Mount Morris Park Historic District
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Mount Morris Park Historic District
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| Location |
Bounded roughly by Lenox Ave., Mount Morris Park West, and W. 124th and W. 119th Sts., (original) |
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| Coordinates | 40°48′17″N 73°56′49″W / 40.80472°N 73.94694°WCoordinates: 40°48′17″N 73°56′49″W / 40.80472°N 73.94694°W |
| Built | 1878 |
| Architect | Multiple; including in the increase: Angell, Edward L.; Baxter, Charles |
| Architectural style | Queen Anne, Late 19th- and 20th-century Revivals, Romanesque (original) Beaux Arts, Second Empire, Renaissance (increase) |
| NRHP Reference # | 73001221 |
| Added to NRHP | February 06, 1973 (original) May 24, 1996 (increase) |
Bounded roughly by Lenox Ave., Mount Morris Park West, and W. 124th and W. 119th Sts., (original)
Mount Morris Park Historic District was designated a historic district by New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1971, and is part of the larger Mount Morris Park neighborhood. It is a large 16-block area in west central Harlem. The boundaries are West 118th and West 124th Streets, Fifth Avenue, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue). "Doctor's Row" comprises the nearby stretch of West 122nd Street, Mount Morris Park West and Malcolm X Boulevard; one of the doctors of "Doctor's Row" was the father of the composer Richard Rodgers. Mount Morris Square, the core of the district, is now called Marcus Garvey Park.
Before the European settlements, the rocky hill of Manhattan mica-schist was used by the Native Americans as a lookout station to see over the entire island. The nearness of the Harlem River made Slang Berg a militarily strategic location.
Despite the 18th-century local prominence of the Gouverneur Morris family, the name "Mount Morris" for the rocky formation, one of two the Dutch called the Ronde Gerbergte is of 19th-century origin:
"One is an abrupt wooded eminence, by modern innovation styled Mount Morris, but which the Dutch called Slang Berg, or Snake Hill, from the reptile tribes that infested its cleft rocks and underbrush even within memory of the living. Southerly from it the gneiss rock crops out in huge, disordered masses. A little way to the right is... a lesser height or ridge, and which to the inhabitants came to be known as the Little Hill.
Little Hill was leveled when the right-of-way was graded for the New York and Harlem Railroad, following the present route of Park Avenue.
On September 4, 1839, a 20-acre (81,000 m2) residential square, on land which was formerly a race track for horses, out of 173 acres (0.70 km2) of a land grant farm owned by the Benson family, was set aside. The square was resited from the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which had planned for a square in the neighborhood, in order to take advantage of the rugged topography that stood squarely in the path of Fifth Avenue.
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