ALICE tumbled down a rabbit hole to find herself in a ''curiouser and curiouser'' world. In the most northern Manhattan neighborhood, the same effect can be found by climbing a marble hill that, while still politically a part of the borough of Manhattan, is no longer physically attached to the island but anchored in the Bronx.
Behind a wall of ordinary looking 1920's brick apartment buildings, ringing the hill on the south and east, is a village of a 100-plus private homes so varied it looks like a display of leftover architectural models. One of the oldest and largest, built in Tudor style, served briefly as a synagogue in the late 19th century. The neighborhood has no co-ops and only one low-rise condominium.
''Marble Hill is a whole other bubble in the world,'' said Lisa Castro, who has lived on Fort Charles Place on the top of the hill since the mid-1990's. She was so enchanted with real estate in the neighborhood that she became an associate broker with New Heights Realty, which had handled her sale, and has since bought and renovated two other Marble Hill properties with her husband, Raul.
On maps today the neighborhood even looks like bubble, floating between Johnson Avenue in the Bronx on the west, Exterior Street in the Bronx on the east and West 230th Street on the north and sitting on the Harlem River to the south. But on a 1867 survey map, it was clearly a Manhattan promontory. The Harlem River and Spuyten Duyvel Creek flowed around it; Dyckman's Canal, which followed an old millrace, cut across it at what was then 222nd Street, linking the Harlem and the Hudson.
The building of the Harlem River Ship Canal turned the hill into an island in 1895, but when Spuyten Duyvel Creek on the west was filled in before World War I, the 51 acres became firmly attached to the mainland and the Bronx. Over the years, residents successfully fought to keep it politically part of Manhattan but lost the battle to have a 212 area code. The Bronx supplies services like police, fire and sanitation, but medics come across the vertical-lift Broadway Bridge from Columbia University's Allen Pavilion.
Continue reading the main storyMarble Hill has several thousand housing units, according to the latest census figures, but most of the units are in 7 of the 11 Marble Hill Houses, a city housing project built to the east of the hill, where the Harlem River once flowed. The other four, just next door, are in the Bronx. The Promenade, a 310-unit state-subsidized public housing rental high-rise on Tenunissen Avenue, is on the western edge of the neighborhood. Only a small fraction of the housing units, whether rental apartments or one- or two-family homes are higher up, on Marble Hill, traditionally a working-class neighborhood, which once housed supervisors employed an old trainyard in the valley to the west.
MARBLE HILL has backyards, but no parklands. Still, from the southern hillside there are vistas of the Harlem River, Inwood Park and Columbia University's Baker Field. It also has less pleasurable views and sounds of the No. 1 and 9 trains traveling on an elevated track over Broadway with a stop at 225th and of Metro-North trains hugging the riverbank.
Guillermo Linares, a former city councilman who used to represent Marble Hill along with Inwood and Washington Heights, thought the neighborhood was the Bronx until he began campaigning in 1991. Three years later, after seeing a for-sale sign on a lawn, he and his wife bought a house on Van Corlear Place, moving from an apartment in Washington Heights. ''We love the neighborhood,'' he said. ''There's character in this small and separate part of Manhattan.''
Twenty years ago, when Nikki Scheuer bought a three-building 93-unit rental complex around a courtyard at 2 Adrian Avenue, she saw a neighborhood with ''lots of potential'' and thought all the ''charming architecture'' would soon lead to gentrification, but change has been slow in coming, she said. People just like the neighborhood too much to leave.
Her complex, in which one-bedroom apartments rent for $800 to $825, had five vacancies last year, all filled by word of mouth through tenants who work for the city or the United Nations. The manager has not run an ad for eight years.
One longtime renter on Marble Hill describes the neighborhood as ''full of birdbaths and people who feed stray cats.'' Over the years, it has moved through the usual immigrant patterns with Irish, Jewish and Italian residents, but today it is so diverse that it defies labels.
''It's what New York means to me,'' said Kathe Mull, a stage manager and director in the theater, whose family moved to Marble Hill last fall from the Upper West Side by way of Inwood after bidding on five other houses over two years.
Despite its diversity, Marble Hill is like an exclusive club. Houses almost never go on the market and are likely to be sold privately. The neighborhood had only one ''for sale'' sign this month -- a two-bedroom, one-bath brick house on Marble Hill Avenue -- but it was already in contract for $250,000. Esther Ore, a Morant Realty associate broker, said the home sold without advertising and within a day of the sign's posting. A few vacant lots remain, but a call to a number on one sign determined the lot had been sold ages ago.
David Rothberg, a partner in a proposed 30-to-40-unit rental project on Marble Hill Avenue, was almost relieved when somebody sprayed graffiti on his site's sign, obscuring part of his telephone number. ''I got a 100 calls from all over Manhattan, calls from New Jersey and the neighborhood, two and three calls a day,'' he said.
Rents in the six- or seven-story complex of studios and one- and two-bedrooms are to be $1,000 to $1,500, reflecting today's geographic realities, not geologic history. ''It's not Manhattan; it's the Bronx,'' he said.
