Saint Nicholas Avenue (Manhattan)

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Saint Nicholas Avenue is a major New York City street. It runs north-south between 193rd Street and 111th Streets in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It goes through the neighborhoods of Washington Heights and Harlem.

North of 169th Street, St. Nicholas Avenue is aligned with the street grid, with Wadsworth Avenue one block west (north of 174th Street) and Audubon Avenue. Below 169th Street, St. Nicholas Avenue cuts at a diagonal to much of the Manhattan street grid, crossing Amsterdam Avenue at 162nd Street and continuing against the grain to West 148th Street. Below 148th, St. Nicholas returns to a rough parallel track, with Convent Avenue one block west and Edgecombe Avenue, down to 124th Street. Below 124th, St, Nicholas Avenue takes a sharp diagonal, crossing Frederick Douglass Boulevard at 121st Street, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard at 116th Street, ending at Lenox Avenue, just north of Central Park.

St. Nicholas Avenue serves as a border between the West Side of Harlem and Central Harlem. Although Harlem "officially" spans from the East River all the way to the Hudson River, the area west of St. Nicholas Avenue is generally not counted as part of Harlem.

In 2000, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani signed a bill adding the name "Juan Pablo Duarte Boulevard" to St. Nicholas Avenue for the stretch from Amsterdam Avenue and West 162nd Street to the intersection of West 193rd Street and Fort George Hill. The added name was in honor of Juan Pablo Duarte, one of the founding fathers of the Dominican Republic^[1].