Our Charter

The Manhattan-Ville Heritage Society's Mission is:

- to promote awareness of Manhattanville's rich history to both residents and visitors,
- to commemorate sites, people and events of historical and cultural significance to the evolution of the Manhattanville area,
- to encourage further historical research of the Manhattanville area, and
- to conduct educational and public outreach programs relative to Manhattanville.

History of Manhattanville.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MANHATTANVILLE

In the mid-17th-century Dutch settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam on Manhattan’s lower tip, several farmers had pulled up stakes to pioneer the upper island. Governor Peter Stuyvesant, who feared Indian attacks, ordered them to live close together at first. Then in 1658, having the Dutch West India Company’s enslaved Africans build a ten-mile wagon road to about 125th Street on the island’s eastern shore, Stuyvesant established Nieuw Haerlem. Some of the village’s 32 original residents -- who comprised 11 French, 7 Hollanders, 4 Danes, 4 Walloons, 3 Germans, 3 Swedes, and some Africans -- had already been shepherding livestock across the island to an outlying valley they called Moertje David’s Vly, by the Hudson River. From these uptown pioneers, the first non-native population of the Manhattanville area began.

The English captured Manhattan in 1664, but pastoral routines generally assimilated them. In 1666, Governor Richard Nicolls conceived a line from the East River at 74th Street to Hudson River at 129th Street, reestablishing New Harlem’s region as all Manhattan above that diagonal boundary. By 1712, the first observed permanent dwellings and barns of inhabitants dotted seven farm lots along the southern hills of the Manhattanville valley area. Only the American War for Independence disturbed the relatively placid 18th-century life here when the valley was known prominently as “The Hollow Way.” Here began, on September 16, 1776, the main action of the Battle of Harlem Heights commanded by General George Washington.

If the period of calm following the Revolution saw the gentry building country seats more commonly along the Hudson cliffs, it was not solely for the exquisite views. They also hoped to distance themselves from the visitations of epidemics to the city, which arrived almost annually in the turning years of the 18th- to the 19th-century. Scourges or not, however, by 1806, values of building lots were predicted to rise in “Manhattan Ville [which was] now forming in the Ninth Ward of this city.”

Jacob Schieffelin, a wealthy merchant and landowner, had helped to lay out some of the original streets where, within months, the “flourishing little town, pleasantly situated near the banks of the Hudson” was recommended as “well worthy of observation,” and as one which “cannot fail becoming a place of considerable consequence.” Sales of building lots had already been made “principally to tradesmen.” Inducements to settlers included the amenities of a “handsome wharf”, an “excellant Academy”, “daily water and stage conveyances to the city”, and the facilitation of improvement presumed “from the circumstances of [the new town] being in a degree under the patronage of the Corporation of the City of New York,” which was then opening the link of Manhattan and 125th Streets from river to river.

But another American-British conflict put the recently established Manhattanville on guard. The War of 1812-1815 made the valley town a hub of an extensive line of fortifications, erected across the upper island from the East River to the Hudson, to defend the city. Although no shots were ever fired, some of the idle structures of Fort Laight, the Manhattanville Pass barrier gate and block houses would reside on the landscape for many decades as Manhattanville continued to develop as a rural town.

In 1823, the affluent St. Michael’s Church in Bloomingdale established St. Mary’s Protestant Episcopal Church-Manhattanville as an independent parish. Schieffelin (whose surname is strongly associated with 19th- and 20th-century social reform) and his wife, Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin, donated land on Lawrence Street (today’s West 126th Street) to erect a frame church the following year, with the family burial vault below. In 1831, St. Mary’s became the first Protestant Episcopal church in the city to abolish pew rentals.

Manhattanville flourished through most of the nineteenth century with churches; schools; a post office; ferry, railroad and streetcar services. Numerous industries included a worsted mill; brewery and the D.F. Tiemann Color Works. Daniel F. Tiemann -- the industrialist and New York City mayor from 1858 to 1859, who originated the custom of placing street names on lamp posts -- lived on the street that bears his name today. Manhattanville’s population -- from around 500 at mid-19th-century to about 14,000 at that century’s end -- has long been notable for its ethnically diverse demography.

The opening of the Interborough Rapid Transit Broadway Subway line in 1904 ushered in a boom of residential building in Manhattanville. Land values increased. While moderately priced apartment houses were already filling in most of the cross streets north of 129th between Amsterdam and Riverside Drive, the area south of Manhattan Street, between Broadway and Claremont Hill, was fashionably “improved.” As brokers mused about the virtual rebuilding of the old neighborhood, and about the likely relocation of institutions, squatters were swept from the rocks near Grant’s Tomb. Distributors, processing plants, garages, gas storage facilities, railway services, and dockside coal barges located in Manhattanville, where homeowners became few among mostly renters or lodgers.

After “Manhattan Street” was made the extension of 125th Street in 1920, higher numbered streets west of Morningside Avenue now lay to the south; confusion was avoided by assigning names to these streets. The original western end of 125th Street was changed to LaSalle Street, 126th Street to Moylan Place, 127th Street to Tiemann Place and 129th Street to St. Clair Place. Lawrence Street was not renamed West 126th Street until later, in the 1930s.
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