With many thanks to Iulius Ceasar for his last words, "Et tu, Brute?"
With a little digression in front of my house, I head off to my subject matter, Marble Hill. Manhattan was not always a full-fledged island. Spuyten Duyvil Creek meandered Nothward, meeting the headwaters of the Harlem River. This waterway though was not navigable by commercial shipping. Sometime in the 19th century, it was decided to dig the Harlem Ship Canal to make the Harlem River navigable to the Hudson River. Rather than following the circuitous route of the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, they simply cut the northern tip of Manhattan off, filled in the creek bed, thus joining the Marble Hill section of Manhattan to the mainland. Marble Hill at the present is neither fish nor fowl. Politically it is still a part of New York County (Manhattan) but in other respects (school districts, police) it is a part of The Bronx. I had wanted to explore this curious part of Manhattan for a long time but kept putting it off.
Three guys insisted I take their picture. When I did, one of them asked if the FBI was going to come after them now? I said that I was afraid so because now that I took their picture, I was going to have to tell the FBI everything I knew about them. At this they laughed like crazy because, of course, I knew nothing about them.
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