Fireplace Remodeling in Manhattan Valley, NY

Manhattan Valley was part of the Bloomingdale District, the name given to the farms and houses along the Bloomingdale Road along Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The Dutch Bloemendaal was Anglicized to “Bloomingdale” or “the Bloomingdale District”, for the west side of Manhattan from about 23rd Street up to the Hollow Way (modern 125th Street). It originally consisted of farms and villages along a road (regularized in 1703) known as the Bloomingdale Road. Bloomingdale Road was renamed The Boulevard in 1868, as the farms and villages were divided into building lots and absorbed into the city.

By the 18th century it contained numerous farms and country residences of many of the city’s well-off, a major parcel of which was the Apthorp Farm. The main artery was the Bloomingdale Road, which began north of where Broadway and the Bowery Lane (now Fourth Avenue) join (at modern Union Square) and wended its way northward to about modern 116th Street in Morningside Heights, where the road farther north was known as the Kingsbridge Road. Within the confines of the modern-day Upper West Side, the road passed through the hamlets of Harsenville, bounded by 68th Street, 81st Street, Central Park West, and the Hudson River; Strycker’s Bay, located on a now-infilled inlet between 86th and 96th Streets; and Bloomingdale Village, a place near the current Columbia University campus.

In the early 1800s, John Clendening owned a farm that covered much of the valley, roughly from the Bloomingdale Road to 8th Avenue between 99th and 105th Streets, with a large mansion near Amsterdam and 104th Streets. The area was known as the “Clendening Valley”. Although the Clendening estate was divided and sold in 1845, the Clendening Valley name persisted until the 1880s, and a Clendening Hotel existed into the early 20th century.