New York Herald, July 14, 1895.

A GRAIN FIELD IN CITY LIMITS
NEW YORK HERALD
July 14, 1895
It Waves at 211^th Street Awaiting the Reaper and Is Manhattan’s Last
IS ON HISTORICAL GROUND
That Part of the Island Was Devastated by Two Armies in the Time of Washington
POINTS OF INTEREST NEAR BY

“RIPE and awaiting the scythe of the reaper, what may be Manhattan Island’s last field of grain is waving at 211^th street, Inwood, and what an incentive to retrospection there is in that golden expanse on the hillside which seems to be casting a look of sad reproof at that fast approaching town!

What recollections of ancient windmill scenes on tile or canvass come back, what visions of corpulent burghers with enormous buckles on belt and hat present themselves, and what pity arises for that conspicuous emblem on the municipal arms which will be deprived of all excuse for further existence there. Yet, if the truth be told, as history gives it, a bunch of “weed” might more properly have served to represent the leading industry of the colonists.

New York Herald, July 14th, 1895.

It will be news to many that a great part of this island was once given up to the culture of tobacco.  Such was the case, however, and the product was said to equal that of Virginia.  The windmill had many other offices to perform than the grinding of grain.  It sawed wood for the shipbuilder, and incidentally it served to frighten Indians.  Much of the tobacco raised upon the island probably found its way up the river, as a medium of exchange for beaver and other skins.  One of the early Governors stated in his report that it was impossible to trade with the Indians when no tobacco was at hand.

Century House in 1898, Source: NY Public Library.

Adjoining the grain patch on the northerly side is the “Nagle burying ground,” where rest the ancient proprietors of upper Manhattan, while about fifty paces to the westward and just in view above the green sward are several rows of rude, uninscribed stones, which are said to mark the graves of blacks, who tilled the soil for their wealthy masters.  To the eastward is the “Nagle House,” better known as the “Century House,” built in 1736, as the stone recently taken from its front attests.

Isham Park Entrance in 1918. Source: NYHS

Directly to the west of the grain, and set in the wall near the Isham entrance, is the old slab of brown stone which for generations informed the traveler that the now encircling city was twelve miles away. Four city blocks to the south and on the Kingsbridge road is the “old Dyckman house,” the residence of Jacobus Dyckman who owned much of the land on the northern extremity of the island and built the bridge, which bears his name.

General Sir William Henry Clinton (1769–1846). Painting attributed to Andrea Soldi.

Scarcely two months ago there came to light the foundation of an ancient house uncovered at 210^th street two old scythes which had probably had been buried above one hundred years, as among the refuse found in company with them were the trappings of officers of the Sixty-fourth regiment of foot and the Eighteenth Light Dragoons—two corps of the British army in the Revolution. Oft had the harvest yielded, no doubt, to these two old blades previous to the coming invaders.  For the seven years following “76” there was little use for agricultural implements in that vicinity.  The meadows of Inwood were one large parade ground for the many regiments assembled at various times near this, Sir Henry Clinton’s headquarters.  No small space was required for the exercise and pasturage of the 984 horses of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Light Dragoons, once stationed at Fort George and Inwood.

Stirring scenes there were in view from this little eminence at 211^th street on that eventful day in November when Fort Washington fell.  Posted across this grain field for a while was that same body of Americans who resisted the landing of three hundred Hessians from the English ship Pearl at Tubby Hook.

“Washington’s Parade Ground” the level strip is called.  Possibly the Continentals encamped there for a short space during the retreat from the island, or on their victorious return in 1783.

216th and Broadway in 1895 (Source-Harper’s Bazaar)

Owing to its isolated position, shut in as it is by the Hudson and Harlem, and deprived of any means of communication with the city proper, Inwood has changed little in a generation.  A few new houses have been built: some old ones have been torn down.  The Kingsbridge road, which was probably at first an Indian trail leading down to the valley and then a highway of early Dutch and English colonists, has of late been graded, curbed and sewered, and now awaits the macadam for which the contract has been given.  Ere the final touch is added the road will probably be in the hands of one or other of the cable companies, and then “farewell, a long farewell, to rural Inwood. The time will not be long before the city has made good its claim to the locality, which the aristocratic sponsors so fittingly named.”

“Ward or Public School No. 52 was a landmark on the southeast corner of Broadway and Academy Street from 1858 to almost 1957. This picture dates from about 1902, or midway of that period. Note the gas lamp with a mailbox on the lamppost. At the right is the house where the caretaker lived.” -Source- William Tieck, Schools and School Days.

In 1858, the year Inwood’s first school was constructed , the area wasn’t even yet known by its current name. Locals, of whom there were few, all referred to the region on Manhattan’s northernmost tip as “Tubby Hook.” Folks downtown hardly even considered the backwater region as being part of their city.

So imagine the surprise when a monolithic, rectangular red-brick structure capped by fourteen chimneys rose from a cow pasture on what we now know as Academy Street and Broadway.  Everyone, locals included, were puzzled as to the need for such a large and modern structure. There were barely enough children in the area to fill even the first floor. Besides, children in those lean times, like their parents, literally lived off the land, and were needed in the fields to care for the crops and herd cattle. Who really had time for school?

Public School 52 on Broadway and Academy in 1930. Note old and new schools sit side by side before demolition of old school in 1956.

According to the late Kingsbridge historian William Tieck, “the growth of the Tubby Hook school was so slow that during the first thirty or forty years of its existence only the lowest floor of the three story structure was used. Because School Commissioner James MacKean was one of the prime movers in the erection of the building, it was long known as “MacKean’s Folly”. The land itself was donated by Isaac Michael Dyckman, who retained an active interest in the school until his death in 1899.” (Schools and School Days in Riverdale, Kingsbridge and Spuyten Duyvil, 1971).

“Even as late as 1908, when Public School 52 celebrated its fiftieth anniversay, it was surrounded by the wide-open spaces shown in the remarkable vista above. The picture was taken in a northeasterly direction overlooking the junction of Riverside Drive with Broadway and Dyckman Street. To the right of the school is the mansion-like dwelling of the caretaker, Mr. O’Neill. Landmarks include the original Mount Washington Presbyterian Church; above its steeple, the now abandoned powerhouse at 216th Street; and, on the horizon, the two buildings of the Catholic Orphan Asylum and Webb’s Academy and Home for Shipbuilders. A string of subway cars is barely visible on the distant-and then new- elevated line running up Tenth Avenue. Note the trolley tracks and gas lamps.” Source: William Tieck, Schools and School Days.

More than a century before Tieck’s seminal work on the history of education in the Kingsbridge section of New York, a reporter from the New York Herald visited the old Ward School 52 as part of an annual examination of city schools.

According to the article, dated June 16, 1865, “The new and progressive schoolhouse at Tubby Hook is one of the most interesting monuments of that beautiful and romantic region. Yesterday the annual examination of the classes was made by Mr. S. S. Randall, the General Superintendent of Schools, with the assistance of Assistant Superintendent N. A. Calkins, H. Kiddle and William Jones. There were eight classes—five grammar and three primary—consisting of one hundred and fifty children in all. They were under the management of Mr. G. Miller, the principal, and his three pretty and intelligent lady assistants. Indeed, all the lady teachers of New York are pretty and intelligent—so much that, in this respect, they differ from the teachers of other cities. They seem to be appointed for their beauty and intellect. The examination was careful and searching, and embraced mathematics, astronomy, geology, history, grammar and a variety of other studies. All the classes acquitted themselves well, and the result of the examination was by no means discreditable to them.”

Ah the ladies…but we digress.

The sturdy old building stood for nearly a century, with civil war heroes and other famous men passing through its doors before it was demolished in 1956 to make room for an addition to the newly constructed J.H.S. 52.

What follows is a 1911 newspaper description of Inwood’s first public school during its prime:
The Sun
March 26, 1911
TUBBY HOOK’S OLD SCHOOL
ANTIQUATED STRUCTURE UPTOWN WHICH HAS A HISTORY.

Something About the District in Which It Stands—Many Well Known Men Went to School In Old 52—The Late John B. McDonald One of Them.

In the upper end of the city, on Manhattan Island, surrounded by up to date apartment houses, electric railroads underground, and in the near distance over-head trolley roads, the elevated part of the subway as well as the main line of the New York Central Railroad, stands an old fashioned brick schoolhouse where formerly a genuine excuse for absence from school was given by the parents of pupils as “the boys were needed to drive the cows to pasture.”

The Sun, March 26, 1911

Up to about twenty-five years ago the place, 206th Street and Broadway, was known as Kingsbridge Road.  Inwood: locally and unofficially it was also known as Tubby Hook; muddy in winter, dusty in summer and looked upon by a non-resident as not being part of the city of New York. The origin of the name Tubby Hook may be traced to a family named Tubb who lived in the neighborhood of a point of land just a short distance south of the Spuyten Duyvil. This locality was later known as Inwood on the Hudson, warranted by the extensive woods surrounding the Dyckman tract of land, and is known now as Dyckman street and Broadway, about a hundred feet south of where the old schoolhouse stands.

To get at the history of this old familiar landmark, which is part of our present local school system, it is necessary to inspect the records of the township of New Haarlem, of which Washington Heights forms a part. A few years after the town was established in 1658 by the last of the Dutch Governors, Peter Stuyvesant, the famous one legged soldier recognized the need of some one person to perform the duties of a schoolmaster for the poor children of the district; the population of Manhattan Island at this time, December 4, 1663, was about 2,000 souls. The Schepens, or Magistrates, held a lengthy meeting, and at its close “a capable man” was appointed; but the very limited means of the residents prevented them from contributing toward the schoolmaster’s salary.

The best they could do was to give two dozen schepels of grain each for his support. The absence of money made it obligatory on the part of the Magistrates, Daniel Tournier and Johannes Verveelea, also Jan Pieterson Slot, who could not write his own name, to petition the Director General and Council of New Netherland for a grant in aid of the appointment of Jan La Montegne, Jr., son of a physician, who was one of the first settlers of New Haarlem. At the time of his appointment the future schoolmaster, who was secretary of the Board of Magistrates and a parish clerk, resigned to take up his new duties at a salary of fifty guilders ($20) per annum, which was considered “the least possible salary.”

For seven years, or until 1670, Mr. La Montagne served in the capacity of schoolmaster, when he moved away. Hendrik Van der Vin succeeded him and fulfilled the same duties at a salary of eight times as much as that paid to Mr. La Montagne. The increase in the schoolmaster’s salary was evidentially too much for the residents, for when his salary was not forthcoming in 1678 it became necessary to make a house to house canvas for subscriptions, which netted 300 guilders, an matters were squared with New Haarlem’s second schoolmaster, at least for the time being. This subscription, together with the rent of the town meadows, was devoted to the salary and support of Mr. Van der Vin, who agreed after some persuasion to accept it for the first year, after which his full salary was assessed upon the residents. The town also voted to rebuild his residence. Nevertheless he lived in poor circumstances and finally fell into debt, the town being compelled in 1682 to pay a bill of $6 for Van der Vin’s pens, ink, paper and writing material.

Reginald Pelham Bolton, a civil engineer, and a well known resident of Washington Heights, whose ancestors owned considerable property in the neighborhood of Bolton road, just west of Broadway and near the old schoolhouse, has in his possession a large quantity of old time official records, one of which bears testimony that Van der Vin was a gentleman well acquainted with Latin and Spanish, remarkable for his accuracy, methodical in his habits and very precise in his duties as a clerk.”

He was succeeded by John Tiebout, who resigned after some years and gave way to Guiliaem Bertholf, who served for one year. Tiebout returned and served until 1690, when he and his family of twelve children moved to Bushwick. Tiebout was succeeded by a young man, a recent arrival from Vlissingen by the name of Adrien Verrautl, and “judging from his penmanship, a scholar,” who filled the place until 1708 when he became voorleser at Bergen, N.J., being recommended by the people of New Haarlem.

Religious discussion of an acrimonious nature left the town without a schoolmaster for about fourteen years, or until 1722 when John Martin Van Harlingen arrived from Holland, who held the position until 1741, although for a long time after this the New Haarlem church people made no appointment. The war of the Revolution did away with education; something more important at this period, many sought protection inside the American lines, returning after evacuation to find their homes ruined.

Chapter 189, Laws of 1801 enacted by the Legislature then holding its twenty-fourth session at Kingston, N.Y., provided that a sum of be raised by a tax for the further support of government, such moneys to be invested in real securities and the interest thereof to be expended for the instruction of poor children in the most useful branches of common education. A town meeting was held in this year and arrangements were made to lease a portion of the common lands to establish an academy for the education of the children of the township, these lands were then situated in the old Ninth ward of the city of New York and caused considerable controversy with the city. A legislative act caused the land to be sold, the proceeds to be placed in the hands of various trustees, who paid $3,500 to the trustees of the “Hamilton School.” The exact date of the establishment of it is in doubt, but references show it to be prior to 1820. Valentine’s Manual shows the Hamilton free school to be located at 181st street and Fort Washington avenue, the teacher then (1852) being Hosea B. Perkins, who died in 1903, the trustees being Isaac Dyckman, Tunis Ryer and John P. Dodge. This school was the predecessor of the present school system on Washington Heights.

Public School 52 in 1905 Postcard

In 1858, when the population of Manhattan Island was about 750,000, the Tubby Hook school—now Public School 52—was formally opened, the land upon which it stands being given to the city by the late Isaac Dyckman, on condition that a school be erected thereon. Until recent years only the first floor was used.

In 1903 a change was made in the building, which measured 40 by 70 feet, with classrooms about 16 square feet, the census of the old red school being less than 150, an addition of twenty-five square feet was added, the class rooms enlarged, the top floor occupied, giving more room, making the census of the school at the present time about 300, including about two dozen in the kindergarten. At the same time that the addition was made the old familiar brick walls were given a coat of paint and the “old red school” became a rich cream in color. It is only within the last few years that the old time stoves were replaced by steam heat.

John B. Mcdonald: “The Man Who Dug the Subway.”

It is questionable if any school in greater New York can show a list of well known graduates that are more respected in the community, among the alumni being the Rev. William J. Cummings and two brothers, John and Frederick; Lieut. Samuel K Allen, a graduate of West Point; his brother, Ethan Allen; J. Crawford McCreery, a partner of the dry goods firm; Samuel Isham, the artist and author; also his brothers, William and Charles; Dr. Norton Denslow and William Wallace Denslow, the well known illustrator and cartoonist; Elijah Cutts, late Senator from Minnesota; Joseph Keppler, artist and editor of Puck; Counsellor William Flitner and brothers, Walter and Charles; and William S. Hartt, director of the Tropical Fruit Growers Association. The old school also furnished some civil war heroes, such as Col. Charles N. Swift and Thomas C. Wright, both of whom rose from the ranks during the war; Col. Cornelius Schermerhorn, John Whalen, first Corporation Counsel of Greater New York and at present the president of Bank of Washington Heights; Blake Wales and his brother Alexander, Corporation Counsel of Binghamton in 1908; Robert Veitch and his son Charles of Dyckman Street; Theodore and Benjamin Barringer, both physicians, Former Alderman John J. McDonald, Andrew Thompson, one of the active members of the Stock Exchange; his brother William, and last but not least John B. McDonald, “the man who dug the subway,” and who died a week ago.”