The city undertook a $4.3 million reconstruction on the hill last year, installing new street lights, water mains, manholes, curbs and sidewalks, but residents balked when they discovered their uneven bluestone sidewalks were being replaced by concrete. Hoping to save their stone, more than 100 residents turned out at a meeting sponsored by the Marble Hill Neighborhood Improvement Corporation. They found preserving tradition would cost more than $20 a square foot instead of $7.50 a square foot for concrete. A few residents found private contractors who would reset the stone for less, but most sidewalks today are concrete.
Melanie Weiss, a retired New York Police Department narcotics detective and longtime resident, became director of the organization last fall and takes care of her community like a patrolman on the beat. There is little crime, she said; landlords are cooperative and and there is lots of community spirit. Neighbors look out for each other, and the same postman has been delivering mail for 10 to 15 years.
The Marble Hill Nursery School, a private cooperative school with some city financing in the Marble Hill Houses, draws students from the neighborhood, Inwood and as far away as Tarrytown if parents work nearby. Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the school has 75 children, ages almost 3 to 5, in half-day and all-day programs.
Students in the neighborhood go on to public, parochial and private schools in Manhattan and the Bronx, including the selective private schools Horace Mann, Riverdale Country Day and Ethical Culture Fieldston, according to Karen Worchel, the director. The closest parochial schools are Good Shepherd in Inwood and St. John's and Visitation in Kingsbridge.
A public school park, which will serve children from kindergarten through high school, is being created in the valley just to the west of the hill, where John F. Kennedy High School, with more than 4,000 students, was built in 1972.
A Harvard professor called Kennedy ''an urban oasis'' and cited it for ''urban school pioneering'' in the early 1980's. While the years brought new challenges and student populations of nearly 6,000, the school is now experiencing ''incredible renewal,'' according to Ms. Weiss.
The immense school, which has escalators as well as staircases, is being divided into smaller academies, including the Marble Hill School of International Studies. The Math and Science Institute offers an honors program to 200 students, and an environmental studies program has graduates accepted into Ivy League schools, said Tony Thoman, the director. Mr. Thoman's students are now developing a wetlands garden after they found cattails that showed the old creek bed had not been completely vanquished.
In 2000-1, the most recent year for which data is available, John F. Kennedy students had an average score of 430 in the math section of the SAT reasoning tests and 415 in the verbal test, compared with citywide averages of 473 in math and 445 in verbal. In 2001, about 45 percent of John F. Kennedy graduates went on to four-year colleges and about 25 percent to two-year schools, according to the New York City school Web site.
Also in the creek bed educational park is Multiple Intelligences School (Public School 37). The eight-year-old school with 640 students, K-8, operates at capacity but is not overcrowded, according to district officials. In the fourth-grade English Language Arts test, 40 percent met state standards, and in the math test, 36 percent were at that level.
M.S/H.S. 368 Intech is under construction nearby, but 561 students in Grades 6 through 8 are temporarily housed at the David A. Stein Riverdale/Kingsbridge Academy (M.S./H.S. 141). Enrollment at the new school is projected at 1,200 students in Grades 6 through 12 with a laptop for each student.
COMMERCIAL activity in Marble Hill is limited to a few bodegas, a video shop, a small grocery and coin laundries, but Kingsbridge is only a short walk or one subway stop away. It has diners, Italian delis, Irish bars, Latin restaurants, furniture stores, pharmacies and a craft store.
Construction has begun a Target-anchored shopping mall just east of the Marble Hill Houses. Paul Travis, a principal in Kingsbridge Associates, which is developing the site, has said that convenient mass transit, major roadway access and 350,000 people with median household incomes of $53,000 within a mile and a half of the property offer ''a totally unmet market.''
Marital compromise, not schools or shopping, attracted Steve Rossiter and Urvashi Ragan. He is a music producer who needed easy access to his Midtown studio. She is a Californian who is a ''reluctant city person'' and who wanted room for her crafts and herb gardening and a quick drive to her job in Yonkers with Consumer Reports. Scrunched into a two-bedroom Midtown apartment that was also his studio, they began their search in Inwood. Checking out the New Heights Realty web site, they discovered a two-family, three-story Queen Anne Victorian in Marble Hill, listed at $399,000.
''A Victorian in the city. How is this possible?'' he remembers asking.
An offer had already been made but no contract executed. They put in a higher bid for $410,000. They saw the house at the end of May and moved in by July.
Few Marble Hill real estate tales have such a straight plot line, as Kathe Mull knows well knows from her quest.
''You have to keep at it,'' she said. ''I was like a little rat terrier once I decided I wanted to live here. While there aren't many houses for sale, they do turn up.''
An article last Sunday about living in Marble Hill, the bit of Manhattan that lies on the mainland, misstated the name of the street that is the site of the Promenade, a rental high-rise. It is Teunissen Place, not Tenunissen Avenue.