Live in Manhattan Heights

Manhattan Heights was a smelter before it was a neighborhood. The Federal Copper Company ran one here from 1901 to 1908, on a barren stretch northeast of downtown. When it closed, the land was platted as the Castle Heights and Manhattan Heights additions, and the first streets took the names Federal, Bronze, Copper, Silver and Gold. Otto Thorman designed the first house, at 3037 Federal, in 1914. Through the 1920s and 1930s Henry Trost, Mabel Welch and William Wuehrmann built west of Memorial Park, much of it Spanish Colonial Revival, with bungalows between. George Kessler, whose City Plan the council adopted in 1925, meant the park as a memorial to El Pasoans who served in the World War.

This is a neighborhood its owners hold. This guide takes the City's Manhattan Heights neighborhood as its boundary: 336 acres between Richmond Avenue, Alabama Street, Grant Avenue and the BNSF railroad, with Memorial Park inside. Owners lived in 708 of the 1,149 occupied homes in 2020, 62%, and half of those owned outright. The census counted 2,860 residents, down 15% from 3,366 on about the same ground in 2010, while the homes rose from 1,271 to 1,286: fewer people in the same houses.

Most houses here are reviewed before exterior work. Manhattan Heights was listed on the National Register on 27 September 1980 and, by the City's account, became El Paso's first locally designated historic district on 26 May 1981; Wikipedia gives 9 June 1979. The district covers 61.5% of the neighborhood and 1,636 of its residents. Inside it the City's Historic Preservation Office reviews exterior changes, windows, roofing, fencing and driveways among them; staff approve many minor ones, but work the design guidelines do not cover that alters a building's character or form needs a certificate of appropriateness from the Historic Landmark Commission before a building permit, about a month from application. Interiors are not reviewed unless designated. The "H" overlay on the zoning map settles which side of the line a lot is on.

No price index follows the neighborhood's line. Every block is in ZIP code 79930, where Zillow's typical value was $184,711 in August 2026, up 1.7% on the year, but the ZIP held more than eight times as many people. The five taxing units on a City and El Paso ISD address add to 2.643693 per $100 for 2025, and two of them, the college and the hospital district, take nothing off a homestead. A homestead at the ZIP's figure owes about $3,309 a year, the same house without the exemption about $4,883: the school district's flat $140,000 exemption is a large share of a house at this price. At El Paso County's $280,615 median sale price a homestead owes about $5,845. The arithmetic is on the El Paso page.

FEMA's effective map here is a scan. It dates from February 2006 and exists for this part of the city only as scanned panels at FEMA's Map Service Center. The preliminary countywide map of August 2025, not yet in force, shows 0.7% of the neighborhood in its 1% zone, in narrow zone A strips, and no block with residents has its center in one. El Paso floods from summer storms in arroyos and streets that neither map draws; in 2006 the city had a year's rain in two days, and the sources read here neither say whether that water reached these streets nor name the arroyo or drain that carries their runoff. Route 32 runs through on Piedras Street, and Dyer Brio and the Five Points Transit Center are about a kilometer south.