History
The creek was first crossed in 1693, when The King's Bridge was built by a Dutch nobleman Frederick Philipse, Lord of Philipse Manor, who had sworn allegiance to the British. The bridge's alignment was roughly south of and parallel to today's West 230th Street. The later-named Kingsbridge carried Boston Post Road, connecting southern Westchester County (which became The Bronx) with Marble Hill, once part of Manhattan island, but still today part of Manhattan borough. The bridge is said to still be in place, having been buried when the creek bed was filled in. The creek water flow was redirected to the new and deeper shipping canal, south of Marble Hill.
Spuyten Duyvil Creek originally flowed north of Manhattan's Marble Hill. The construction of the Harlem River Ship Canal to the south of the neighborhood in 1895 turned Marble Hill into an island, and in 1914, when the original creekbed was filled in, Marble Hill became physically attached to the Bronx, though it remains part of the borough of Manhattan.
Another realignment of the creek occurred in the 1930s, to the west of the original realignment. This had the opposite effect: It separated a portion of the Bronx and resulted in its attachment to Manhattan as a small peninsula where the Inwood Hill Park Nature Center is now situated.
Read more about this topic: Spuyten Duyvil Creek
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)