-

New York Times, August 22, 1931

“The final battle in which the bandits were killed was in front of 146 Dyckman Street.  Here the bandits were overtaken in a taxicab driven by William Nugent and occupied by Patrolman Albert Walker of the Thirtieth Precinct, Patrolman Albert Morrell of Traffic Squad H and Detective William Kiley.   The two patrolmen and the detective, standing on the running board of Nugent’s cab and using the car as a barricade, shot it out with the thugs. When the bodies of the gunmen were removed from their bullet-riddled car a revolver, five automatic pistols and a quantity of cartridges containing “dumdum” bullets were found on the floor.”  (New York Times, August 22, 1931)

1931 shootout on Dyckman Street near Sherman Avenue.

On a mid-August evening in 1931 the apartment dwellers of the Dyckman district had just begun to stream home for the weekend.  This was Prohibition-era Inwood and a gangland shooting outside a speakeasy called The Mad Dot Boat Club, on Dyckman Street near Seaman Avenue, the previous spring, still had many on edge.

Standard Union, August 22, 1931

Teenager Phil Dickens was working a summer job at the hardware store on Dyckman Street, not far from Broadway, when he first heard the gunfire.  The sixteen-year-old, who lived several blocks west on Payson Avenue, impulsively stepped see what was happening.

James Cagney’s gangster tale “Public Enemy” was fresh in the theaters and, like many youths, Dickens wanted to witness some real life action.

That he was about to walk into a raging gun-battle never crossed his mind.

The decision nearly cost Dickens his life.

Looking west up Dyckman Street the teen watched with saucer-eyed amazement as a bullet-riddled taxicab zigzagged towards the Loews Inwood movie theater on the south side of the street.

1931 Shootout on Dyckman Street, Acme Newspictures. (Note Loews Inwood theater in background)

The cab slowed to a crawl as police moved ever closer, peppering the mysterious yellow cab with shotgun blasts and machine gun fire.

Standing on the edge of the firefight, time seemed to slow down as the gun battle raged around him.  Only later, his heart racing, did he stop to think that he had been directly in the line of fire.

Dickens, and thousands of others in the neighborhood, had witnessed the final moments of a ninety-minute car chase that had begun with a payroll heist in the Bronx earlier that afternoon.

Lacking radios to coordinate their efforts, police, for the most part, had fought the pitched gun battle, for a distance of twelve miles, from the running boards of taxicabs.

Shootout on Dyckman Street in 1931.

The bloody chase, spanning four police precincts, would dominate the news and unite law enforcement as New York came to grips with a new breed of criminal–the gangster.

Site of 1931 Dyckman Street shootout taken in November of 2013.

The sensational crime, that left two police officers dead, would result in the placement of short wave radios in police cars and station houses throughout the city and change law enforcement’s approach to high-speed chases through residential areas.

The Payroll Heist 

Standard Union, August 22, 1931

Around 3:45 PM on August 21, 1931, some 150 employees of the Mendoza Fur and Dye Works on east 133rd Street in the Bronx were getting ready to call it a day.  The week had been long and hot, but today was payday and quitting time was a little more than an hour away.

Outside the factory, plant manager Floyd Fomhoff had just returned from the bank on East 138th Street where he had picked up the $4,619 payroll withdrawal.   Patrolman Walter J. Webb, who had been assigned to guard the cash, accompanied Fomhoff.

Just to be safe, the plant manager parked behind the tall wire fence that surrounded the factory.

But, despite all precautions, two gunman, armed with pistols, waylaid the factory man and his armed escort just as they stepped out of the plant manager’s car.

Webb reached for his gun a second too late.

One of the bandits, as if taking aim at Webb’s police shield, fired a shot that crashed through the officer’s chest piercing his heart.

A moment later, Webb, who had just celebrated his ten-year wedding anniversary, lay on the ground mortally wounded

The 39-year-old police veteran was pronounced dead in an ambulance while en route to nearby Lincoln Hospital.

Fomhoff, the terrified dye works manager, offered no resistance as the two thugs, later identified as 25-year-old John Brecht and 19-year-old Martin Bachorik, snatched the payroll and took off in his car.

Inside the long, one-story, brick building the employees of the dye works continued working; not realizing a robbery had transpired until the alarm was sounded.

Switching Cars 

New York Sun, August 22, 1931

After speeding away from the scene of the heist, the two robbers ditched the plant manager’s car at 149th street and transferred their guns, ammo and stolen payroll satchel into a yellow Monarch taxicab driven by Herbert Hasse to continue their getaway.

Hasse, a twenty-seven year old father of two, had been driving a cab for less than a year when the armed bandits jumped in his back seat.

But what role had played in the heist?  Was he a confederate of the brazen killers, or, to use modern vernacular, had he been carjacked and forced to drive against his will?

While most on the police force believed Hasse had been “in” on the crime, that the pickup location had been prearranged, his wife later insisted that he was not a criminal.

Regardless, Hasse proved an adept wheelman as the gunmen continued their attempted flight from justice.

New York Times, August 22, 1931

Bullet Begin to Fly

For twelve blocks the bandits continued on in Hasse’s cab unnoticed, but the speeding taxi soon attracted the attention of two traffic cops assigned to Third Avenue and 163rd Street.

Just after the escape car sped past motorcycle policeman Edwin V. Churchill and traffic cop Edward Worrell another motorist pulled over to catch their attention. The tipster, Charles Fackler, told the two bluecoats that the passengers appeared to be brandishing firearms.

In moments the chase was on.

Officer Worrell quickly hopped onto Fackler’s running board as Churchill raced ahead on his motorbike.  Firing his pistol as he drove, Churchill quickly closed the gap between himself and the renegade taxi.

Churchill shooting location.

The motorcycle cop nearly caught up with his quarry when the bandits let loose a fusillade of bullets.  Struck six times in the abdomen, Churchill fell to the ground.  The father of three young children died on the operating table three hours later.

The Good Samaritan

Municipal fireman Vincent J. Hyde was enjoying a much-deserved day off when the stolen cab blew past his driveway.   Hyde watched in horror from the curb as Churchill was thrown from his bike by the deadly blast.  He rushed into the street to assist the mortally wounded cop, but Churchill was beyond help.

As tipster Charles Fackler rolled past the bloody scene, Hyde, hands covered in blood, grabbed Churchill’s weapon and jumped on the running board opposite traffic cop Edward Worrell.

But Hyde’s act of valor would prove short lived.

Moments later the Good Samaritan, too, lay bleeding on the pavement—struck twice in the chest by one of the nearly 1,000 shots police claimed would be fired over the course of the chase.

Hyde would recover from his wounds and was later honored by the Uniformed Fireman’s Association for his heroism in the “battle of the Bronx.”

A Crimson Trail

Sitting in their car at the intersection of 161st Street and Jerome Avenue, the three members of the Lopez family, John, a city fireman, his expectant wife, Matilda and their four-year-old daughter, Gloria waited for the light to change.

Without warning their vehicle was strafed by a barrage of gunfire.

A wild bullet struck the young Gloria in the head.

Gloria Lopez, New York Times, August 23, 1931.

The family was taken to Morrisania Hospital, in the Bronx, where Gloria died at 2:20 in the morning.  Her parents, both wounded in the exchange, were recovering in nearby rooms when their daughter passed away.

New York Times, August 22, 1931

Other bystanders were wounded as well.

Dead and wounded list, Standard Union, August 22, 1931.

*  Mrs. Sophie Van Zerkorn, 40, was shot in the right leg near the intersection of 169th Street and Boston Road.

*  Thomas P. Cullin was hit in the shoulder after a bullet shattered his windshield.  The 25-year-old attorney had left the safety of his office to join in the chase when he heard the commotion outside.

*  Nicolas Klein, 31, was shot in the left forearm near 168th Street and Park Avenue.

*  Taxi driver Ruben Katz, 34, was struck in the shoulder.

*  13-year-old James Girodano, who lived on Arthur Avenue, was shot in the shoulder as he scrambled for cover.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 22, 1931

In all, twelve persons would be wounded by gunfire before the sun had set.

On the Job for Three Days

Cab driver William Nugent was looking for a fare when the two cars blew past him, and, out of simple boredom, decided to join in on the chase.

New York Sun, August 22, 1931

“I been a taxi driver only three days an’ things were kinda dull yesterday,” Nugent told reporters afterward.  “I took in three fares for $1.30 an’ I got 45 cents out of that.  Things wasn’t so good, an’ I was looking’ for excitement, so when this taxi rips past me up at 167th and Park, I thought I’d fall in behind and see the excitement.  I didn’t know they had guns, then.  I just thinks they’re speeding’ an’ maybe a cop’d give ‘em a bawling out.” (New York Sun, August 22, 1931)

Several blocks later, off-duty Detective William J. Kiley commandeered Nugent’s taxi and climbed onto the running board, firing round after round, as Nugent pushed the pedal to the floor.

Soon after, Patrolman Albert Morrell, assigned to Traffic Squad H, also climbed onto Nugent’s taxi.

By this time actual police vehicles had joined the westward pursuit, towards Manhattan, as bullets whizzed up and down the streets of the Bronx.

Soon, Nugent, the daredevil cabbie, was racing into a hailstorm of lead, across the Harlem River, and north into upper Manhattan.

“We followed ‘em up to Macomb’s Bridge at 155th,” Nugent would later brag,  “an’ I stayed on the wrong side of the bridge an’ kept dodging’ through the traffic.  The boys with me was pumpin’ away all the time an’ now and then I’d slow down a little so’s they could put more cartridges in.”

After crossing the Harlem River the escape taxi, now trailed by eight cars and taxis commandeered by police, shot west and then hooked a right.  A wild exchange ensued as the convoy sped north up Riverside Drive where police estimated that hundreds of rounds were exchanged.

“I’d kinda zigzag when I could so’s to dodge the bullets, but I dodged into ‘em sometimes,” said Nugent, describing the final leg of the chase. “One come through the cowl right between my arm an’ me an’ plunked into the seat.  That was on the left side, an’ a minute later another one buffed into the seat on the right side of me.”

The bandits seemed determined to die in a final shootout with the cops, and, with two fellow officers dead, the police were ready to oblige.

Nugent tailed the escape vehicle into the Inwood section of northern Manhattan.

The neighborhood was flooded with armed police and sewn up tight.

After leading cops on a desperate loop around the neighborhood the bandits were finally corralled on the east end of Dyckman Street between Broadway and the Harlem River.

By this point the bandit taxi had begun to slow down and weaved back and forth as police sprayed the escape vehicle with round after round—driver, Herbert Hasse, likely shot and bleeding out at the wheel.

“Well, we was pretty near the end, then.  I dodged a woman an’ a baby carriage.  I thought I had her for a minute but she jumped.  I’d a hated to hit them.  Then Kiley (the off-duty detective on the running board) or the other guy with me picked off the gas tank on the other car and it begun to smoke.”  (New York Sun, August 22, 1931)

End of the Line

Just west of Sherman Avenue the smoking escape taxi rolled into a fruit delivery truck and came to a stop.

The Norwalk Hour, August 22, 1931

In a breathtaking police report, Detective William Kiley, who poured lead into the bandit taxi from an exposed position on Nugent’s running board, described the final moments of the chase.

“We got up to Dyckman Street and Broadway, where the bandits fired on another cop.  They zigzagged around the corner, with our machine in pursuit.  At Dyckman Street and Sherman Avenue Patrolman Morrell had commandeered another automobile and when we reached the corner of Dyckman Street and Sherman Avenue, Morrell’s machine and our machine got on either side of the bandits’ car and stopped them.  I jumped off the machine and pulled open the door of the bandit cab.  I had four shots left in my revolver.  One of the bandits was sitting on the floor of his car reloading his gun.  I let him have the last four shots I had in my gun.  I yelled at Walker that the other bandit was kneeling on the seat of the cab also reloading his gun and Walker fired at him.” (New York Times, August 23, 1931)

Looking up, Kiley saw an army of armed officers descending on the death car.  The off-duty police detective, who had been in front of his Bronx home washing his car when he joined the chase, worried other cops might mistake him for a bandit because of his civilian clothes.

“Having no hat or coat,” Kiley stated in his report, “and knowing that everybody around there had pistols in their hands and not knowing who I was, it was not really a healthy case for me and I ducked away.  I don’t know who shot the third man.” (New York Times, August 23, 1931)

Taxi driver Nugent claimed that after Kiley’s heroic assault on the taxi that he too joined in on the final assault.

“Kiley had thrown open the door of the bandit cab and was pumping it in right on ‘em,” Nugent told reporters.  “I got out of my cab and on the tail of the fruit truck I saw a hammer.  I picked it up and went towards the driver of the bandit cab, on the other side of him.  He had a rod in his hand.  As he tried to step out, I hit him with the hammer.  And then I threw the hammer down on the running board.” (New York Times, August 22, 1931)

As he was beating Hasse with a hammer, the driver claimed, another cop, whose name he didn’t know, fired shot after shot at the two bandits in the backseat.  Then, moments later, Nugent asserted, yet another policeman fired four shots at the bleeding getaway driver.

Aftermath of 1931 shootout on Dyckman Street.

Hours later a crush of onlookers lingered on the sidewalks of Dyckman to catch a glimpse of the gruesome scene.  Splayed out in front of the news cameras were the bodies of the two bandits and their alleged getaway driver.

Post-Mortem

In the midst of intense media coverage President Hoover ordered a concerted campaign, that involved local and Federal law enforcement agencies, including the Justice Department, Internal Revenue Bureau and Prohibition Bureau, for the roundup and prosecution of criminals in New York City.  A similar crackdown in Chicago resulted in the successful prosecution of Al Capone is cited.

Aftermath of 1931 Dyckman Street shootout.

Days after the gun battle NYPD Commissioner Mulrooney requested $100,000 to equip all police vehicles and stations with short wave radios.  All agreed the chase had been poorly coordinated and hampered by the lack of police radios.

The issue of the safety of bystanders during police chases was also put on the front burner; greater care and discipline were called for.

The Norwalk Hour, August 22, 1931

The widows of slain policemen Churchill and Webb each received a lump sum payment of $3,000 from the Police Relief Fund.  The women were also to be provided with $50 a month and $1,500 annually (half of a police officer’s salary) for the rest of their lives provided they never remarried.   After her husband’s death, Florence Churchill would become a champion for the widows of police and firemen killed in the line of duty.

