Fireplace Remodeling in Marcus Garvey Park, NY

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.

During the American Revolutionary War, Hessian soldiers “mounted a battery” at the hill “to command the mouth of the Harlem River”. 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, as seen from McGown’s Pass to the south, is … a lesser height or ridge, and which to the inhabitants came to be known as the Little Hill.

Learn more about Marcus Garvey Park.