Tenth Avenue / Amsterdam Avenue is a north-south thoroughfare on the West Side of Manhattan in New York City. It carries uptown (northbound) traffic as far as West 110th Street, also known as Cathedral Parkway for the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. At this point, it continues as a two-way thoroughfare.
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Geography
Tenth Avenue begins at West 13th Street and the West Side Highway in the West Village / Meatpacking District and it runs uptown (northbound) for 47 blocks until its intersection with West 59th Street, where it is re-signed (like the other West Side avenues) as Amsterdam Avenue but continues without interruption.
As Amsterdam Avenue, the thoroughfare stretches 129 blocks north before reaching Highbridge Park at West 190th Street, where the roadway is briefly renamed Fort George Avenue before it terminates. The street narrows to one lane in each direction as it passes through the campus of Yeshiva University's Wilf Campus, between 184th and 186th streets. Following the roadway's interruption by Highbridge Park, it resumes in the same line as Tenth Avenue, running for slightly less than a mile, from Dyckman Street to the intersection of West 218th Street and Broadway, near the extreme northern tip of the island of Manhattan and the Broadway Bridge, which crosses the Harlem River.
The segment south of Highbridge Park, running a total of 177 blocks, is the longest continuous avenue in Manhattan, excluding Broadway, the West Side Highway and the FDR Drive (none of which is strictly an avenue).
History
The street's name reflects the Dutch roots of Manhattan's earliest colonization in the 17th century. According to Sarah Feirstein's Naming New York:
What is now Amsterdam Avenue was laid out in the 1811 Commissioners' Plan as 10th Avenue and opened from 59th Street to Fort George Avenue in 1816. The name was changed in 1890 in a bid on the part of Upper West Side landowners to confer a measure of old-world cachet to their real estate investments in an area that had yet to catch on. The new avenue name supported the speculators' claim that this section would become "the New City" and a "new, New Amsterdam."[1]
Amsterdam Avenue in culture
The ballet Slaughter on Tenth Avenue recalls the dangerous early 20th century decades in Hells Kitchen. In the 19th century when the West Side Line (NYCRR) ran along the Avenue, a "Tenth Avenue Cowboy" was paid to ride a horse and warn people of an approaching street running train.
Notable sites on Amsterdam/10th Avenue
- Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine
- City College of New York
- Columbia University
- John Jay College
- LaGuardia High School
- New York Presbyterian Medical Center
- St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center
- Yeshiva University
References
- ^ Sanna Feirstein, Naming New York: Manhattan Places & how They Got Their Names NYU Press, 2001, p. 169 ISBN 0814727123, 9780814727126 [1]
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