If you’re familiar with a final product, looking at the early ideas can be disconcerting. Things seem familiar but wrong, as can be seen in this 1870s map with a proposal for Morningside Park. The Upper West Side was pretty sparsely populated at that time because of the difficulties in getting there, and that goes doubly so for the area now called Morningside Heights.
There are a lot of streets doing strange things, but there’s one hint as to why. If you follow 116th Street from Morningside Avenue, on the west side of the proposed park, to Ninth Avenue on the east side of the park, you’ll see a series of staircases connecting the two sides. All of the street weirdness in plan makes perfect sense if you look at it in three dimensions. Here are a few examples:
- The curve of Morningside Avenue marks the edge of high ground before a very steep hill down towards Ninth Avenue. Back then, the area west of the hill was Harlem Heights and the area east of it was Harlem Flats.
- Riverside Drive effectively ends in a loop because of the very steep hill from there down to the diagonal line of Manhattan Street. This was before anyone thought of building a viaduct across that valley.
- Manhattan Street itself marks the bottom centerline of the valley.
- The Ninth Avenue elevated – the double line running along Eighth Avenue for most of the map – takes that big S curve at 110th Street to avoid the abrupt hill up from 110th to Morningside.
The name changes don’t make it any easier. The Boulevard is now Broadway, this part of Tenth Avenue is now Amsterdam Avenue, this part of Ninth Avenue is now Columbus Avenue, this part of Eighth Avenue is now Frederick Douglass Boulevard, Manhattan Street is now 125th Street, and Lawrence Street is now 126th Street. And the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum is now Columbia University, although that was more than just a name change.
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