Hooked on the Bronx, Legally Manhattan’s

When the construction of the Harlem River Ship Canal separated Marble Hill from the rest of Manhattan in 1895, the little neighborhood, perched on a high mound of Inwood marble, was suddenly surrounded by water as if by a moat. Two decades later, when Spuyten Duyvil Creek, to its north, was filled in, Marble Hill joined the mainland Bronx. The hill’s identity, however, remained defiantly — irrationally, even — linked to its past, and it continues to be legally part of the borough of Manhattan. And while two train lines make it easily accessible today, the topographical and cartographic oddity feels like what it once was: an island unto itself.

FORGET THE MANHATTAN GRID. Here, streets, and even buildings, curve around the hill’s peak. On Marble Hill Avenue, the Richard Alexander House, built in 1894 for a real estate agent who helped facilitate the community’s first housing boom, is a Tudorish one-off that seems to be seeking a shady copse and a herd of roe deer. Instead, its neighbors are low-rise apartment buildings and rambling — in some cases, run-down — Victorian houses with porches and gables.

DURING THE REVOLUTION, Marble Hill was valued for its excellent views over tactically important bridges connecting Manhattan and the Bronx, bridges that George Washington’s troops retreated over after the Battle of Harlem Heights. When Hessian troops took the hill in 1776, they called their post Fort Prince Charles, after the Duke of Brunswick, a Prussian married to George III’s sister. A vestige of the name remains in Fort Charles Place.

THE HARLEM RIVER SHIP CANAL allowed boats to travel all the way around Manhattan and significantly shortened the route from the Hudson River to Long Island Sound. Its construction drew German and Irish immigrants in the final years of the 19th century. In 1897, Alexander McMillan Welch, an architect who restored the Dyckman Farmhouse and Hamilton Grange in northern Manhattan, built a grand redwood-shingled church with a square tower and a north-facing rose window here. That church, St. Stephen’s, once looked over Spuyten Duyvil Creek.