Taxi driver William Nugent, who led the chase to the finish, suffered a nervous breakdown in the days after the shooting.  Police, summoned to his home on Brook Avenue in the Bronx, were forced to subdue Nugent as a physician injected the hero driver with a tranquilizer.

The bodies of the three men in the bandit taxi were taken to the Bronx morgue for autopsy.  Despite multiple gunshot wounds, no bullets were found in any of the dead.  All of the rounds had passed through their targets.  Among the findings: John Prechtl had been shot twice in the abdomen and once in the heart.    Martin Bachorik had apparently bled out after suffering a single gunshot wound to the groin.  Taxi driver Herbert Hasse had one bullet wound; he also had been shot in the heart.

Items in Bandit taxi, 1931 press photo.

An inspection of the getaway taxi revealed that several bullets had pierced the cab’s gas tank.  The tank had been nearly empty at the conclusion of the chase. Inside the cab police recovered the satchel containing the stolen payroll, a revolver, five automatic pistols and numerous cartridges containing dumdum bullets.

It was also revealed that stick-up men Prechtl and Bachorik had a criminal history.  Both men had been charged with the attempted holdup of a dance hall in upstate New York the previous year.  The charges had been dropped after the complainant failed to appear in court.

Stick-up man John Prechtl, who had been out of work for a year, lived with his parents before the Battle of the Bronx.  His body was released to his father, John, for burial when the investigation concluded.

Confederate Martin Bachorik, an out of work plumber’s apprentice, lived with his married sister, Anna Lippay before his death on the streets of upper Manhattan.  Lippay told reporters that her brother had disgraced the family and that no one planned to claim his body.  He is presumably buried in Potter’s Field.

Mrs. Margaret Hasse, widow of taxi driver Herbert Hasse, insisted her late husband had no part in the robbery.  Her claims were bolstered by the eyewitness account of Detective Phillip Knecht who insisted the driver of the bandit taxi had been unarmed.  After receiving conflicting accounts of Hasse’s involvement, Police Inspector Henry Bruckman told the press: “I’m not sure about it and I guess we never will be.  It will have to be left to the public to decide, so figure it out for yourself.” (New York Times, August 24, 1931)

Herbert Haase widow, The Rochester Journal, August 27, 1931.

At her husband’s funeral, the widow Hasse told reporters, “If it takes the rest of my earthly days, I’m going to have it proved that Herbert was no gangster.” (The Rochester Journal, August 27, 1931)

Inwood’s 215th Street Garbage Incinerator, Photograph from January 29, 1937, MCNY.

“When the Mayor of New York dedicated the new incinerator at 215th Street and Ninth Avenue a little while ago, he said plainly that he didn’t like it. Perhaps he was justified in his opinion of it as a piece of sanitary engineering, but when he went on to say that it looked ungainly and unsightly, and that it reminded him of Sing Sing, one wondered what he really wanted. Did he want it dressed up to look like the Municipal Building, or dressed down to look more like an incinerator? I hope it was the latter, for the Mayor’s whole reputation as an architectural critic rests upon this decision.” (Lewis Mumford, 1934)

“Stranger, touring Manhattan, do not forget to come to Inwood, the northernmost part of it. You will behold the most thrilling sight in our glorious city. No, that billowing cloud of smoke and soot is not a volcano. It’s the new incinerating plant opened last Thursday by Mayor LaGuardia.” (New York Times, June 29, 1934)

Inwood’s 215th Street Incinerator Smokestacks

On 215th Street, near Tenth Avenue, sit three massive smokestacks, which have towered over the Inwood skyline, east of Broadway, since 1934.

Inwood’s 215th Street Incinerator

The smokestacks, part of a decommissioned Department of Sanitation “destructor plant,” once incinerated some 7,500 tons of New York City garbage daily. The fires of the incinerator burned trash round-the-clock and coughed up so much smoke, soot and other horrifying vapors that residents of one apartment building on nearby Park Terrace East felt compelled to file a lawsuit against the city just years after the $1.5 million facility went on-line.

The June 28, 1934 opening of the plant represented an historic day for the city. From that day forward, under court order, New York would begin burning its garbage, ending a long-standing practice of dumping refuse at sea.

The Inwood plant, and three others that would go on-line the following day, had been constructed after the Supreme Court imposed a deadline after which the city was forbidden to dump trash offshore. The deadline, which also imposed a $5,000 a day penalty for non-compliance, was the result a lawsuit filed by the State of New Jersey. According to the suit, New York’s waste disposal practices had left the Jersey Shore so polluted that its once beautiful beaches were no longer fit for bathing. The practice, they argued, must end—and the Supreme Court agreed.

Sanitation Smokestacks on 215th Street, Inwood, New York City.

The incinerators, designed by architect Frank S. Parker, were each to burn nearly 400 truckloads (750 tons) of garbage a day. At the time, the plants, constructed by the Superior Incinerator Company of Dallas, Texas and the L.E. Myers Company, were the largest and most modern in the world.

Jersey Cries Foul

During the 1920′s the beach resorts along the Jersey Shore found themselves dealing with a full on health crisis and bathers were getting sick.

The problem was garbage. Tons of it. Furniture, household waste, manure, street sweepings and more drifted onshore in an endless stream originating far off the coast.

Garbage Scow, 1899, NYPL.

Where the noxious rubbish came from was no great secret. Since at least the 1870′s New York City had been piling its waste onto great ocean bound barges known as scows. The scows took the trash offshore and dumped the City’s unmentionable excretions into the salty deep.

Some of the estimated 3,000 tons of waste dumped each day sank to the bottom, while the rest was tossed and blended into the greatest garbage gyre the Atlantic Ocean has ever seen.

Because of its proximity to the dump sites, much of the waste wound up on the shores of New Jersey and Long Island where “in places the remnants of garbage are piled a foot thick at high water mark, and it is no uncommon thing to bump into melon rinds and grapefruits while in bathing. On the beaches may be found the remains of chickens, cats and dogs, which, added to the putrefying vegetable refuse, attract flies, pollute the air and are a menace to public health.” (New York Times, July 24, 1923)

In an effort to improve sanitation in New York City, these ocean dumps were legally permitted, provided the scows dumped their stinking cargoes at least twenty-one miles offshore. But as the urban population swelled, New York’s solution became a dangerous business for its coastal neighbors.

“Last Saturday on one strip of beach 300 yards long on the south shore of Long Island no less than three cats and one dog were cast up within the same hour. They came ashore amid a profusion of grapefruit skins, pineapple tops, cans of shoe polish, bottles and other choice bits of refuse,” wrote the New York Times. (New York Times, July 1, 1925)

The Times urged city leaders to end the practice of dumping garbage at sea all together. The system, the Times argued, was under-regulated and the scows often dumped their loads within miles of shore.

Garbage Scow in 1933, NYPL.

“If it can be conclusively proved that every scow has gone the regulation distance on every trip, the lesson is that the dumping place should be still further out at sea. In the meantime, it behooves the city authorities to face that the present system is at best antiquated and that further experiments with incinerators will have to be made until a type is acquired which can be erected in various parts of the city without being an offense to the neighborhood. This is an expensive undertaking, but one which in the long run is more likely to pay than the present system. Not until the city stops dumping garbage art sea can those who use the beaches be sure of finding them reasonably clean.” (New York Times, July 1, 1925)

New York Times, September 5, 1926.

The following summer, 1926, after watching garbage wash up on their beaches all season, the coastal cities of New Jersey banded together and drafted a resolution, which was presented to the United States Secretary of War.

The demands were straightforward.

No longer would New York City’s practice of dumping of garbage at sea be tolerated. New York must be forced to invest in modern incinerators to combat an odious situation that had befouled dozens of miles of once pristine beaches.

In hearings, David M. Newberger, the President of the Anti-Pollution League, testified that the ocean off the coast of northern New Jersey had begun to resemble the trash-strewn Sargasso Sea.

Charles A. McGee, the assistant superintendent of the Street Cleaning Department of the City of New York candidly admitted that, while the construction of incinerators to combat the problem was in the works, the city continued to dump some 3,200 tons of garbage into the ocean every day.

Supreme Court

In May of 1931, five years after the anti-pollution resolution, New Jersey officials took their fight to the United States Supreme Court.

The Court sided with the State of New Jersey, ruling that New York City should indeed be barred from dumping their refuse into the ocean. But, the fix wouldn’t happen overnight. The high court ruled that New York must be given “reasonable time” to construct the long promised incinerators.

Justice Butler, who faced no dissent, ruled that the dumping of garbage at sea constituted a “public nuisance” and assigned a special master, Edward K. Campbell, to determine just how much time New York be allowed to get a new system for waste disposal on-line.

Under advisement of the Special Master the Supreme Court would later impose a deadline of July 1, 1934 after which the city would be forced pay a $5,000 a day fine for each day trash-laden scows continued to leave the harbor.

And, after the herculean efforts of the Department of Sanitation, the plant opened just in time.

Opening Day

Inwood incinerator plant opens, New York Sun headline, June 28, 1934.

When the dedication of the Inwood facility began at 8:30 that Thursday morning Mayor LaGuardia stood at the podium, flanked by 200 members of the Department of Sanitation, known as “White Wings” for their signature white uniforms. Also in attendance were representatives of neighboring states and jurisdictions.

Inwood sanitation plant opens, New York Sun, June 28, 1934.

In a description of the event that read like a theater review, the New York Sun described an event full of “pomp, ceremony and a speech by the Mayor.”

“Mr. LaGuardia arrived at the site,” the Sun wrote, “prepared to toss the first shovelful of garbage and to cut loose with a few broadsides on his favorite topic, Tammany Hall.” (New York Sun, June 28, 1934)

White Wings cleaning streets in 1911.

The White Wings “snapped to attention,” the Sun wrote, and “remained in military formation until the Mayor had mounted the platform. Then the band struck up, the good old Department of Sanitation Band that used to welcome distinguished visitors to City Hall. How it got there with all its drums and horns intact caused some comment, but there it was, prepared for the occasion.” (New York Sun, June 28, 1934)

Fiorello H. LaGuardia, mayor of New York City in 1940 photograph.

And while Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia had no qualms accepting credit for getting the operation up and running, he was clearly upset with both the plant’s design and efficiency, which he felt had been hastily constructed in order to meet the deadline.

On the platform, beneath the red, white and blue bunting, LaGuardia addressed the assemblage: “In the past it has been quite easy to make speeches on such an occasion,” LaGuardia lamented. “All the Mayor had to do was dig out an old speech about receiving ‘this new modern plant.’ In this instance this was not possible. The plant is not modern, not well planned, although it conforms to all of the specifications.”

“It was three-quarters finished on January 1 and we had to take it,” LaGuardia continued. “But you can imagine a plant of this capacity having to buy every bit of electricity it uses while 6,000,000,000 thermal units of heat go up the chimneys every twenty-four hours?”

But the Mayor’s displeasure with the plant did not end there.

Inwood’s 215th Street incinerator, January 29, 1937, MCNY.

“There was no need to make the walls look like the walls of Sing Sing Prison,” the Mayor continued while gesturing towards the three towers which stood atop a base of brick, terra cotta and concrete.

Not losing his sense of humor, LaGuardia quipped “he believed it was the first time in the municipal history that a city had met a Supreme Court order of such a nature without asking for an extension of time.”(New York Sun, June 28, 1934)

Before leaving the podium, LaGuardia issued a warning to the State of New Jersey: “In the future the city will not drop a single orange peel in the sea, ” LaGuardia said. “I like to be neighborly, but in a spirit of friendly neighborliness, I ask want to warn neighboring cities that if they dump garbage, I’ll go to the United States Supreme Court order and dump some of the choicest Manhattan garbage right at their doorstep.”

Inwood’s 215th Street incinerator plant.
“Most of the trouble with this incinerator is that the architects, contrary to the Mayor’s impression, did try very hard to keep it from looking like Sing Sing. But the only means they knew for doing this was ‘ornament.’ Hence they introduced dreary bands of hashed limestone and equally dreary pilasters, to emphasize elements which should have been kept clean so that the mass would remain unified. Since it was impossible to hide the chimneys completely, the architects smugly concealed the base of these three noble columns.” -Lewis Mumford, 1934

That afternoon the very last of the old garbage barges went out to sea at 2:00 from the foot of Roosevelt Street. After that, said Department of Sanitation Chief Thomas Hammond they were transferred to “less odorous duties.”

The following day three other city incinerators, one in the Bronx and two in Manhattan, went online.

Lawsuit

When construction on the Inwood incinerator began in 1933, J.M. Johnson, president of the Dallas company overseeing construction, promised area residents that the new furnaces would be odorless. The smells, Johnson said, would be neutralized as the rubbish burned at temperatures between 1,200 and 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

Inwood’s 215th Street garbage incinerator.
“The incinerator is ‘unsitely’ enough; indeed, it is probably as misplaced as such a building could be. It lies on the lowland near the Harlem River, and its chimneys breathe their smoke into the face of University Heights, aided by the prevailing north and west winds. On a square two-story base sits a setback third story with a different window arrangement; the proportions are not bad. Three huge chimneys of pale, buff brick–inaccurately and unjustly called ‘drab’ in the newspaper reports–rise from the front of the building, which is done in the same sort of brick, with limestone trimmings.” -Lewis Mumford, 1934

But, despite those early assurances, one can only imagine the awful smells that must have resulted from the delivery and incineration of 7,500 tons of garbage daily.

In November of 1935, the Park Avenue Terrace East Corporation, owners of a six-story apartment building located at 520 West 218th Street filed a lawsuit against the city.

“The City of New York was sued in the Supreme Court yesterday for $50,000 in damages and an injunction restraining the city from operating the incinerator and garbage disposal plant at 215th Street and Tenth Avenue on the ground that it constitutes a nuisance,” the New York Times reported. “The plaintiff alleges that the incinerator emits smoke and cinders and nauseating odors, which have caused it the loss of tenants and depreciated the value of its property.” (New York Times, November 14, 1935)

The suit fell on deaf ears. The trash needed to be burned somewhere. And, for decades to come, that someplace was Inwood.

Workers Killed

Workers Killed, New York Times, July 24,1944.

In summer of 1944, tragedy struck the 215th Street Department of Sanitation plant.

Around 10:15 on the morning of July 23rd a crane operator in charge of moving garbage accidentally dropped a monkey wrench into the forty-foot trash pit adjacent to the incinerator. Quickly, another worker descended into the pit to retrieve the fallen wrench.

As the worker reach the bottom of the pit, he collapsed.

Seeing what had happened, two others scrambled into the pit to assist their fallen colleague.

The crane operator watched with great dismay as the two good Samaritans were also overcome by whatever noxious fumes lay below.

