This drawing by William Barclay Parsons, from 1887, is quite something. It shows a 12-span viaduct with two bridges to carry a street from the top of a hill gradually down to the lower grade over a mile to the north. This is the same northern portion of Manhattan of which I said two weeks ago “The most important thing about this area is the presence of really steep hills.”
To give a little context, Tenth Avenue was later renamed Amsterdam Avenue, and here’s the current map:
You can see Amsterdam Avenue end in a curve to Fort George Avenue on the lower left. Highbridge Park has the big hill on the left side of the Parsons drawing. The northern stub of Tenth Avenue orphaned by the hill and the inlet off the Harlem River known as Sherman’s Creek is on the upper right, past the 207th Street station for the A train and the MTA train yard. Parsons’s viaduct would have run from Amsterdam down to somewhere near the text “207th Street Train Yard Facility.” He was an immensely talented engineer, most well known today for being in charge of the original IRT subway design and founding the firm Parsons Brinckerhoff, so I have no doubt that the structural engineering of his viaduct was sound. Its purpose is a little fuzzier.
In 1887, there was simply not that much vehicular traffic in this area. The amount had increased after New York’s annexation of the west Bronx in 1874, but most travel, both passenger and freight, was by some form of rail. The northern tip of Manhattan, above Dykeman Street, was still pretty much wide-open. The reason for this is perhaps best explained by the name “Dykeman Meadows” on the drawing: “meadows” is a word used again and again in the New York metropolitan area to mean “swamp”, including the Lispenard Meadows in lower Manhattan, the Flushing Meadows in Queens, and the Hackensack Meadows in New Jersey. The Dykeman family farm was in this area (their farmhouse still is, visible at the top of the map) and the Dykeman Meadows was a stretch of unusable land nearby, eventually turned into a train yard.
Maybe Parsons was thinking ahead. The Harlem River Drive, listed as the “Speedway” on his drawing, provides a link past the hill and the creek, and was eventually turned into a highway. Maybe he was advertising his skills: in 1887 he was 28 years old, and working out west on railroad projects after having grown up in and started his career in New York. Maybe he thought that he could create a demand for the project to jump-start it, which is pretty much what John Roebling had done with the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883.
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