Manhattan's Hills

Manhattan seems flat to casual visitors, and it is flat,  more or less.  The grid layout of the streets certainly reinforces this impression.  But those of us who live here and walk extensively through the city notice the hills, not like those of Boston and San Francisco, to be sure, but there are inclines that betray the presence of gentle hillsides.

When the first settlers arrived at the island’s southern end, there were hills beyond it; as they extended the settlement northward they razed down the rising terrain but they did not flattened all the hills totally, and some names stayed.  There is Lenox Hill in the area around 70th Street and Park Avenue, which I notice on my walk up from 1st Avenue to the Lenox Post Office, where I sometimes have to go to pick up packages.  Further up Park Avenue there is Carnegie Hill near 92nd Street where streets incline up noticeably from all directions; I’m made aware of it when I go to 92nd St. Y.  Murray Hill to the south, around 36th Street, makes a trip to the Morgan Library from the south an uphill climb.  San Juan Hill was where Lincoln Center stands now; Tenth Avenue is an incline up northward from 54th Street, and the crossstreets toward Hudson River is a very steep slope down, which I experience when I walk along CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice to get to its Gerald W. Lynch Theater.

In Upper Manhattan, the topography is more varied.  There is Morningside Heights, the site of the Columbia University, Hamilton Heights further up in West Harlem (with Sugar Hill to the east), and finally Washington Heights in the northern reaches of Manhattan, which marks the highest point of the island; I associate it with the Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters in it, and it is rugged. Finally, there is Marble Hill but it is today across the rerouted Harlem River. 

Rome has seven hills, and so does Manhattan, humbly.