Marble Hill: The Piece of Manhattan That Is No Longer an Island

Marble Hill is a neighborhood that officially belongs to the Borough of Manhattan, but it is physically attached to the Bronx. To understand how that happened, you have to go back to a canal.

For most of New York City's history, Manhattan was a true island, bounded on the north by a tidal strait called the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, which connected the Hudson River to the Harlem River. The neighborhood at the island's upper tip took its name from the Tuckahoe marble found in the bedrock beneath it, a fine white limestone that was quarried here from the colonial era onward.

In the eighteen eighties, the Army Corps of Engineers decided to improve navigation between the Hudson and Harlem rivers by cutting a new, wider channel. Construction of the Harlem Ship Canal began in January of eighteen eighty-eight. The canal was cut straight through the neighborhood, slicing Marble Hill off from the rest of Manhattan to the south. When that cut opened in June of eighteen ninety-five, Marble Hill became an island, with the new canal on its south side and the old Spuyten Duyvil Creek still running along its north.

For nineteen years, Marble Hill was literally surrounded by water. Then, around nineteen fourteen, the old Spuyten Duyvil Creek north of the neighborhood was filled in, connecting Marble Hill by solid ground to the Bronx.

So here is the situation today. Marble Hill is physically part of the Bronx mainland. It has a Bronx zip code. Its streets touch Bronx streets. But the Greater New York consolidation of eighteen ninety-eight, which created the five boroughs, had already designated Marble Hill as part of Manhattan. Nobody ever changed the designation. It is, legally and administratively, a neighborhood of Manhattan, with Manhattan political representation, and a Manhattan address, even though you can walk there from the Bronx without crossing any water.