Soon two others, Martin Norton, 43, of Flushing, Queens and Gennaro de Trinco, 56, of the Bronx, climbed into the pit, but were forced back as they began to suffer from the effects of the gas.

Donning special masks equipped with breathing apparatus members of the fire and police departments were able to pull the three fallen Sanitation workers from the pit. The operation, sadly, proved to be a recovery rather than a rescue. After a priest from the nearby Church of the Good Shepherd performed last rights, the three men, Gaetaino Musorrafite, Antinelle Pieri and Michael Gallagher were pronounced dead at the scene.

“The police theory,” reported the New York Times, “was that a small amount of methane gas had accumulated at the bottom of the pit and was thrown off by the decomposition of the garbage. It was said that the five men felled by the gas ordinarily would have been off yesterday but had been working in order to get some extra time off at a later date.” (New York Time July 24, 1944)

Shotgun Shells

In December of 1951, after reports from Sanitation workers that unexploded ammunition had been “popping off” in area incinerators, Sanitation Commissioner Andrew W. Mulrain issued a public plea.

Mulrain told the media that after hunting season came to a close on December 6 that city outdoorsmen had apparently been tossing their unused shotgun shells out with the trash.

The problem was “a particularly regular occurrence” at the West 215th Street and West Fifty-Sixth Street stations. (New York Times, December 19, 1951)

The Sanitation Commissioner warned New Yorkers that it was illegal to toss ammunition into their garbage pails.

“Hunters should turn their post-season surpluses over to the Police Department,” Mr. Mulrain declared. “Fortunately, there has been no damage of injury from exploding bullets thus far, but there always is the possibility of danger to our stationary firemen, who frequently stoke the incinerator fires.” (New York Times, December 19, 1951)

End of an Era

Inwood’s 215th Street Department of Sanitation facility.

In the winter of 1970, amid cries for better air quality and changing attitudes towards pollution, the City Planning Commission recommended that incinerators be phased out and replaced with land-based dumping grounds.

Inwood’s 215th Street Department of Sanitation facility.
“The architects have given the chimneys a ‘base’ by carrying the wall of the two-story structure around them: a mask of brick with three arched recesses and two arched openings. These form a triumphal entrance to nothing whatever, since the rubbish wagons swing around the side.” -Lewis Mumford, 1934

On November 30, 1970 the Department of Sanitation began the closure of the 215th Street incinerating plant. It was recommended that the loads of garbage that had arrived daily for nearly four decades be rerouted to the 2,000 acre Fresh Kills landfill site on Staten Island.

The 115 workers assigned to the incinerator were reassigned to other posts around the city.

Today the site, still run by the Department of Sanitation, is used as a base for administration, storage and parking.

Blizzard of 1888, 11th Street.

In March of 1888 New York City was slammed by one of the most devastating blizzards in recorded history.   From March 11^th to 15^ththe city was buried underneath a fifty-inch blanket of snow.

The Great White Hurricane, as it came to be known, disabled transportation and telegraph communication from the Chesapeake Bay to Montreal.  Huge, “modern” cites suddenly found themselves cut off from the rest of the world.

For the first time in history the New York Stock Exchange closed, and would remain so for two days as the storm raged on.

In New York City alone more than 200 perished in the extreme cold.  In the icy darkness of night fires raged as helpless volunteers watched from afar, their teams trapped in the deep drifts that formed in the howling winds.

Blizzard of 1888

With surface transportation crippled, many credit the Blizzard of 1888, or “The Blizzard,” as it was known for fifty years hence, with the creation of New York’s underground subway system.

The below report, filed in the New York Herald, just as the storm abated describes both the horrors and bravery experienced by everyday New Yorker’s as they weathered one of the worst storms in U.S. history.

The Blizzard of 1888, New York Herald, March 14, 1888.

New York Herald
March 14, 1888

With men and women dying in her ghostly streets, New York saw day breaking through the wild clouds yesterday morning. Nature had overwhelmed the metropolis, and citizens were found dead in the mighty snowdrifts.  White, frozen hands sticking up out of the billowed and furrowed wastes testified to the unspeakable power that had desolated the city.

Had Jules Verne written such a story a week ago New Yorkers would have laughed and pronounced it a clever but impossible romance.

Yet here was the stupendous reality.  Within forty-eight hours the city was converted into an Arctic wilderness, cut off from all railway and telegraph communication.  The white hurricane had strewn her busiest and gayest thoroughfares with wreck and ruin.  Courts of justice were closed and the vast machinery of commerce Europe could not was paralyzed.  Groans of mutilated humanity filled the air.

The artillery of all Europe could not have reduced New York to such an awful condition of helplessness in such short time.  Think of reporters on snowshoes, and rescuing parties being organized to save men from dying of exposure in the heart of the city!  When firemen dragged their engines to fires it looked as if they were soldiers hurrying cannon through the wilderness as they sat on their horses lashing the leaders and following the dim figures of mounted scouts in the mad tempest.

It was all so white, strange, picturesque and grandly terrible as the ugly sky frowned upon the pulseless, haggard miles of half-buried houses.  Everybody knew that corpses would be dug out of the streets.

BELOW ZERO

Just after dawn yesterday the snow ceased to fall, but the great wind that had roared ceaselessly for two days and two nights still shook the earth and whirled flakes upward again in weird, fantastic shapes.  At six o’clock the thermometer was one degree below zero.

Blizzard of 1888

Thousands upon thousands of men, wrapped in the oddest of costumes that imagination can picture, turned out to dig paths through the streets.  In many places the diggers had to cut through gigantic drifts in order to release people who were imprisoned in their own houses.

Tremendous hills of snow were thrown up in the streets, and between them were paths through which the population crept along.  Sometimes these hills were so high that a man would walk for half a block without being able to see anything but the sullen sky above him.  Horses were employed in dragging away the fallen trees and telegraph poles.  Thousands of abandoned wagons were dug out and dragged by double teams to places of shelter.

But with all the confusing sights and sounds that turned New York upside down and made people wonder if it was not all a dream the most appalling thing was the absolute breaking off of all outside communication.  The elevated railway trains had partially resumed work, and citizens could go up and down town again without danger of freezing to death in the streets, but no one could get in or out of the city.  The great trunk lines were buried.  Now and then some pale and half dead wanderer struggled into the mountainous outskirts and told dreadful stories of whole trainloads of passengers imprisoned in the snow, without food of the slightest means of escape.

Blizzard of 1888

Rescue parties in sleighs were sent out in all directions to relieve the snowbound unfortunates.  The railway companies battled heroically with the snow in their efforts to push through their trains.  Here and there engines were chained together and hurled against the drifts at full speed.  The New York Central Company upset one of the heaviest locomotives while trying to butt a hole through the snow packed in the Fourth Avenue tunnel.  How many have died in the drifts while trying to reach help from these blocked trains will not be known for days yet.

LOCKED IN SLEEPING CARS

All the sleeping cars in the public railway depots were given to the public as hotels.  Women and children lay on the hard floors and thankfully ate cheese and crackers distributed by railway officials.

Blizzard of 1888

The telegraph wires were simply raveled up into tangled webs that caught the feet of horses and human beings in the snow.  Editors cabled to London in hopes of getting news from Boston.  The operators slept all night beside their instruments, but no sound broke the deadly silence.

All wheel traffic ceased in the city with very few exceptions.  The jingle of sleigh bells was heard from the Battery to Harlem.  Russian droskies plunged down Wall Street, where a few brokers gathered in the almost abandoned Stock Exchange.  It looked like a winter scene in St. Petersburg.  When a wheeled vehicle appeared it was dragged by teams proceeded by extra horses, upon which rude postilious were mounted.  Sleighs were hired out for $50 and $30 a day.

Most extraordinary looking structures on runners began to appear in the most fashionable parts of the city.  Rich club men were glad to drive down town from their clubs in ramshackle grocery sleighs of last century pattern.  The Insurance Fire Patrol dashed to fires in sleighs.  Carpenters were kept busy making rough sleds of unpainted lumber for the use of storekeepers.  Mouldy arks on runners drew up in front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the Hoffman House and the other prominent hotels, and howling swells were glad to get a ride at any price.

BUT NO HORSE CARS

But not a horse car moved.  Hour after hour the armies of diggers toiled and mile after mile of shining tracks were uncovered, but darkness came on again before a single car moved.

The sufferings of homeless people can hardly be told in words.  All policemen were ordered to look out for these people, and also to arrest all persons who showed any signs of not being to take care of themselves.  Early in the day the police lodging rooms were packed.  Men who had money but could get no places to sleep in hotels applied at the station houses for shelter.  The police were finally obliged to use their corridors to save men and women from perishing outside.

Blizzard of 1888

As the storm increased in fury on Monday night and the mercury fell lower and lower the cheap lodging houses on the Bowery were invaded by people who had been unable to get beds in the regular hotels.  It was indescribably funny to see gorgeously attired young men of fashion humbly arranging for cots in the haunts of the tramp and street Arab.  All night the lodging house dormitories were crowded with snow bound dandies who scratched and grumbled and tossed about on the hard pallets in the ill smelling cubbyholes.  And wonderfully comical scenes took place at the breakfast tables, where waiters were paralyzed with astonishment at demands for napkins and finger bowls.  Many of the ten-cent lodging houses raised their price for a cot to fifty cents.

Editors and reporters slept on chairs and billiard tables in the Press Club.  The Exchange Club on New Street was filled all night with belated merchants, who sang, played poker, told blizzard stories or snored in their chairs in all sorts of odd postures.  The uptown clubs were also turned into hotels, and sounds of revelry were heard from those who could not sleep on chairs and were not disposed to let any one else sleep.  Some of the most prominent men in New York did not dare leave their clubs, and the story of the great storm of 1888 will long be famous in the cafes.

OFFENDERS AGAINST THE STATE

In front of all the clubs, in fact everywhere throughout the city, people could be seen feeding the starving sparrows, which flew against the windows in the most pitiful way.  This awful violation of the law—for it is at present a criminal offense in New York—was ignored by the police.  Nay, a Herald reporter saw a policeman in cold blood criminally feeding breadcrumbs to a sparrow in Twenty-third Street near Ninth Avenue.

Blizzard of 1888

All through the wild night and far into the morning, with its horror of flying fragments and gleaming white mountains, the police were at work saving exhausted pedestrians from death in the snow. One well-known merchant at daybreak was found dead on Seventh Avenue.  Another man’s rigid corpse was picked up in Central Park.  An unfortunate woman was frozen to death in a hallway.  Men were picked up senseless in all directions.

Two Herald reporters were fighting their way through the furious storm yesterday morning at three o’clock.  They had waded through drift after drift and were covered with snow from head to foot.  One of them had been thrown down by the wind and painfully injured.  When the reporters reached the corner of Broadway and Twenty-third Street they saw a dark object half buried about three feet from the sidewalk.  The snow was drifting over it.  Struggling forward they reached the spot and found a policeman lying down insensible.  He would have died in an hour had he not been discovered.  The reporters raised the man up and half carried him into the Herald uptown office across the street, where he revived.  He said that he had gradually become insensible and fell while trying to make his way to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

There had been a universal carouse in the saloons all day.  Men had filled themselves with whiskey in order to resist the effects of the cold.  Drunken men reeled out of the rum shops and staggered into the deep snow.  While daylight lasted these men were soon discovered and rescued.  But when darkness closed in and the storm raged over a city plunged in utter blackness the police began to realize the frightful responsibility thrown upon them of saving human life.

IN UTTER DARKNESS

All the electric lamps were out and no attempt to light the gas lamps was made.  Drunken men and men who were simply tired by long and severe struggles in the drifts were stumbled over in every neighborhood.  The ambulances were overturned again and again, although some of them had extra horses attached by ropes to the shafts.  A ghastly procession of wounded men and women began to file into the wards of the hospitals.  Broken skulls, fractured arms, thighs and legs, frozen hands and feet—these were the things that kept the whole corps of every hospital up all night.  Men were found bareheaded and insane in the tempest.

Blizzard of 1888

A heartrending wail began to go up all over the great city. People were missed and no trace could be found of them.  Husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, sons and daughters poured into the police stations haggard, hollow eyed and desperate with fear and anxiety.  The Morgue will soon be choked with victims.

Then came the news that none of the Sound steamers had been heard from.   It was known that the ocean was beating in with terrific force and many vessels were given up as lost.  Crowds of half crazed people haunted the offices of the different lines in the vain search for information.

This was also a feature at the railway depots, where anxious people learned that their relatives might be cooped up in any one of the seventy-five trains snowed in with all their passengers within fifty miles of New York. Some of those who found their way in from the trains stayed in the depots giving information.  One train on the Harlem Road started from Pleasantville for the city at twenty minutes past seven o’clock on Monday morning.  It was due here at half-past eight o’clock. The train did not reach New York at all.  After plunging and thrusting all day in the snow it was left at Melrose at night.  Many of the passengers started on foot for the city.  Many others stayed behind.  Among them were a number of ladies.  The railway officials sent food to the prisoners.  It was greedily taken by the men, who acted in the most selfish manner.  Finally all hands walked from the train to the city, singing and shouting and playing games on the roads.

BROOKLYN’S ISOLATION

Brooklyn was in a frightful plight, being completely cut off from New York.  There was an effort made to run cars on the big Bridge, but one train was derailed on the west side, and further work in that direction was given up.  To walk across the bare and unsheltered promenade in the storm that shrieked through the ponderous steel rigging meant suffering and perhaps death.  The police advised women not to try it.

Blizzard of 1888, East River crossing.

Here nature, which had shut off the ordinary channels of travel and rendered the monumental bridge of the century useless, provided a substitute in the shape of an ice bridge just like the crystal floe across which Henry Ward Beecher and a few thousand of his fellow citizens walked from shore to shore on the famous cold day in 1874.

A great floe of jumbled ice drifted out of the North River (Hudson) and swung around the Battery into the East River at about half-past seven o’clock yesterday morning.  It was a very extensive field of ice, and as it slowly moved toward the bridge on the sluggish tide its edges ground with a loud noise against the piers on the Brooklyn side.  The floe at last glued itself against the shore at Martin’s stores.  It gathered up floating ice in its glittering skirts till the East River was filled from one side to the other.  A few bold men climbed down on the Brooklyn side and cautiously treaded the dangerous field toward the metropolis.  Every little wave underneath made the floe bend and undulate and flash.  Crowds of half frozen spectators on the shore shouted warnings to the intrepid pioneers.

But no matter how the ice reeled or rocked or creaked with ominous sounds, on went a little line of men Indian file, picking their way like ballet girls over the heaving pathway.  Policemen on the Bridge climbed up on the granite copings to look at the thrilling sight.  Sailors scrambled up the ice wreathed rigging of their spectral ships and hallooed wildly as the line came marching on.

