Morningside Park (New York City) Morningside Park (New York City) Morningside Park is a public park in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. The area occupies 110th to 123rd Streets from Morningside Avenue to Morningside Drive at the border between Harlem and Morningside Heights. Much of the park is adjacent to Columbia University. Morningside Park's natural geography contains a cliff of Manhattan schist rock, with manmade features in the park such as an ornamental pond and waterfall. It is operated by New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. The park was first proposed by the Central Park Commissioners in 1867, and the
New York City dominated by Tammany Hall, a political machine supported by Irish and German immigrants. Several prominent American literary figures lived in New York during the 1830s and 1840s, including William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, John Keese, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Edgar Allan Poe. Public-minded members of the contemporaneous business elite lobbied for the establishment of Central Park, which in 1857 became the first landscaped park in an American city. The Great Irish Famine brought a large influx of Irish immigrants, of whom over 200,000 were living in New York by 1860, upwards of a quarter of