This two-block stretch of Lexington Avenue might be the steepest hill in Manhattan—and it has a forgotten name
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.”
Duffy was born in the East Village and sounds like the kind of minor politician who ingratiated himself to various Tammany Hall bigwigs. He ended up serving as an alderman for Duffyville in the 1880s, and he died in 1903 at age 67 in his home on East 103rd Street.
Before and after Duffy’s death, Duffy’s Hill was something like the East Harlem version of Death Avenue. Cable cars traveled up and down the hill, forcing them to suddenly accelerate and then slam on the brakes, which resulted in many casualties.
A guard was eventually stationed at 103rd Street to stop traffic when the cars needed to go up and down, per a 1933 New Yorker article. But that wouldn’t have stopped the mischievous boys who in 1921 sent an unoccupied limo hurtling down Duffy’s Hill, killing a girl on the street.
The Duffy’s Hill name made it into this 1911 Buick ad as one of New York’s most notorious hills. Per the New Yorker article, it’s actually the city’s steepest hill “on which surface cars are operated,” with a 14 percent grade.
One question remains: why didn’t Duffy or some other city official have it leveled? Ghosts of Gotham mentions the ridge of Manhattan schist that rises in uptown neighborhoods, so perhaps it was just geologically impossible to flatten at the time.
[Third image: The Sun]