CUT IN TWAIN

Suddenly the steam tug Transfer sped trough the middle of the floe, throwing up soft and rotten ice over her prow.

Initially there was a general cry of terror, and the excursionists ran back to Brooklyn, falling again and again in their mad scramble for safety.  Later on the river was bridged again.  This time there was a solid crossing.  Several hundred men and boys walked over to New York.  Among them were John Price, night clerk of the International Hotel, and his companion, John Fitzgerald.  A big Newfoundland dog was also seen following his master over the strange bridge.  Thousands of people gathered on the riverfront, despite the fierce weather, to look at the remarkable spectacle. Soon the heartless greed for money which has been so prominently shown during the last two days was developed. The only way a man could get down on the ice from the Brooklyn docks was by using ladders.  The men who owned the ladders charged three cents for each person.  This idea was at once taken up on the New York side, where the ladder men charged five cents for the privilege of climbing up off the ice floe. This fee was insisted upon even when some of the victims were in danger of drowning.

The tide changed some time after ten o’clock and the floe broke up. Then ensued a scene of extraordinary excitement, as a number of men were carried down the river on cakes of ice.   The castaways shouted for help and waved their hands wildly over their heads.  All the vessels in sight gave the alarm by blowing their whistles, and the crowds ran frantically along the riverfront on both sides screaming and shouting.  Steam tugs hurried out from the slips and soon picked up all the involuntary sailors from their perilous footholds.  It is rumored that two of the men were washed beyond Governor’s Island and drowned, but this is denied vigorously by many who stood on the Bridge and saw the whole scene.

Blizzard of 1888

Such scenes as these were the successors of the long night suspense which kept New York awake.  The drug stores down town, for the first time in years, they had sold out their entire stock of playing cards during the night, showing how little sleep was indulged in by the excited inhabitants of the lower part of the city.

CAGED LEGISLATORS

So great was the blockade and so entirely was all travel suspended that fourteen out of the thirty-two member of the State Senate were locked up in the city— C. P. Vedder, John Raines, James F. Pierce, Eugene F, O’Connor, Jacob Worth, Michael C. Murphy, Ed F. Reilley, Julius Caesar Langbein, Cornelius Van Cott, G. Z. Erwin, Hadley, Coggeshall, Sweet and Hawkins.  Thirty-nine Assemblymen were also kept in the city. None of these legislators had any means of learning what was going on in Albany or of instructing their associates on bills.  Some of them fairly danced with anguish at the thought of what might be done while they were away from Albany.  Senator Vedder, by the way, paid $25 for a ride from Union Square to the Chamber of Commerce, which will cause excitement when it becomes known in Cattaraugus County.

All the bold collar-button and suspender peddlers appeared on the streets with baskets and boxes filled with many colored toboggan caps and thick woolen gloves.  These were sold by thousands and soon the profusion of this tinted headgear gave Broadway and the Bowery a gay, holiday look despite the weltering desolation that loomed up on all sides.  Caps sold for fifteen cents each.  They were hawked in all the hotel corridors.

Blizzard of 1888

No milk was served in New York yesterday.  The cows had a rest.  Newspapers sold at enormous prices.  It was one of the striking features of the situation.  The Herald sold for five cents a copy early in the morning; later on the price was raised to ten cents.  It finally reached twenty-five cents.  These prices were good-naturedly paid, partly through the anxiety of citizens to learn the extent of the great calamity and partly out of pity for the pinched and frozen newsboys.

Thousands of people ran out of coal, and the dealers took advantage of their necessities to extort double prices in many cases.  Women could not venture out of doors till the streets were at least partly cleared.  Men who had always scorned to take any notice of domestic details were compelled to humbly beg their grocers to send provisions.  Many were only too glad to carry the parcels home.  The groceries were rapidly exhausted of their stock.  On the east side of the city this caused a great deal of serious suffering.

HEROES OF THE HOUR

Blizzard of 1888

There never was a city on the face of the earth in which more superb manhood has been shown than that which the now historic white hurricane developed.  The police and the firemen deserve the highest praise for the endurance, unselfishness and heroism which they have shown.  A great, tender, noble heart has the American metropolis exhibited.  Everyone agreed yesterday that every charitable and benevolent organization within the reach of New York must open its doors wide now if ever it is to be done.  The city had lost so many millions of dollars by this storm that no man will dare to even guess at the total damage.  The bulk of this burden will fall upon the poor and naked.

Now is the time New York millionaires to show how royally Americans respond to the cry of distress!  Now, while the streets are buried, while men and women are wandering half clothed and hungry over the storm smitten streets, dying and clutching helplessly at the empty air.  Think it over.

On December 17, 1903 Orville Wright took to the skies above the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Orville and his brother Wilbur conducted their experimental flight tests in total secrecy.  While obsessed with flight, the Brothers Wright were more concerned with securing their patents.

The Wright brothers had true cause for concern.  Fast on their heels was another American inventor and business competitor named Glenn Hammond Curtiss.

A true modern hero, Curtiss blazed into the 20th century atop a roaring motorcycle. Traveling 136-miles per hour on a bike of his own design, Curtiss not only set a world record but earned the title, “the fastest man alive.”

Once Curtiss took to the skies no one could keep him on the ground–not the Wright Brothers and their army of lawyers, not the nay-sayers, not even the laws of physics.

Treated like a crown prince in Europe, Curtiss couldn’t sell a single airplane in the United States without paying royalties to the Wrights who owned every conceivable copyright concerning manned flight.

But while Orville and Wilbur had the courts on their side, Curtiss’ airplanes could out fly and out maneuver any machine the Wrights put in the air.  In fact, the Wright’s planes were quickly becoming obsolete.

Aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss and his Albany Flyer.

Then, in the spring of 1910, Curtiss showed the Wrights and the rest of the world who really owned the skies.

Incredibly, Inwood would play a starring role in the early history of aviation…

In the early morning hours of May 29th, 1910, Curtiss set out to do the unthinkable.  For a purse of $10,000, offered by New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer, Curtiss would attempt to fly from Albany to Manhattan.

Pulitzer’s rules were simple if not insane:  Curtiss was allowed two stops to refuel and the entire distance of more than 150 miles had to be completed in less than twenty-four hours.

Curtiss was the only pilot in the world to agree to Pulitzer’s terms.

That morning more than 100,000 spectators gathered along Curtiss’ Hudson River flight path to witness one of the greatest spectacles of their day.

Sign in Albany describing historic flight. (Courtesy Steve Doherty)

Pulitzer’s rival, the New York Times, even chartered a special train filled with reporters and cameramen to record every leg of the flight for eager readers.

At 7:02 am  Curtiss and his Albany Flyer were airborne.

Donning goggles, a cork life vest and rubberized waders,  Curtiss kept pace with the news train. On-board the locomotive, his wife Lena hung out a window cheering her husband on while waiving a handkerchief.  “It was like a real race and I enjoyed the contest more than anything else during the flight,” Curtiss later recalled.

Eighty-seven miles into his trip, Curtiss landed his Albany Flyer in an open field near Poughkeepsie where he borrowed oil and gas from curious motorists before taking back to the air.

Shortly after his second takeoff dangerous wind currents just south of Storm King Mountain nearly tossed the aviator from his plane. “My heart was in my mouth.  I thought it was all over,” Curtiss recalled.

Regaining control of the airplane, Curtiss found himself in the homestretch.  The Manhattan skyline was just visible on the horizon.

Then disaster struck.

Curtiss’ aircraft was leaking oil. He needed to put down before his engine froze up.  But where?

The Albany Flyer

Scanning the ground below, Curtiss looked for a large patch of green in northern Manhattan he had scouted out while planning his flight.  Veering east from the Hudson, Curtiss put down in Inwood, on a stretch of land owned by the family of the late financier and leather merchant William B. Isham.

At 10:42 am, Isham’s daughter Flora and her husband, Minturn Post Collins, were reading about the flight in the Sunday paper when they heard a motor running behind the house.

Heading out back to investigate, Collins immediately realized he was standing face to face with the aviator he had read so much about in the morning news.

“I am certainly delighted to be the first to congratulate you on arriving in city limits, and am glad you picked our backyard as a place to land,” Collins told Curtiss.

All business, Curtiss responded, “Thank you, but what’s worrying me now is oil and gasoline.  Have you any that you can spare?”

“It was grand,” Collins later told reporters.  “…And that’s the best word I can think of to describe it.  Imagine yourself seated on your veranda with no thought of an airship in your mind, and then suddenly wake up and see one of the finest machines in the world coming down in your backyard.  It was simply perfect in every respect, and although it was all over in less than a minute it was a sight that I shall never forget.  Curtiss was so modest about it all, too, and when I congratulated him he did not seem to realize that he had accomplished one of the greatest aerial feats in the world’s history.”

Glenn Curtiss’ Inwood landing site. (From “Riverdale, Kinsgbridge and Spuyten Duyvil” history by William Tieck)

Collins gave Curtiss some gas and sent a servant down the hill to a nearby boathouse to fetch some oil.  While this was being done, Curtiss phoned the newspapers to let them know that while he had landed within city limits, he still planned on flying to his final destination on Governor’s Island as planned.

When Curtiss returned an enormous crowd surrounded his plane.  It seemed that the whole world had descended on Inwood to catch a glimpse of the great aviation pioneer and his magnificent contraption.

The Kingsbridge police station quickly dispatched a horse drawn wagon full of officers to the Isham estate to help maintain order.

Sergeant Edsall, who witnessed Curtiss’ plane pass the Spuyten Duyvil said, “It was the finest sight I have ever seen.  No bird ever flew with more grace than did Curtiss as he came down.  I was near Inwood-on-the-Hudson when I noticed a tiny speck in the air far up the Hudson.  It was coming like the Twentieth Century Limited, and I knew right away that it was Curtiss.  On it came, all the time getting bigger and bigger, and off Riverdale I begun to hear the whirring of propellers.  I just stood there on the bluff and looked and wondered.  I could not move.”

Glenn Curtiss’ legendary Inwood takeoff.

Realizing Curtiss was going in for a landing, Sergeant Edsall sprinted up the hill to the Isham property.

“As I reached the top of the hill I saw Curtiss jump out of the machine and shake hands with Mr. Collins,” Edsall later told the New York Times.  “I knew that people from everywhere would head for the Isham place, and I sent in a call for reserves from Kingsbridge, and, say, did you ever see people spring up from everywhere as they did here in this, one of the most sparsely settled parts of New York?”

Another takeoff was going to prove tricky business.  In addition to the crowd of onlookers, Curtiss realized he had flown into a cul-de-sac.  His only option, a dangerous one, was to roll down the hill then steer his airplane past the unforgiving walls of the Spuyten Duyvil as he gained altitude.

Technically he didn’t have to continue at all.  Pulitzer’s rules only specified he land in city limits.  For this sportsmanlike act he would earn the respect and admiration of New Yorkers for years to come.

At 11:42 Curtiss took off from the Isham lawn and once again headed west for the Hudson River.  A fleet of automobiles attempted to chase the plane down Riverside Drive, but could not keep up.

Curtiss Landing at Governor’s Island

All along the west side spectators took to the shoreline, piers and ferries struggling to catch a glimpse of Curtiss as he ventured south, circled the Statue of Liberty, then landed on Governor’s Island at almost exactly the stroke of noon.  Total flying time: Two hours and fifty-one minutes.  Average speed: Fifty-two miles per hour.

While he would become an international hero, opening the door for commercial flight, air-mail and a host of other modern applications, Curtiss provided a sober insight into the future of aviation.  He told reporters that during his flight two thoughts had occupied his mind.  One was the need for landing fields and the second was the airplane’s potential as a weapon of war.

“All the great battles of the future will be fought in the air,” Curtiss stated.   “I have demonstrated that it is easy to fly over cities and fortifications. It would be perfectly practical to drop enough dynamite or picric acid down on West Point or a city like New York and destroy it utterly.”

At a later award ceremony, presenter/publisher Charles Mann said, “Three names will always be associated with the history of the river—that of Hudson, the explorer; that of Robert Fulton, the introducer of river navigation; and that of Glenn H. Curtiss, the birdman.”

Curtiss died in Buffalo, New York in 1930 following complications from an appendectomy.

His company, the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company, later merged with that of the Wright brothers to become the Cyrtiss-Wright Corporation. The company exists to this very day.

As for the $10,000 check… Curtiss gave it to his wife who told reporters she’d likely spend the money on an automobile.

Back in Inwood, Flora and Julia Isham wound up preserving a piece of aviation history, though likely not for that reason.  In 1912 the Isham women donated their land, the site of Curtiss’ landing, to the City of New York for the creation of Isham Park.

Click here for more Inwood history.

“The Old Tulip Tree,” by Ernest Lawson.

Before Inwood Hill Park, before there even was an Inwood, a mighty Tulip grew in the forest. In a new city lacking a sense of anything from antiquity, New Yorkers latched onto a tree.

The giant tulip of Inwood became a popular destination for picnickers, school children and hikers looking to escape the other world downtown.

In the minds of early New Yorkers the tree stood as the only witness to their then fairly recent past. It’s easy to imagine a teacher pointing to the Spuyten Duyvil and telling her young wards that this is the spot where Henry Hudson and his crew on the Half Moon first set foot on the shores of Manhattan.

Tulip tree in 1913

And while the tree no longer stands, the site is marked with a boulder, a magnificent body of photography and written word concerning the tulip has survived.

Tulip Tree in 1913

An annual report published by the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society in 1913 describes both New York’s love for the tulip and the desperate attempts to save the dying giant:

“On Wednesday, October 30, 1912, exercises were held under the auspices of Park Commissioner Stover at…’the oldest and biggest tree in Manhattan, the giant tulip of Inwood.’ This tree stands on the flat land on the east side of Inwood Hill, on the west shore of Spuyten Duyvil Creek near the southernmost bend of the creek. Near it are shell deposits and rock habitation of the aborigines.

The Inwood Tulip, Source: NYC Parks Department 1930 Annual Report.

Tree surgery performed on the Inwood Tulip, Source: NYC Parks Department 1930 Annual Report.

The Park Department has had all the dead wood cut out of the tree, filled the cavities with cement according to the methods of modern tree surgery, and erected around it an iron fence, in hope that this ancient tree may stand for centuries to come.”

The following description, in gold lettering marked one of the cement fillings beneath the tree, “Tulip Tree. Liriodendron tulipifera. Circumference, 19 feet. Age 225 years. Henry Hudson entered this inlet in 1609 and may have met the Indians who used the place for a camp, as shown by the quantity of old broken oyster shells around this tree and nearby.”

At the time, the giant tulip grew on private property and a neighborhood movement to buy a small parcel of land surrounding the tree to be presented to the city never materialized.

Tulip tree in 1932

The tree was an iconic symbol for generations. Countless photos and sketches show the tree in a constantly changing topography as the wheels of change widened waterways and altered the grade of the land.

