Manhattan can be a craggy place. It was built on a bedrock that did not supply it with the shorelines it wanted, but made its interior an ideal place for tall buildings. The city’s native schist enabled - as much as purely human motivations - its vertical course, its skyward-reaching character.

Surreally dense as it is, Manhattan is circumscribed by old-fashioned boundaries. Midtown bears no more a resemblance to the Upper West Side than a pretty girl does to a mud fence. And while Gramercy Park might be considered an elitist enclave, the aura of a mid-Nineteenth Century village green is an infectious one and unlike any other urban phenomenon. When you’re on the old Bowery, you know it – just as you feel a certain kind of electricity strolling 5th or Madison Avenues. The visual component is so thrilling, you don’t necessarily need it to know where you are.

Upper Manhattan was built to accommodate the man-swarm that was vacating the old Upper West Side – and Harlem. It attempted to recreate the posh apartment blocks of the “nearer” Upper West Side – and did a creditable job. The building I lived in had once been luxurious: with newsstands, a shoe-shine parlor, and its own little eatery. These perquisites had long vanished by the time I moved in, but its old-fashioned elegance was everywhere to be seen, from the ornately coffered ceilings in the lobby to the few ten-room apartments some of the older residents still maintained. It was ten or eleven stories – the tallest on a block that quickly filled in during the boom years of the Teens and Twenties. By the early part of the 20th-century, Upper Broadway had successfully replicated the canyons cost-conscious apartment-dwellers had abandoned on 79th or 86th Street. Though its grandeur was no longer pristine, Riverside Drive provided a visual excitement few other places in the city could. Panoramic views abounded. Great, breathtaking sweeps of the Hudson could be had from almost anywhere you might look. And if you lived in a Westward-facing apartment – particularly above the fifth or sixth floors – you were in heaven. Almost literally. There was nothing between you and the ethereal realms but the kinds of magnificent views non-New Yorkers must see in their mind’s eye when they think about visiting.

Down 158th shows the craggy character of the neighborhood, though the buildings themselves aren’t particularly distinguished. I suppose I was interested in capturing the rolling contour that brought you all the way down to the river.