2553 Sage Place ca. 1936 This Spuyten Duyvil store was approximately 100 years old, and from the 1850s to the early 1930s housed a barber shop. One of the daughters of barber Peter Tarantino turned the shop into a luncheonette called “Ye Olde Country Store,” but the store failed, a victim of the Depression. The store was closed when Abbott visited, but she was able to photograph the store’s exterior and interior. The exterior view, which Abbott discarded, shows the rural character of the neighborhood, which lacked paved roads and sidewalks. The interior view shows the store’s original beaded wooden sealing board and hand-planed oak floors. The potbelly stove, wall clock, and wire-back chairs date from the turn of the century. The light streaming in from the windows casts a warm glow, lending the illusion of stability and order to the scene. Sage Place no longer exists. In the 1960s, the area was cleared for apartment buildings and a high school.

St. Stephen’s United Methodist Church, built in 1897, is at the base of Marble Hill.

St. Stephen's United Methodist Church, 1932. A Methodist congregation, known as Mosholu Methodists was established in the Bronx in 1825. In 1835 the congregation was incorporated as The Methodist Episcopal Church Bethel and their first church building was located at 251st Street and Old Albany Post Road. After a name change (to St. Stephen's) and a move, the parish would build its current home in 1897. The Victorian church building might be one of the most quaint church buildings in the city with its oak-frame structure, weathered shingles, fieldstone base, and small tower. Despite the many drastic changes to the neighborhood-- not least of which is the fact that Marble Hill, once geographically attached to Manhattan, is now firmly on the mainland of the Bronx-- St. Stephen's remains. After a thorough restoration, the church was rededicated in 2010.

"Looking north from the Harlem River Ship Canal at 225th Street, 1920." The Bridge seen here is the Broadway Bridge, a span originally constructed when the Spuyten Duyvil Creek was widened and deepened. The first modern bridge here was completed in 1895, opening when the new Shipping Canal opened. The bridge, designed by Alfred Boller, a civil engineer, was a single-deck steel swing bridge. Due to the development of the subway, and the bridge needing to accommodate subway traffic, it was replaced within the first decade of the 20th century. This photograph depicts the second modern bridge, a double-deck swing span. The earlier bridge was actually floated down the river in an extremely complex process and was installed and renovated as the University Heights Bridge at West 207th Street. The second bridge survived until 1962 when it was replaced by the double-deck lift span, which can be seen today.

The vernacular brick housing stock seen in this photograph is common of residential neighborhoods in the outer boroughs, largely developed in the pre-war period. The infrastructure work being done on the street here is being performed by workers of the Works Progress Administration. During the New Deal programs of the Great Depression, workers repaired street paving, and curbs and constructed parks, bridges, airports, and roads.

In the foreground of this 1906 photograph is Spuyten Duyvil Creek. The creek originally flowed around and to the north of the neighborhood known as Marble Hill. A narrow, somewhat meandering, but fast-flowing waterway, it was traversed by a few small bridges (such as the one seen here). The differences between high and low tide on this creek were so drastic that when low, one could wade through the creek, but when the water was at high tide a small ferry was needed to cross. Because the strait was so shallow it was not an appropriate shipping lane. The Harlem Shipping Canal was dug from a section of the creek in 1895 and as such Marble Hill was a temporary island sitting between the shipping canal to the south and the remaining section of the creek to the north. In 1914 the remaining creek was filled in, using rocks from the excavation of Grand Central Terminal. Since 1914 Marble Hill has been geographically attached to the Bronx while politically it remains part of Manhattan.

Marble Hill is Manhattan’s northernmost neighborhood—so far north, in fact, that it’s no longer physically connected to the rest of the borough. Though politically tied to Manhattan, Marble Hill is geographically part of the Bronx. But it wasn’t always so. Until the late 19th century, Marble Hill sat at the northern tip of Manhattan Island, separated from the mainland by the swirling waters of Spuyten Duyvil Creek. A modest 88-foot span, known as the King’s Bridge, linked it to the mainland in what is today considered the Bronx—a crossing the New York Times once called “the first impulse of the early city toward expansion.” In the late 1800s, efforts to create a more navigable connection between the Hudson and Harlem Rivers led to the construction of the Harlem River Ship Canal. The project effectively severed Marble Hill from the rest of Manhattan. Then, in 1913, the remainder of Spuyten Duyvil Creek was filled in, permanently fusing the former chunk of Manhattan to the Bronx. This geographic sleight of hand has sparked more than a century of confusion, marked by hostile incursions, attempted takeovers, and lingering debates over Marble Hill’s true identity. https://theneighborhoods.substack.com/p/marble-hill-manhattan

Before Inwood and Washington Heights were densely populated and long before the Henry Hudson Bridge stretched across the Hudson, the Johnson Family built their ironworks in the Spuyten Duyvil. Having first worked upstate as part of another firm, Elias Johnson had made a fair amount of money creating munitions and provisions for the Mexican American War. Ready to strike out on his own, Johnson raised some capital and began building his factory in Spuyten Duyvil in 1853 with his son Isaac. Nor was Isaac a neophyte, he had graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that same year with a degree in Civil Engineering. It was Isaac Johnson who sited the mill, scouting locations throughout the city (including what is now Central Park.) Eying the peninsula jutting out from Spuyten Duvel, Johnson decided to put the foundry there with the land being shared by a rolling mill. The proximity to the railroads and New York's waterways made the plant quickly prosperous. Soon it was pushing out ironwork for all manner of commercial and home applications. The Johnsons soon were able to afford fancy homes, expensive lifestyles, and trips to exotic locales. However, their prosperity was only beginning. During the civil war, the Johnsons built prototypes of a cannon for the Union, guaranteeing their quality. Its success made the Johnson Foundry an important munitions supplier, a role the foundry would continue in through World War I. It would also branch out into steel production as well as automobile mechanics (dominating the automobile parts industry in its nascent stages.) As the prospects of the foundry grew so did the number of their employees, starting in the low hundreds to over sixteen hundred employees at the time of its closing. The Johnsons, a fairly religious family, were said to be fairly interested in the well being and health of their workers and built a number of reading rooms, chapels, and accommodations for their workers. The end would come, not from depression or disaster, but the New York Legislature. In 1919, it was decided that the ship canal would be straightened to make it more navigable. Peninsulas like the one that the Johnson Foundry were situated on were to be blasted away and dredged. It would take four more years, but the Johnson foundry would be closed and demolished.

Before Inwood and Washington Heights were densely populated and long before the Henry Hudson Bridge stretched across the Hudson, the Johnson Family built their ironworks in the Spuyten Duyvil.

Construction on the southern end of the Broadway Bridge spanning the Harlem River Ship Canal, March 21, 1906.

On the neighborhood’s western edge, the eight-story John F. Kennedy High School building—now home to several smaller schools—similarly straddles the invisible Manhattan–Bronx dividing line.