Despite man’s best efforts to save the tree  the giant tulip fell victim to a storm in 1938.

The end of the mighty Inwood tulip, 1930′s, NYHS.

A tragic photograph captures the once mighty giant still standing her ground, gazing at the ever evolving neighborhood she had guarded through the centuries.

Today a new plaque marks the spot where the tree once stood. It reads:

“According to legend, on this site of the principal Manhattan Indian Village (Shorakkopoh), Peter Minuit in 1626 purchased Manhattan Island for trinkets and bead then worth about 60 guilders.

This boulder also marks the spot where a tulip tree (Liriodendron Tulipera) grew to a height of 165 feet. It was, until its death in 1938 at the age of 280 years, the last living link between the Reckgawawanc Indians who lived here.”

Boulder in Inwood Hill Park marks the site of the old tulip tree.

The new plaque was put in place in 1954 by the American Legion to commemorate New York City’s 300th anniversary.

The Fulton Patriot, December 8, 1938.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INWOOD HISTORY AND PHOTOS

House of Mercy, New York Herald, January 26, 1890.

A century ago  asylums and institutions lined the ridge of Inwood Hill.  Inside these fortress-like structures, all demolished by Robert Moses in the 1930′s, tortured, long-dead souls were kept under lock and key.  Some were criminals, some were inebriates and drug addicts, others had the mere misfortune of suffering from tuberculosis.   All were outcasts, banished to the northernmost reach of Manhattan, decades before Inwood Hill would be named a park.

More than 100 years later some say the shrieks and wails of these wretched and forgotten souls still reverberate through the park.

While nary a remnant of these asylums exists today, their legacy of suffering is legendary.

So take a trip, if you dare, to another time, another Inwood, where bad things go bump in the night.

Escape from the House of Mercy, The National Police Gazette, December 1895

The House of Mercy: The granddaddy of our Institutional tour, where young girls, inebriates and ladies of ill-repute endured cold nights on the windswept hill on strict diets of bread, molasses and water.

Inwood House of Rest for Consumptives depicted in 1910 postcard.

The House of Rest for Consumptives: Treatment for Tuberculosis patients was nonexistent near the turn of the century and this fabled institution represented the end of the line for those who entered.

Magdalen Society depicted in a penny postcard.

The Magdalen Asylum: This frightening home for wayward young women changed its name to Inwood House after several girls fell victim to mercury poisoning while under the doctor’s care.

Today northern Manhattan is home to thousands of gypsy cabs, but step back a century in time and you would find a sleepy little farming community inhabited by, among others, real life European gypsies.

As early as 1887, according to a New York Times article, Mr. J. Hood Wright allowed a full blown Romany encampment to set up shop on his property on Broadway and 173rd Street as part of a charity event to raise money for Manhattan Hospital.

And raise money they did. New Yorkers of the day seemed fascinated by gypsy culture and lined up at various booths to buy colorful clothing and trinkets or sample exotic food and fruits like crushed cantaloupes, pickled olives and fried shrimp.

According to the Times article, a team of female archers would allow “you for 15 cents to shoot a target with a bow and arrow. If you hit the bull’s eye you get an elegantly dressed cigar. If not you get another chance at paying 15 cents.”

And of course, there were the fortune tellers.

“The star of the occasion, however, is the Soothsayer. She is dressed in a wonderful robe of pink satin, which conceals everything but two penetrating brown eyes. She has a tent all to herself, and as you recline luxuriously on some Turkish cushions she takes your palm in hers and tells your fortune. She is a very good fortune teller. After she has won your interest and confidence by telling you a lot of things about yourself that you are surprised to find her in possession of, she paints your future brilliantly, paints it in rose color so to speak.”

A decade later, the Kingsbridge area had become so accustomed the gypsies living among them that in September of 1895 the Reverend Benjamin Burch, the rector of Saint Stephen’s Protestant Episcopal Church said a funeral mass for a young “gypsy Princess” named Little Patience Penfold.

According to the New York Times, “It was an unusual sight, the white vestments of the clergyman in the midst of the quaint gypsy camp. The body lay in a tiny white casket, in the little tent where it had been since death. On the coffin were two wreaths and a large cluster of daisies and goldenrod gathered from the fields nearby. A group of curious spectators stood near, and when the prayers were said all knelt, and many joined in the responses.”

Despite this outpouring of acceptance, the freewheeling days of setting up camp on the farms and pastures of this turn of the century hinterland were drawing to a close.

What follows is an inside look at one of the last, and possibly largest gypsy encampments in all of Manhattan. Located across Broadway from the present site of Isham Park, this incredible description comes from a 1904 edition of the now defunct New York Tribune.

New York Tribune Illustrated
October 30, 1904

“A real gypsy camp in the heart of the second city in the world is a picturesque sight just now on the meadows between Broadway, Harlem River and Two-hundred-and-eleventh and Two-hundred-and-twelfth Streets, which would probably surprise any one not familiar with the areas still remaining in their natural condition in upper Manhattan Island.

The camp consists of a dozen house wagons of various types, as many tents, a couple of dozen horses tethered on the sloping meadow or grazing in the marsh, numerous dogs of indescribable breeds, and fifty or more gypsies of both sexes, ranging in age from infants in arms—or, more strictly speaking, infants on the ground—to veterans of threescore years and ten.

The men and older women are as swarthy as Arabs, but the middle aged women and children are fair, barring freckles. One or two of the families have been there for a couple of months, and are sending their children to the New York public schools. The others have just arrived from Danbury, where they have been attending the Danbury fair. The other day there was a great flurry in the camp when the old gypsy king and queen joined the colony, and were received with honors due to their exalted positions.

These gypsies are from Devonshire, England, and arrived in America two or three months ago with their equipages. They are an intelligent company, speak with a decided English accent, and are most civil in their address, adding “sir” to almost every sentence. They dress in bright colors, and their clothing, displayed on the grass and bushes to dry on “wash day,” imparts a kaleidoscopic aspect to the landscape. They make a living by trading horses and telling fortunes by palmistry, and some of them are believed to possess no inconsiderable means.

The gypsy boys are interesting little chaps—alert, bright, and as inquisitive as a corkscrew. They wear curious jackets, the fronts of which are made of plaid stuff and the sleeves and backs of buckskin, making them look as if they were in their waistcoats. They have their pets with them. One has a little Shetland pony, which is tethered to a stake in the middle of the camp and nibbles at grass contentedly. Another has a rabbit, which hops in and out among the heaps of firewood that have been gathered for their campfires. Another has a canary bird hanging in a cage at the front door of the house wagon.

These house wagons, which are sometimes used by English people who are not gypsies for summer outings, are different from anything made in this country. They are wholly enclosed like a stage, but wider at the top than at the bottom, and open in front instead of behind. At the rear is a track for transportation of the canvas and other impedimenta. On the front of the vehicle, on each side of the front door, is a tier of little shelves or racks—a convenient resting place for the canary bird cage and other light articles in fair weather. Within, on each side, is a long seat. The side windows are neatly curtained, and above them, and on the further end, are pictures and other household ornaments. The interior has an inviting air of snug comfort, tempting to one fond of outdoor life.

One or two families have a camp stove, but most of them cook in true nomadic style, slinging their kettles over the campfire from tripods. They have a great admiration for America—having seen Danbury, Conn., some parts of New Jersey and New York City— and they are free to admit that New York is superior to Danbury. They will probably remain here for some time.”

But by 1904 such camps would become all but impossible. That year the elevated IRT (today’s one train) arrived in Inwood. With it came aggressive real estate speculation and development. The flowing pastures needed for a proper encampment were either developed or spoken for.

The gypsies like so many other cultures before and since, were pushed out of the neighborhood in the name of progress.

Click here for more Inwood History.

Lorrie Goulet poses in the Inwood Pottery Studios for a newspaper article about the impending closure of the Pottery.

Since launching Myinwood.net I have posted quite a bit on the Inwood Pottery Studios; which once occupied Inwood Hill Park. The pottery, the houseboat community, the idyllic setting of a nearly forgotten era has always fascinated me.

So, I was thrilled when I received an email from a former student of the Pottery named Lorrie Goulet. She wrote: “I was very happy to see this article. I was a student of Mrs. Voorhees from age seven to eleven. This was from 1932 to 1936. It was one of my happiest experiences. I was there when Mrs. Voorhees had to abandon her pottery.

I wrote a letter to Mayor LaGuardia asking him to give Mrs. Voorhees more time to move. He did give her three months more. Because of my time at the pottery, my life in art was very much influenced. I became a sculptor, and have never forgotten Mrs. Voorhees, my first teacher. I am now eighty-five years old, and still working!”

Equally thrilling was the writer’s own history.

After studying ceramics as a child in Inwood Hill Park, Lorrie Goulet went on to become an accomplished sculptor. Her carvings, in both stone and wood, have been exhibited in museums around the world.

She still works out of her West 20th Street studio; a studio she once shared with her late husband, fellow sculptor Jose de Creeft. Her husband’s Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park is still a familiar and popular sight with children an adults alike.

Lorrie Goulet and her late husband Jose de Creeft.

Extending a gracious invitation, Lorrie allowed myself and fellow Inwood history sleuth Don Rice into her workspace to discuss her childhood growing up on 218th Street–just steps away from the pottery works.

Together we recorded this fascinating oral history from an Inwood of long ago.  Many thanks to Lorrie Goulet for sharing her memories with us, and now, with you:

For more information on the old Inwood Pottery Studios, click on the below links:

Inwood Pottery Studio

Inwood Arts Pioneer: Aimee Le Prince Voorhees

A Potter’s Lament

Generations of Inwood residents have trudged up and down the familiar stairs which connect Broadway with Park Terrace East. The steps themselves have stood frozen in time as the surrounding neighborhood reached maturity.

The stairs are a familiar sight to anyone who has ever passed through Inwood. The ancient passageway was built in an era when the automobile was still a relatively new contraption and getting up or down a hill required nothing more than a decent pair of shoes. There are a total of 94 step-streets in the City of New York.

215th Street Stairs in 2010.

Below are several photos of the 215th Street stairs, as they would have been seen during the Inwood’s modern infancy.

These photos provide a remarkable glimpse back in time to an era when Broadway was covered in cobblestones and white picket fences, like the one seen topping the stairs in the first photo, still dotted the neighborhood.

I hope you enjoy these early photos of Inwood’s beloved, and sometimes reviled, step-street. What the future holds for the 215th Street stairs seems to be anyone’s guess.

If you have any stories you’d like to share about the stairs, I encourage you to write in and share your memories.

215th Street Stairs August 29.1915

215th Street Steps in 1916.

Much of what we know today about the history and pre-history of Inwood and Washington Heights is due largely to the turn of the century work of amateur historians, self taught archaeologists and close friends William Calver and Reginald Bolton. Starting in the 1880′s Bolton and Calver began exploring northern Manhattan with picks and shovels, chronicling their discoveries along the way.

An Inwood dig site near the turn of the century. Reginald Bolton (left, sitting) and William Calver, standing to right of dig site.

What you are about to read is an essay written by William Calver in 1932 describing those early days before the urbanization of Northern Manhattan. The original draft, written in fading pencil on lined legal paper, is housed in the Archives of the New York Historical Society.

“Recollections of Northern Manhattan”
W.L. Calver
3-10-1932

Back in the early 1880′s when the writer first became familiar with that section of Manhattan Island known as “Inwood” it was only a fairly good class of humor when a reporter for one of the city newspapers alleged that in the course of a visit to northern Manhattan he had conversed with a farmer who declared that he had not been down to New York for the past twenty five years. The agriculturalist had been promising himself, however that he would be making a pilgrimage that way before long for he had heard that great changes had taken place to the Southwest and Yorkville had gotten to be as big as Harlem. Our own experience with Inwood in these far off days led us to believe that the scribe’s story might be at least-plausible.

Turn of the century postcard depicting Veitch’s grocery on Dyckman just west of Broadway. Note the card reads “Tubby Hook” rather than “Inwood.”

The very name “Inwood” as applied to the locality in question was suggested by its ultra-rural character, and we ourselves got it from a venerable clerk of one of our courts that he in turn thus sponsoring the locality, on the occasion of his surrendering his trust for certain properties thereabouts in the 60′s, had good reasons for his choice of such a name. To nature lovers the name was attractive, but with the ultimate expansion of the City the appellation of “In-wood” was anathema to the promoters of real estate, tough prospective buyers went further and fared worse.

View of the Kingsbridge Road, Valentine’s Manual, 1866.

While dealing with names we would say that in Revolutionary days all of the northern end of the island was known as “Kingsbridge,” as in our day the settlement contiguous to the old bridge-on its northerly side-is so called. Previous to the adoption of the present name of “Inwood” the locality bordering on the present day Dyckman Street-west of Broadway, was called “Tubby Hook.”

The last of the Kingsbridge

Because the farmer of the 1880′s had not been to town for many years past it has not to be inferred that Inwood was independent of the outside world. The peddler on learning the city to start out on his rounds to the northward passed along the old “Kingsbridge Road” -now Broadway- reckoned on a lessening of his load by the time he reached the bridge to the mainland that ancient structure we will remember the waterway it spanned has long ceased to exist.

Spuyten Duyvil Creek in 1860.

The rival bridge -”Dyckman’s Bridge”- we photographed for the last time in 1911. Peddlers or no peddlers the old-time resident of northern Manhattan did not suffer from want of wearing apparel, tin-ware or trinkets for Yonkers was-for those days-within easy walking distance and before the coming of the surface cars much more accessible than the 125th Street district.

Dyckman House in 1890′s, photo by James Reuel Smith.

In contrast with its rustic beauty and apparently pastoral innocence by day, the Inwood district was in the 80′s, and early 90′s, far from safe after the evening shades had fallen. The pedestrians one would meet then along the Kingsbridge Road might be a resident who was abroad on legitimate business, but the chances always were that travelers northward bound were desperados fleeing from justice, while other travelers southward bound were culprits of one sort or the another bent on hiding their identity in the big city; or were crooks journeying in from the provinces with their spoil.

Frequently, perhaps, they were of the latter sort; and in this connection we recall some stories told by a policeman of his nightly experiences along his beat. That beat covered half a mile of highway, and extended to the Harlem River to the eastward. The tales told by the officer convinced us at the time that an active and fearless policeman on night duty along the Kingsbridge Road had opportunities aplenty to win distinction.

The old Kingsbridge Road, now Broadway, at 204th Street, photo by Ed Wenzel.

The Kingsbridge Road it must be remembered was, of old, the single artery of travel north and south, and was in all respects, typically a rural highway bordered on both its sides by fenced in areas with yet a few farm homes or tavern buildings which claimed an 18th century origin.

Century House in 1892.

