Marble Hill
New York, United States of America, 10463
Marble Hill is the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan’s New York City. It’s one of the few areas within the Manhattan borough that isn’t on the island of Manhattan. Marble Hill was occupied as a Dutch colonial settlement in 1646 and was named in 1891 because of marble deposits underneath the neighborhood.
In 1895 Marble Hill became an island on the Harlem River, a political region in New York County, when the building of the Harlem Ship Canal separated him from the island of Manhattan. In 1914, the Harlem River was filled on the north side of Marble Hill, connecting it to the North American mainland and the Bronx. The neighborhood borders are approximately between Terrace View Avenue and Johnson Avenue to the west, between 228th Street and 230th Street to the north, and the Marble Hill Houses and River Plaza Shopping Center to the east.
As a result of this topography transition, Marble Hill is sometimes connected to the Bronx and forms part of Bronx Community District 8. Marble Hill also has a Bronx ZIP code of 10463 and is served by the fiftieth Bronx-based New York City Police Department.
Two bridges connected Marble Hill to the mainland: the King’s Bridge and the Dyckman Free Bridge. In 1693 Frederick Philipse, a Dutch nobleman who had sworn allegiance to the Crown at the British takeover of Dutch New Netherlands, built the King’s Bridge at Marble Hill near what is now West 230th Street in the Bronx. Originally a merchant in New Amsterdam, Philipse had acquired vast land holdings in what was then Westchester County. In the present-day Sleepy Hollow, he established a plantation and supply depot for his shipping business upriver in Westchester County.
The River Plaza, a shopping mall located on 40 West 225th Street between Broadway and External Street and overlooking the Harlem River, opened in August 2004. It’s the commercial center of Marble Hill. It cost $90 million and has a floor area of 235,000 square feet (21,800 square metres). The mall, which has an open-air format in which the passageways between stores are outdoors, has a 640-room parking lot on the roof.
Today, Marble Hill itself still looks like a picturesque village. Small wooden family homes, built in the Queen Anne style with porches and gardens, nestled beside each other on winding, steep streets still bearing the Dutch names of its original founders. The unusual curved streets follow the path of the packed old Spuyten Duyvil Creek, giving Marble Hill its atypical feel.
