A numbered street of East Harlem, at the foot of Duffy’s Hill on Lexington Avenue.
103rd Street is one of the ordinary 60-foot-wide cross streets of Manhattan’s 1811 grid. The station’s entrances lie at the bottom of Duffy’s Hill, the steep stretch of Lexington Avenue between 102nd and 103rd Streets. It was named for Michael James Duffy, a Tammany Hall alderman who built rowhouses nearby from 1894; by 1897 cable cars were having accidents on its slope.