The most interesting of these structures was the “Century House” dating from 1735, and yet as occupied until its destruction by fire in 1904. For a while abandoned, but now given a new lease of life in a city park the Dyckman farmhouse stands at 203rd Street-an excellent example of an 18th century Dutch farm dwelling. The house was erected immediately after the close of the Revolutionary War. Somewhat more modern than the Dyckman- which in its checkered career had served as a tavern-was the “Black Horse Inn” building which we remember well as standing on the westerly side of the Kingsbridge Road, at the junction of the present drive and south of Dyckman Street.

The name Dyckman Street appears to be of recent origin, for three score years ago the name “Inwood Street” applied to it; which in remoter days it was referred to as the Tubby Hook Landing Road. Old timers will recall that the appendix Landing went with Hudson River shore village appellations- a relic of pre-rail road days when river traffic cut the big figure. When we know the Black Horse it had long ceased to serve its original purpose of a road home, but it was occupied as a residence down to the close of the 19th century. It was a landmark in our early days. We failed to get a photograph of the Black Horse, but there are several good drawings of the building extant.

Black Horse Tavern, sketch from Frank Leslie’s Sunday Magazine, 1884.

At the present junction of Nagle Avenue and Broadway there stood a rather diminutive, but ancient, dwelling on the easterly side of the road. This little dwelling, to the rear of which was a little stretch of farmland and an orchard, shows up just within the scope of our view taken in 1892. About one year previous to the taking of this view the post-Revolutionary oak trees covering the westerly side of Laurel Hill was cut away. Some stumps of those trees may be seen in the photograph.

At a point about a 100 yards south of the little dwelling, just referred to, there stood on the same, easterly, side of the road a picturesque residence without a history it is time, yet entitled by its age and character to some consideration. Here lived a generation ago, a rather old man- John Sowerby by name, and in the early 90′s there lived with him his mother who claimed to be about 90 years of age. Mr. Sowerby told us that he had it from his forbearers that the home was erected during the yellow fever scare which he thought was about the year 1798. Perhaps it was.

Sowerby Cottage, 1923, NY-HS.

Mr. Sowerby was profuse in his recollections of northern Manhattan, but he seemed disposed to dispel the glamour of antiquity gathering about the locality-he asserted that-his mother witnessed the construction of the Black Horse Inn, and we find that a journalist writing at the close of the third quarter of the 19th century had it that the Inn was actually built in 1805, by one Henry Norman.

Most interesting of Mr. Sowerby’s “recollections,” although it was unconsciously such, was his persistent reference to his locality as the “Barrier Gate;” for strange to say he knew nothing of the barrier, or “stockade,” erected by the British across the roadway in 1779, to impede a passable irruption of an American force coming down from the north. Here was a remarkable persistence, locally of a name for above a country after the original of an appellation had ceased to exist. Remindful of that very barrier is a massive wrought iron point-part of a cheval-de-frise – found recently near the site of the British obstruction

12 mile marker from old slide. (Now located at the Broadway entrance to Isham Park)

In the days of our earlier outings about Inwood there stood by the roadway two of the ancient milestones; these were the 12th and the 13th indicating the distance from “N York.” The 13th milestone which stood on the west side of the Kingsbridge Road near the extreme north end of the island has disappeared, but the 12th milestone still remains- built into the retaining wall at the Isham Park entrance. We were told that the stone originally stood at the 203rd Street corner; the present pitted appearance of the stone is attributable to a shotgun charge fired by a hunter who wished to empty his piece on the return from a hunt.

The roadside fences, the ancient dwellings, and the milestones were the features that gave character to the stretch of the old Kingsbridge Road as we knew it in our early pilgrimages thither.

Reconstruction of Hessian hut behind the Dyckman farmhouse.

One hundred years after the close of the Revolutionary War the fields and heights of Inwood yet reeked with reminders of that struggle; and while it was not literally true as Lossing has it that there was “scarcely a road of ground thereabouts that was not scarred by the entrenchers” there were evidence on every hand of military occupation. Reminders innumerable of the British military possession turned up when the soil of the fields was disturbed by tillage-or was loosened by the frost or rains.

Dyckman House. Hessian Hut being built by William Calver (standing with straw hat) and and Reginald Bolton (far right) in 1916.

In the course of repeated visits, in season and out of season, we gathered up these mementos, and in time we retrieved inscribed bits of accouterments traceable to each and every corps of the enemy serving at New York. Ultimately we located the campsites of the British and Hessian armies, and these several camps have been, or will be, duly described by me.

Hut Camp of the 17th Regiment on Inwood Hill, NYC, by John Ward Dunsmore, 1919.

Three campsites distinctly British, and one camp occupied by Hessians were discovered and explored. The British sites were the camp on the northerly side of Nagle Avenue at the junction of the avenue near Broadway, a camping place on the west bank of the Harlem River on the line of 201st Street, and an extension hut camp at Payson and Seaman Avenues, in the vicinity of 203rd Street, west of Broadway; the Hessian camp was that of the Lieb Regiment, or “Body Regiment” – located at Arden, and Thayer Streets east of Broadway. Other camps were at Fort George at 192nd Street, and Audubon Avenue – and at Fort Washington; but these, like the camps of the valley, are subjects for separate papers.

Turn of the century view of the Inwood Valley looking north from Fort George before real estate development transforms the landscape, NY-HS.

Inwood Valley in 1910 looking north from Fort George, notice construction boom underway, NY-HS.

The Inwood valley as it appeared forty years ago is shown completely on the photograph which the writer had taken at that time, and which is, we believe, is unique in its way. For these were in the last days of rural Inwood to apprehend its early passing. A study of the view will convince the reader of the probable truth of a story current in Inwood long after the alleged visit of the city newspaper reporter, that a legitimate excuse of a tardy schoolboy, at the public school, was that he was delayed by his driving of the cows to pasture.

“Ward or Public School No. 52 was a landmark on the southeast corner of Broadway and Academy Street from 1858 to almost 1957. This picture dates from about 1902, or midway of that period. Note the gas lamp with a mailbox on the lamppost. At the right is the house where the caretaker lived.” -Source- William Tieck, “Schools and School Days.”

The school-building-with its fourteen chimneys, is still standing and doing duty as a schoolhouse. It may be seen on the eastern side of Broadway, at Academy Street, in one view taken in 1892.

Ship Canal Bridge in 1907, NY-HS.

We have referred to the Kingsbridge which was built towards the close of the 17th century and was named for King William III; and mention has been made of the Dyckman’s Bridge or the Free Bridge built in 1759 to compete with Kingsbridge and removed in 1911. These structures served their day, but passed out with the coming of the subway which opened for business in 1907. Spanning the Harlem there was another bridge which connected the Inwood district with Fordham until 1907 when it was replaced by the present 207th Street Bridge-which by way was originally erected over the Ship Canal, on the line of Broadway, at 221st Street, and upon the instillation of the present two story bridge, over the canal, was floated down to its present site at 207th Street.

Inwood’s Floating Bridge, 1906

The footbridge to Fordham was never a very substantial affair. The structure consisted of a narrow pathway of planking supported upon small piles barely high enough to clear the floating ice at a very high tide. The boys resorted to it as a bathing pier, and in the crabbing season the pedestrian had to pick his way through the assemblage of crabbers. In the period just previous to the coming of the present bridge the trestle bridge and causeway part of it were in an advanced stage of dilapidation. We recall that at the last the forehanded foot passengers brought with him a plank to stop a probable gap in the causeway while other passengers restored a missing span with a plank taken from a section of the pathway they had already passed. Towards the close of its existence the bridge was resorted to only in cases of extreme need; and on a windy day only the venturesome made use of it.

Along the Harlem River on its westerly side were many coves and inlets. One of these coves had been obliterated-probably in Colonial days by the construction of a dike paralleling the river at 211th Street. Some thrifty Dutchman of the 17th century had perhaps, by the erection of this embankment eliminated a goodly stretch of “waste-land” – purely city owned under the Charter of 1686, and had given a homelike look to his buildings, certainly remindful of the land from which he sprang.

We found the stretch of high ground bordering the Harlem, to the north of 201st Street, referred to as “Huckleberry Island.” We gathered a few huckleberries there, but in our time the tract was not of an insular character, though we conversed with an old resident who asserted that he had rowed around the “island” at a very high tide.

Some discussion, we understand, has arisen in recent years regarding the legal ownership of what is now solid ground bordering on Sherman’s Bay or “Creek.” There were those around Inwood half a century ago who habitually referred to the present existing inlet as Sherman’s “Bay”-it was in early times the “Half Kill.” The name “bay,” we take it, should apply to that stretch of water affected by the tides, and the appellation “creek” to that tributary-formerly known as “the Run”-which had its source west of Broadway just south of 181st Street. It might be said to have emptied into the bay at the present junction of Nagle Avenue, and Dyckman Street, but previous to the filling in of Dyckman Street in 1892-even at low tide one in coming down from Fort George to a point where the subway station now stands had to proceed southward nearly to the line of Arden Street in order to pick his way dry shod – using stepping stones at times -to cross the creek and reach the fields of Inwood. On our way we gathered wild iris blooms at Thayer Street, and Nagle Avenue-at the mouth of the creek. In Revolutionary days the creek was apparently navigable at times along the line of the present Nagle Avenue, as far as Broadway; for it is so recorded by Von Krafft, the young Hessian officer that in July 1781 many pontoons were floated up from New York and were placed in the “Line Barrier.”

Harlem River from Fort George, New York by publisher H. Hagemeister, 1910 postcard.

In 1890 the swamp lands, or cat tail growth, extended in an irregular diagonal line from the junction of Nagle Avenue and Arden Street, to the junction of Sherman Avenue and Dyckman Street. On the northerly side of Dyckman Street, and extending from the present junction of Vermilyea Avenue eastward to Post Avenue the area for a stones throw northward was cattail covered in the summer, and was resorted to as a skating pond in the winter. Above at the junction of Nagle Avenue with Dyckman Street on the north side of the street the Salt Meadow began, and extended then a -covering all the area between the Speedway and Sherman’s Bay-nearly to the Harlem River.

On the north side of the bay meadow of salt bay reached from Nagle Avenue to solid ground at “Bronson’s Point.” I saw a stranded barge on the east side of the Harlem about on the line of 201st Street just north on the mouth of Sherman’s Bay. There lived one Harry Bronson – who was born in the immediate vicinity. Bronson, who was a jovial good hearted sort of man, survived until a quite recent date. In his later years he lived in one of the wooden houses on Nagle Avenue at Elwood Street. At the last he was employed as a watchman in the Interstate Park. In his early manhood years Harry, with his father-picked up a living catering to pleasure seekers along the shore, and those who were fond of clams and oysters were good patrons of the Bronsons-the elder Bronson, and Harry his son. In a complimentary way the locality of the barge was referred as “Bronsons” or “Bronson’s Point.”

The character of Sherman’s Bay, and “Creek” areas show up pretty well in the views we had taken of them forty years ago. The view taken in 1892 from the westerly side of “Laurel Hill”-Fort George Hill-looking northward, is one of the few reminders of early conditions in the “Barrier Gate” district. The other large view embraces the salt meadow area on the northerly side of Sherman’s Bay, while the smaller photograph includes within its scope nearly all of the salt meadow on both sides of the bay, and the bulkheading of the bay itself.

Moreover, the photographic view shows the filling in of the northern area while the work was in progress. Through the last two decades of the 19th century a resident of Inwood-Charles Atkins by name-regularly harvested the salt hay from these meadows. Salt hay has given way to excelsior, and some other packing materials, but in the fairly olden days the hay was universally used in shipping crude pottery and other cheap fragile products. Mr. Atkins, who still survives-lived for upwards of 50 years in the Mansard roofed house which stood until 1931 on the westerly side of Broadway at Fort Washington Avenue. For more than a decade the marsh wrens nested and the muskrats constructed their huts amongst the rushes on both sides of Dyckman Street-between Nagle Avenue and Post Avenue -after the street was filled in.

At the southwest corner of Sherman Avenue and Dyckman Street there existed a colonial burial ground which, as such, had nearly faded from memory when in 1890 we discovered in a small excavation nearby some fragments of an excellent quality of Aborigine pottery a nearby resident jumped to the conclusion that there was a connection of the pottery with the rude headstones of the burial plot and with the expenditure of much labor he unearthed a dozen or more human skeletons which were believed to be Indian; but there were some old timers residing nearby who claimed a relationship with the deceased. The presence of a Charles II sixpence in one grave and iron nails in all were not convincing, but two pairs of sleeve link buttons of Spanish coin design and dating 1771, establish the character of the remains as being of whites; and it is quite probable that the buttons were worn the apparel of a British officer-possibly a victim of the battle of Fort Washington in 1776. Such sleeve links we have found in many British Revolutionary sites. There appears to have been a voque of corn-design buttons in the 18th century days.

Nagle cemetery, early 1900′s

The more modern burial plot-that named for the Nagle family-we well recall-in fact it existed, though in a very dilapidated state until a recent date at 212th Street, and was graded away in preparation of the area for the new subway stops and yard. In the 80′s, and even in the 90′s, the plot was protected with a good fence, and the grounds had all the appearance of a well kept rural cemetery. Internments were made in the plot up to about thirty years ago, but with the construction of the surface railways and the subsequent opening of the subway line, a harum scarum class of pleasure seekers overran the little plot – tore down its fences and threw down the memorial stones. Before its destruction was quite complete we got an indifferent sort of photograph of the already much desecrated area of the burial plot and promised ourselves better views but failed to keep faith with ourselves in this respect. We have the satisfaction of knowing however that copies were made of all legible inscriptions upon the stones of the plot.

Nagle Cemetery between 9th and 10th Avenues between 212th and 213th Street, 1926, NYPL.

For above a dozen years previous to the grading of 10th Avenue, along its route through upper Manhattan Island we had had our eye on a feature of the ground at 212th Street on the line of the Avenue, for there, amid a cluster of tall pear trees many rude stones, which could hardly be said to be regularly set, projected from the ground. Tradition had it, as we found, that the stones marked slave’s graves. We could never trace the origin of this report, but there certainly existed a belief that human internments had been made there, for apparently the ground had not been plowed since the placing of the stones. Our chance to verify, or disprove tradition came in March 1903 when the work of grading 10th Avenue began. In the course of grading though the knoll about thirty skeletons were exhumed. The skulls of these were examined by Dr. Herdlika, the eminent craniologist and were pronounced by him – “purely African.”

One of the skulls we photographed, and many other skulls were photographed-en masse. As indicated by the presence of nails in the grave, the bodies had been interred in wooden boxes while the presence of brass pins and the green stains thereof upon the skulls indicated that shrouds had been used. Aside from the nails and the pins the only other metallic object recovered was a brass brooch set off with brass and blue glass beads. It is well known that slavery existed in this state and was finally extinguished in 1827. On studying up on the subject of slavery we discovered some interesting matter relating to the burial of slaves. It is recorded that the English colonists were slow to act on the suggestion from the Crown to “find out the best means to facilitate and encourage the conversion of negros, and Indians to the church faith provided that the baptism of any slave should not be deemed a manumission of such slave.”

