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Manhattanville is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan bordered on the south by Morningside Heights on the west by the Hudson River, on the east by Harlem and on the north by Hamilton Heights. Its borders straddle West 125th Street, roughly from 122nd Street to 135th Street and from the Hudson River to St. Nicholas Park.
Throughout the 19th century, Manhattanville was a town that bustled around a wharf active with ferry and daily river conveyances. It was the first station on the Hudson River Railroad running north from the city, and the hub of daily stage coach, omnibus and streetcar lines. Situated near the famous Bloomingdale Road, its hotels, houses of entertainment and post office made it an alluring destination of suburban retreat from the city, yet its direct proximity to the Hudson River also made it an invaluable industrial entry point for construction materials and other freight bound for upper Manhattan. With the construction of road and railway viaducts over the valley in which the town sat, Manhattanville, increasingly absorbed into the growing city, became a marginalized industrial area.
The neighborhood is now the site of a major planned expansion of Columbia University, which has campuses in Morningside Heights to the south and Washington Heights to the north.
Aside from Grant's Tomb, Riverside Church and the Manhattan School of Music at the southwestern corner, the principal landmarks in Manhattanville are the elevated section of the IRT Broadway – Seventh Avenue Line and the elevated Riverside Drive Viaduct. Within the neighborhood is Manhattanville Houses, a 1,272 unit development of the New York City Housing Authority, which opened in 1961. Designed in the international style by noted Swiss-born architect William Lescaze, the development was initially created to house middle income residents.
The neighborhood also contains the landmarked neo-Renaissance Claremont Theatre where Thomas Edison once shot a short film in 1915 featuring the building's entrance, the Manhattanville Bus Depot, St. Mary's Church, and the Fairway Supermarket, whose broad selections attract distant customers.
In Riverside Park, north of Grant's Tomb, is the site of the former Claremont Inn, a riverside respite and hotel for the affluent back in its heyday. It was originally built around 1775 as a private mansion and estate. By the end of the 19th century it was bought by the city of New York and leased to a hotelier. There was also a place to rent bicycles at the inn. It had a serious fire in the 1940s which caused its demise. A plan was in the making for a reuse of the inn and restaurant and grounds when yet a final fire caused its closing in 1951. A stone plaque marks where it once stood.
In the 1920s, on 131st Street between Broadway and Twelfth Avenue, there was a Studebaker automobile factory plant in Manhattanville which made luxury cars. The building was sold in the Great Depression in the 1930s to Borden to be used as a dairy plant. In the 21st century it is used by Columbia University and has a Studebaker Cafe in it.
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