Lenox Hill, Murray Hill, Carnegie Hill, Golden Hill—Manhattan used to have a lot of hills, and the island’s once-bumpy topography lent itself to neighborhood names still in use today. (Well, not Golden Hill, but I’m partial to bringing it back.)
But one true hill that remains on the streetscape spans Lexington Avenue between 102nd and 103rd Streets. To my knowledge, nothing like this steep slope exists below Washington Heights and Inwood—which are home to some pretty sharp inclines
A hill like this is a strange thing to encounter in the flattened-and-smoothed-over Manhattan below 168th Street. I’ve walked it many times over the years and finally decided to look into its backstory.
First, this hill has a name. Duffy’s Hill, as it’s been known since before the Sun featured it in a story in 1886, was named for Michael J. Duffy, a Gilded Age builder who constructed more than 800 houses, “with the greatest concentration located between 94th Street and 104th Street between Third Avenue and Lexington Avenue,” states Ghosts of Gotham in a 2023 post.
Before Duffy developed the area, this was a neighborhood with its share of shanties and free-roaming goats—too far north to appeal to the millionaires building Upper East Side mansions.
“His impact on this part of East Harlem was so significant that people started calling the area Duffyville and he became known as the Mayor of Duffyville.”
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