 residents lives in the areas north of what is often called Lower Manhattan (although the definition seems to change depending on who is defining the area: some argue it is the area below 23rd Street, some say it is below 14th Street, others the area below Houston Street, and still others [the purists] argue that Chambers Street marks the northern limit of Lower Manhattan). Of the areas below Madison Square (roughly below about 26th Street), the area north of 14th Street ( Chelsea, the Flatiron District, Union Square, Gramercy Park, etc.) has a population of a little over 100,000, while Greenwich Village and the East Village (Houston to 14th Street) have close to 150,000 residents.

As I enter Central Park, the old road disappears for one of the very few times along the course of this project.

I found the road in a shopping mall in Stamford, Connecticut, in the Bronx and upper Manhattan, in Downtown Boston, Providence, and New Haven. I found the road in a forest in the middle of the Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctuary in Sharon, Massachusetts, and I found the road in innumerable areas where it was supposed to be long gone. Here in Central Park, in the green heart of Manhattan, designed and created by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted in the years 1858-1873, a place full of elegantly constructed rustic landscapes replete with winding paths, a place it might be supposed the designers might have taken the natural contours of the road into account and kept the old road as a memory of a more rural New York, the old road was completely obliterated.

I live less than a ten minute walk from Olmsted’s great contribution to Boston’s green space, the majestic Emerald Necklace, and I live a twenty minute walk from Olmsted’s house and studio, and I am deeply impressed by the numerous contributions Olmsted made to seemingly every urban landscape in North America, from Mont Royal Park in Montreal to the US Capitol Grounds in Washington, from the design of Stanford University and numerous other college campuses, to the design of the Vanderbilt Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. Yet I would be remiss if I did not say here I am extremely irritated that Olmsted and Vaux did not spare the old road here and incorporate it into the design of the park, opting instead to redesign the already rugged landscape here at the north end of the park in a whimsical manner to suit their own aesthetic interests.

Fortunately the map drawn by J.H. Colton in 1836 of Manhattan Island shows the old road as far as 92nd Street and Fifth Avenue, where the road leaves what is now Central Park and follows a winding route through the East Side of Manhattan, which sadly has also been obliterated by the steady march of the ‘Grid’ up the island. By using a combination of Colton’s map and Colles’s map of the road drawn in 1792, I am able to at least determine where the road once was and thus in this entry I will attempt to follow the road that isn’t there from 110th Street and Lenox Avenue to Madison Square at the junction of Broadway and 23rd Street. As the crow flies this is a distance of a little over 4 miles but is closer to 5 miles on Colles’s map and will be closer to 5.5 miles as I try to follow the old road as closely as possible on today’s roads.

Above is a section of Colton’s 1836 map of Manhattan. The curving road heading south from near 106th Street is the old Boston Road or Old Post Road. Notice that it stops at 92nd Street and Fifth Avenue, at Observatory Place. From here to 23rd Street the road is no more, a victim of the development of the grid pattern of streets. The Harlem Creek was transformed into the Harlem Meer in the northeast corner of Central Park by Olmsted and Vaux, effectively submerging the road between 106th and 109th Streets.

Marble Hill is the answer to one of the classic trivia questions:

what is the only neighborhood in Manhattan that is part of the mainland? The neighborhood, immediately south of West 230th Street, once was part of York, or Manhattan Island, and was an area that was crossed by every visitor to New York who traveled by land. This is because the sole bridge connecting the island to the mainland was built here in 1693, across a creek called Spuyten Duyvil, The Devil’s Whirlpool, or “Spitting Devil.” The name, of Dutch origin, refers to the somewhat turbulent waters that characterized this convoluted meeting of the waters of the Harlem and Hudson Rivers. Not surprisingly, it was difficult to cross. As the narrowest crossing to the mainland, however, Spuyten Duyvil was destined to become an important transit area, and by the 1690s demand for a bridge to cross the tempestuous waters was high. The local landowner Frederick Philipse (originally Vriedrick Flipsen) took on the project of building a bridge across the creek from Manhattan to his property on the mainland in what is now the Kingsbridge neighborhood of the Bronx in 1693. Philipse did not build the bridge as a magnanimous gesture to the people of New York: as Sarah Knight indicated in 1704, the bridge was a profit-making enterprise: “about 5 we come to Spiting Devil, Else Kings bridge, where we pay three pence for passing over with a horse, which the man that keeps the Gate set up at the end of the Bridge receives.” (1) A second bridge, which was free to cross, was erected nearby in 1759 by Jacobus Dyckman and Benjamin Philips in response to numerous complaints by farmers about having to pay the toll. Both bridges are gone today, as is the Spuyten Duyvil Creek.

The creek was filled in after a larger ship channel was carved out of a preexisting small brook that roughly paralleled what would be 223rd Street. This canal, which obliterated the grid from 220th to 224th Street, allowed the passage of ships from Long Island Sound to the Hudson River. The outline of the former Spuyten Duyvil Creek remains only in the boundary line separating Marble Hill from the Bronx. Below is a map detailing the geographic changes to the area.

Manasseh Cutler’s biting remarks probably reflected the consensus opinion about the bridge: it was not particularly noteworthy except that everybody had to cross over it. There may still be a piece of the bridge under the asphalt near 230th Street and Kingsbridge Avenue, otherwise the bridge disappeared with the creek, leaving only the neighborhood name as a legacy. But it was almost always mentioned by travelers who had to cross it. (2)

King’s Bridge and Spuyten Duyvil. Below left is a map from Jenkins, The Story of The Bronx (1912, p.129) depicting the location of fortifications but also showing the various waterways and roads that crisscrossed the area of upper Manhattan and the Kingsbridge neighborhood of the Bronx. Broadway still exists, although Spuyten Duyvil creek was filled in shortly after his book was published. Below right is an image of unknown provenance showing King’s Bridge during the Revolutionary War. The image at lower right shows the original course of Spuyten Duyvil and the neighborhood of Marble Hill, part of Manhattan but now on the mainland. Bottom left is a photograph from Jenkins showing King’s Bridge as it looked in the late nineteenth century. Finally, the map at the very bottom is an excerpt from an 1836 map of New York, which shows the planned numbered streets of the city alongside the actual terrain and streets of the time. The small creek between 222nd and 223rd street was enlarged to create the Harlem River Shipping Channel in 1895. King’s Bridge is between 228th and 230th Streets, while the Dyckman Bridge was at 224th Street.