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:
“Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.”
—Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
“In all history no class has been enfranchised without some selfish motive underlying. If to-day we could prove to Republicans or Democrats that every woman would vote for their party, we should be enfranchised.”
—Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)