When many people think of New York City, they focus on the borough of Manhattan, the island that features the Empire State Building, Central Park, Grand Central Terminal, and other things nonresidents know about. There are four other boroughs—Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx—but to get from any of those to Manhattan, you have to take a bridge or tunnel, with the rare exception of a neighborhood called Marble Hill. It’s not part of Manhattan Island—rather, it is connected to the Bronx. But if you’re voting or called for jury duty, you do so as a Manhattan resident.
Its history gives us a brief glimpse into America’s early attitude toward Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Manhattan is separated from the Bronx by the Harlem River, which connects the Hudson River to the East River. In 1890, a section of the Harlem River that was a few thousand yards from the Hudson was very narrow, and seafaring vessels had difficulty in navigating it. The Army Corps of Engineers decided to reroute the Harlem River, creating a wider passageway south. In doing so, it cut off a piece of Manhattan—Marble Hill—turning it into an island. When the county of the Bronx was created by the state on January 1, 1914, Marble Hill—still an island—was officially included as part of Manhattan. Unfortunately for mapmakers everywhere, the old path of the Harlem River fell into disuse and was filled in sometime during that same year. Marble Hill was, from that point on, a neighborhood in Manhattan that was paradoxically attached to the Bronx but not to Manhattan itself.
For more than two decades, no one seemed bothered by this. However, in 1939, Bronx borough president James F. Lyons tried to capitalize on this curiosity and turn it into some publicity for himself. He went to the neighborhood—“unarmed and escorted only by his chauffeur,” in the words of the New York Times—and climbed to the summit of a rocky hill, where he planted the flag of Bronx County. Symbolically, he was claiming the neighborhood for his borough. While residents of Marble Hill jeered him, Lyons was unperturbed, comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln and noting that some disliked Honest Abe for freeing the slaves.
The news media ate it up, just as Lyons had hoped. The Times article featured a picture of him, grinning widely, holding the Bronx County flag on a rock atop the hill, his chauffeur-assistant standing stoically next to him. Everyone seemed to appreciate the joke, but the Times, for some reason, did not carry Lyons’s self-comparison to Abe Lincoln. Instead, they saw a different person in Lyons, one who doesn’t seem so funny to modern ears: Adolf Hitler.
The Times casually referred to him as “the Bronx Fuehrer” multiple times in its coverage of his “bloodless coup” the next day. Further, the Times called Marble Hill the Bronx’s “Sudetenland,” a reference to the section of Czechoslovakia that the Nazis had annexed a year prior. All of this was done tongue-in-cheek, of course, but apparently in the spring of 1939, it was perfectly okay for a major U.S. publication to jokingly liken an American politician to Adolf Hitler.
As for Marble Hill itself, the attempted annexation failed—it had no lasting impact on the geography of New York City. To this day, the neighborhood remains a part of Manhattan, although residents go to schools in the Bronx and are serviced by Bronx-based emergency responders.
On the day of Lyons’s attempted annexation of Marble Hill, reporters thought that he had brought in reinforcements—there were four tanks sitting near the border between the neighborhood and the Bronx. It turns out that was a coincidence. An enterprising entrepreneur had bought fourteen surplus tanks from the government and was shipping them to South America to be used as tractors. Ten of the fourteen had already been shipped, but the other four were sitting there, unmanned and uninvolved, as Lyons and his driver invaded Marble Hill.