As seen in this photograph and the next by Harlem Renaissance writer Carl Van Vechten, the upper part of Manhattan looks nothing like its leveled counterpart south of approximately 190th Street. Many of the man-made features that define Manhattan—Broadway, numbered streets, high-rise apartments, and crowds—are also found in the island’s northern reaches, but they are disrupted by the area’s hills and valleys. Here, right-angled New York must accommodate nature’s curvy lines, and as a result, the city’s numbered streets do not align on a rectangular grid: tiered street walls curve around the contours of the land, and patches of wild vegetation break through the cityscape. AR