MANHATTAN boasts a Manhattan Avenue on the Upper West Side, which runs from West 100th Street one block west of Central Park West north past Morningside Park to West 124th Street, where the angling St. Nicholas Avenue takes over its northern progress. What no one remembers, though, is that Manhattanville once had its own Manhattan Street, and there was actually a second Manhattan Street way downtown, where the East Village meets the Lower East Side on East Houston Street.
Pictured above is West 125th Street east of the subway viaduct on Broadway. For a few decades this stretch of Harlem’s main east-west drag has been properly called Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. for the rightly famed civil rights leader; but most people, residents or not, still call it 125th. However, west of Morningside Avenue, this section of West 125th used to be called Manhattan Street.
Before the 1820s or so, New York City was pretty much confined to the area south of City Hall and indeed, City Hall was left unfinished on its north side since no one believed the city would ever extend north of that. Manhattan Island was dotted with hamlets and small villages, connected by roads like the Eastern Post Road (or Boston Post Road) part of which became Park Row and the Bowery, and Bloomingdale Road–that became Broadway.
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