• Central Park North (West 110th Street)
• Frederick Douglass Houses
• Manhattan Avenue Historic District
• Croton Aqueduct Bridge Remnant

Manhattan Valley takes its name from a geographic feature — a natural topographic depression in the upper Manhattan landscape through which streams once flowed eastward into what is now Central Park. The area was part of the colonial-era Bloomingdale District, known in Dutch as Bloemendaal, which described the farmlands and country estates along Bloomingdale Road from roughly 23rd Street northward. In the early 1800s, the valley was known as Clendening Valley after landowner John Clendening, whose farm covered the area between 99th and 105th Streets. As the IRT Ninth Avenue Line extended uptown in 1870 and the Broadway subway opened in 1904, the neighborhood filled with tenement buildings and became home primarily to Irish, German, and later Puerto Rican immigrant communities through the mid-twentieth century.

The northern end of Central Park at West 110th Street — Cathedral Parkway — forms Manhattan Valley's eastern boundary and provides residents with direct access to one of the city's defining public landscapes. The Frederick Douglass Houses, a New York City Housing Authority development completed between 1958 and 1965, represent the neighborhood's mid-century urban renewal period and remain a defining presence along the western blocks.

Manhattan Valley's layered story — from Dutch farmland to immigrant tenement district to gentrifying urban enclave — is the kind of place-specific identity that MY-NHD was built to represent.