This map shows the proposed street layout in Manhattan from the original northern boundary at 155th Street (on the left, where the blocks are shown as featureless white rectangles) to the northern tip of the island (on the right). I mentioned two days ago that the street layout in the northern area came after 1884, and here’s the plan in 1900. Note that this map does not show exactly was actually built in the early twentieth century nor what’s been modified since.
The most important thing about this area is the presence of really steep hills. The rest of Manhattan had been hilly before the grid street plan was implemented and everything was flattened out, but not like here. The faint, lightly-dashed, and unlabelled gray lines represent elevation contours. If you follow them around, you can see how steep and irregular the hills are. For example, start at the right-angle curve that is the north end of Wadsworth Avenue (near the park labelled Fort George) and move up the page. While some cutting and filling was performed here, it was much less than was done further south, as anyone who has ever exited the A train at 181st Street can attest to. To some extent, the north-south avenues were curved to follow the contours, but only so much can be done that way.
Most of Highbridge Park, Fort George Park, and Fort Washington parks had not yet been laid out, and their presence both solves the problem of trying to set up building lots on a cliff and provides the area with some much-needed space. On the other hand, the vast subway train yard between Tenth Avenue and the Harlem River, from 207th Street to 215th Street, isn’t there either. The area where the train yard would eventually be built was mostly empty – there are almost no buildings shown east (down the page) of Tenth Avenue – and a lot of the area consists of “water lots”. Those were theoretical land that could be created via landfill but hadn’t yet been made, and they explain why some of the streets and blocks continue into areas obviously marked as river.
Spuyten Duyvil Creek, the natural link between the Harlem River and the Hudson River, followed an exaggerated S curve. It was straightened in two campaigns into (officially) the Harlem River Ship Canal or (unofficially) Spuyten Duyvil Creek. This map catches the change halfway: the northward projection of Manhattan called Marble Hill has been separated from the rest of the island by the new canal, but the loop of old creek around it has not yet been filled in, and the swampy southern projection of the Bronx west of Marble Hill has not yet been cut through to straighten the west half of the S. Note that the Broadway bridge over the creek is marked as “proposed”. Also note that the main line of the New York Central Railroad makes a huge curve to go around Marble Hill and the old creek; it was later shortened with a cutoff following the new, straighter line of the canal.
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