It was the custom in the old slavery days hereabouts to inter the remains of bond servants in a plot set apart for that purpose, and the law provided how simple the burial services must be. A law passed in 1722 decreed that all negro and Indian slaves dying within the City should be buried by daylight. The law was subsequently rescinded and it was decreed that not more than 12 slaves should attend any funeral under penalty of a public whipping. No pall, gloves, or favors of any sort were to be worn, and any slave who was found to have held a pall or worn gloves or favors was to be whipped. The ceremonies of slave burial must have been-in consequence of the laws-rather simple, as few probably had any instruction in the Christian faith, and whereas many of the blacks were direct importations from Africa it is quite possible that pagan rites were performed. The fear of conspiracies inspired the restrictive laws. The non Christian character of the blacks prevented burial in consecrated ground.

Farming on the Spuyten Duyvil, photo by Ed Wenzel.

We have referred to these two local reminders of man’s mortality-white and black but in close proximity to these we had previously noted what suggested the “staff of life.” This was the last crop of grain grown on Manhattan Island, true, the grain proved to be the prosaic rye intended for the sustenance of live stock but with all that crop marked the closing of an era in the Island’s history, and was remindful of the figure which grain and products thereof had cut in the affairs of the colony. Flour and baked bread were important articles of export.

And when the growing of tobacco was found to be more profitable and thereby the price of bread soared a law was passed compelling the farmers to plant two acres of grain to one of tobacco. The flour barrel founds its place on the City seal in 1688; it is there yet. We photographed the grain field. In recent times, that is to say in the ultimate grain field days, that field was part of the Isham estate; of old it was “part of the Nagle farm.

Century House ruins, 1904.

With the passing of the Nagle residence-”the Century House”-in 1904-(shown above) we got the chance we had waited for to explore the sloping ground between the homesite and the Harlem River shore.

1904 dig at site of old Nagle homestead.

We reckoned that here would be found the discarded household and personal material of the Nagles, and mementos of the British officers who would probably have occupied the house. Our guess was good; we discovered all we could have hoped for, but in the Autumn of 1907 as we were journeying toward the subway after a days work at the Nagle dust heap we made a find conspicuous in the Archaeology of the Eastern United States.

Native American Pottery discovered in Inwood by William Calver, Source: “Washington Heights, Manhattan: Its Eventful Past” by Reginald Pelham Bolton.

On the bankside of the newly graded 214th Street and near to 10th Avenue-right here in the Metropolis we spotted a massive and complete specimen of an Iroquoian Indian jar-the finest yet discovered. Although the pot was nearly duplicated in its dimensions and symmetry by a similar find which we made at the opening of 231st Street, we believe our first great find will never be equaled. That vessel was, miraculously barely exposed by the grading of 214th Street and was noted by us as it lay interred, just safely below the plow line, in the soft earth of the field. Probably at the departure of the last Aborigines from Manhattan Island the jar had been buried on a campsite against the day when those poor exiles would return. That day alas, for them, never arrived.

William Calver discovers Native American Pottery in Inwood, Native American Pottery discovered in Inwood by William Calver, Source: “Washington Heights, Manhattan: Its Eventful Past” by Reginald Pelham Bolton.

Years before that early familiarity with the region to which we referred at the commencement of these “recollections” we looked into the longing eyes over the strictly private areas of Inwood as we passed up or down on the New York Central trains. The grassy meadow bordering the Harlem and the rocky ridges to the westward appeared by us ideal in the advantages they offered to the red man whose footprint as it were-we
ultimately discovered thereabouts. It is not too much to say that with its stretches of probable Maizeland, its oyster beds, and fishing grounds; its watercourses-fowl and small game; its still waters for canoeing, along with the natural rock shelters North Manhattan was unmatchable in the features possessed for the accommodation of primitive life.

Exploring the Indian caves

The Indian cave or “rock-shelter” now fortunately within the bounds of Inwood Hill Park, promises to be preserved-forever a memorial to the original occupants of Manhattan Island.

Doubtless the rock shelters, before the coming of the red man was the home of the bear and the wolf, and two score years ago a family of “wild dogs” that had quarters beneath some massive rocks above the Indian cave were the subject of newspaper stories for a while causing some little excitement among the residents of the valley, for those who investigated by day saw nothing, but much barking was heard in the vicinity of the rocks by night. The “wild dog” excitement never quite subsided at Inwood, and along about the year 1915 when the furor became acute all stray dogs were regarded with apprehension. The newspapers featured the matter again, so we decided we would investigate. There were plenty folks at Inwood who declared that an actual past of savage dogs existed. Hair raising stories of the nightly depredations of degenerate curs were told.

The brutes foraged at night for their rations almost to the very hearths of the, then, sparse population of the valley. Children were attacked and erstwhile faithful, home loving, dogs were lured away from regular feed, and cozy kennels, to revert to primitive conditions and a vagabond life. There was, however, some little foundation, as we found, for the stories current of dog life in the hinterland of Manhattan. To verify, or squelch the stories we fared forth and made a complete survey of the infested region, all possible natural shelters, or potential dens, were inspected, and residents of the valley, and high places, were questioned without positive results. One day as we had completed a lengthy jaunt we sat down upon a rock-one of a great mass of stones removed for the cutting of Thayer Street, and almost immediately there arose a distinct growl coming from the other rocks a few yards away. The growl was of such a volume as to convince us that it did not proceed from a lapdog. With camera in hand we retired a few paces and awaited developments. Presently one sizable puppy, and then others to the numbers of five, or six emerged from their den.

The puppies of old Inwood.

These puppies were exceedingly shy, but we managed to get four of them in characteristic attitudes exhibiting curiosity, suspicion, or resentment. The mother dog we may suppose was a victim of circumstances having been abandoned by her master as folks moved to other parts , she was compelled to care for herself, and resorted to such shelter as could be found as a refuge by day, while she foraged for sustenance by night. From neglect and abuse she probably developed a savage temper, and some trivial exhibition of ill will on her part may have been exaggerated to such an extent as to make her the terror of Inwood. A young man living nearby made a grand rush one day and captured one of her puppies, this puppy, we subsequently learned, grew up to be mild tempered, everyday sort of dog.

1880′s photo of Inwood Hill.

Only a few years have elapsed since the last cow was kept on northern Manhattan, but the last actual herds of that region appear in our photograph of the Inwood farmlands.

Last pig on Mantattan photographed on the current site of Columbia University’s Baker Field, from the collection of William Calver, September 30, 1911,NY-HS.

The very last porker reared on the whole extent of Manhattan Island inhabited an old fashioned sty on the site of the present day “Baker Field,” near to Spuyten Duyvil Creek. The owner of the sty poured the floor of the sty with asphalt blocks expropriated from supplies for city streets , but as may be seen in our photographs this era marking animal left no stone unturned. Those who have scrutinized early drawings of New York street areas, and have recollections of the figure cut by swine in the annals of Manhattan will understand what we mean when we refer to the individual we have photographed as “epochal.”

Spuyten Duyvil in the 1860′s, note the Johnson Ironworks on the left, NYPL.

Previous to the cutting of the ship canal a curious phenomenon presented itself in the ebb and flow of Spuyten Duyvil Creek; for owing to the sinuosity and shallowness of that strait, its tides rarely kept pace with the larger volumes of water in the Hudson, and Harlem which it connected. To some extent this tidal peculiarity still exists. If we remember rightly an advantage to be gained by the construction of the canal would be the partial forestalling of a possible blockade of the New York Harbor and the passageway it would provide in a day of need for United States war vessels. Towards the last stages of its completion disaster befell the canal for abnormal high tides wrecked the bulkheads at the Kingsbridge Road and destroyed the temporary roadway that compromised the bulkhead. The canalling was completed by dredging-for the bulkhead was not restored.

Depiction of the Spuyten Duyvil in a 1907 Singer Sewing machine card.

Two features of “interest” in natural history were disclosed by the cutting of the canal. One of these was the extensive lamination of peaty vegetable matter revealed in section to a considerable depth; the other was the exhuming of a mastodon’s tusk from the bed of an ancient bog. This was in the year 1885. The tusk is now in the American Museum. That particular remnant of a prehistoric kingdom is not, however, the only such of which Inwood can boast, for portions of the head of another Mastodon was unearthed-rather salvaged we should say-from a boy on the north side of Dyckman Street at the junction of Seaman Avenue when excavation work was carried to a depth of 21 feet below the sidewalk for a footing for the foundation of an apartment house. The tusks and skeletal remain of the mammoth still rest, perhaps, below the basement floor of #2 Seaman Avenue.

The name “Marble Hill” as applied to the extreme north portion of Manhattan Island forty years ago was derived from the character of the rock of which the hill is composed. A Revolutionary earthwork crowned the hill in a position to command the Kingsbridge. This work was known as “Fort Prince Charles,” its site and the marble of the hill are shown in a photograph taken by us in 1928.

In its passing from the rural to the urban we have witnessed the last appearance of certain forms of wildlife on northern Manhattan. The probable last foxes-there were two in 1892-one was minus a portion of his tail; the last mink we have his hide; and possibly the last raccoon we have noted, yet there are those who will, no doubt, be surprised to learn that wild rabbits still inhabit north Manhattan, and that opossums have been seen alive or dead at Kingsbridge, and Fieldstone within the past five years. All of these were oddities in their way-likely as the deer to be seen in unsuspected areas.

Seaman and Payson Avenues near turn of the century.

That section of Manhattan Island to which our recollections pertain has, of late, aside from its use as a place of residence for a vast population been the scene of at least five great developments, three of which in combination assure the maintenance of some of the original natural features of the locality. These are the parks bordering on the Hudson River and the ship canal. They compromise a continuous stretch of City owned grounds where areas may, in their development, prove and invaluable asset to the community at large. With the parklands may also be included the Baker Field, but opposed to these the extensive yards and shops of the new subway and a potential backset to an otherwise well formed region.

For more Inwood history, click here.

Below are a collection of real estate advertisements from ages past.  As both a real estate agent and fan of Inwood history, I found the below images fascinating.  If you’ve lived in any of these building and have stories to share, please feel free to comment in the space below the image box.

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Gustave Leoplold Herz 1919 passport application photo.

On a steamy July day in the summer of 1918 Austrian inventor Gustave Herz purchased a large stable on the northern tip of Manhattan.  While many before him had built grand monuments to equestrian sportsmanship, given the neighborhood’s proximity to the Harlem River Speedway, Herz was no horseman.

Instead, Herz was a dreamer who planned to convert the large stone building on the south side of 215^th Street between Seaman Avenue and Park Terrace West into his dream home.

The land Herz purchased was part of the larger Seaman-Drake estate, but did not include the gleaming marble mansion just to the east.

Shortly after closing on the deal, Herz, who held patents for early models of the spark plug, set to work transforming the old stone stable into an eclectic workshop and home for himself and his family.

Herz spark plug.

New York Times, July 19, 1918.

During the early years of Herz’s residence, the Park Terrace area would have been a serene and nearly suburban area.   Unlike the lands to the east, the western side of northern Manhattan had not yet become crowded with apartment buildings spurred by the arrival of the elevated subway in 1904.

Herz would share the hill with a small and elite group of New Yorkers who enjoyed the romantic solitude and beautiful views the area had to offer.

Seaman Mansion for sale, New York Times February 2, 1913.

Architect Thomas Dwyer, who had purchased the old Seaman mansion, now the site of Park Terrace Gardens, would have been Herz’s closest neighbor to the east.  Dwyer was famous in his own right.  From his office, in the old marble arch, Dywer drew up plans for a number of municipal projects including the Soldier’s and Sailor’s Monument on Riverside Drive.

1920′s photo from Hurst descendent JoAnn Jones (note Isham Gardens under construction in background)

Other neighbors included William H. Hurst, President of the New York Stock Quotation Telegraph Company.  Hurst, his wife Minnie and their eleven children lived in a large brick home designed by Irish architect James O’Connor in 1912.  The house, today in a severe state of disrepair, stands on the corner of west 215^th Street and Park Terrace East.

Isham House, circa 1934.

The Ishams, an old and wealthy Inwood family, lived in a beautiful wooden home on the current site of Isham Park. (A gift from the family to the City of New York).

Among this fascinating group of New Yorkers Herz found a home away from the deafening madness of downtown.

Edith Herz 1920 passport application photo.

There, amid the tranquility of old Inwood, Herz and his wife, Edith,  bore a son.  On the stone walls of the former stable the inventor carved quotations from Goethe, his favorite writer, and otherwise personalized the home that had once sheltered the horses of a previous generation.

This wonderful description of the old stable home was written in 1938, just before the residence was demolished to make room for more modern apartment dwellings.

The article makes one want to travel back in time to meet this colorful inventor and his Park Terrace neighbors.

New York Sun
December 3, 1938
Last Days of Famed Stable

Sales Dooms Inwood Building Made Into a Mansion by Inventor Herz
By Gerry Fitch

Old stables made into attractive homes have given many a New York street a quaint and enduring charm.  It’s something to sigh about that these old stables must inevitably be torn down to make way for changing life in changing times.

And even as this is being written the end has come for the most fantastic stable-home of them all—the stone structure standing on two levels of high ground up in the Inwood section.  This unusual “house” with its beautiful surrounding garden occupies a large plot bounded by Seaman Avenue, 215^th Street and Park Terrace West.  The site happens to be ideal right now for another smart apartment building, such as loom up all around it.  For who can afford to be sentimental about charm, and aren’t the old and the thick tall trees enclosing it, and the rock garden and the lovely rose bushes just too old to live any more?

Seaman mansion before demolition.

Only a month ago the sale of the picturesque Dwyer mansion (formerly the Seaman-Drake estate) in Inwood was reported.  Already the mansion is half demolished, to be followed by five new eight-story apartment buildings.   The “stable house” used to be the stable of the fast disappearing mansion, but that was long before Thomas Dwyer bought the mansion some thirty years ago.  He didn’t buy the stable because another buyer had seen it first, G. L. Herz, millionaire Austrian engineer, who invented the spark plug.

Gustave Herz spark plug patent.

The original builders of the mansion and stable must have been picturesque individuals indeed.  Both structures, more than a hundred years old, are reflections of “individualism” at its utmost.   Following upon the sale of the mansion by Mr. Dwyer the stable-house is now sold by the widow of Mr. Herz, and upon the site will rise two more apartment buildings of six to eight stories in height.

Property Sold Monday

Herz Spark plug advertisement, 1913, The Automobile.

Last Monday Alexander and Samuel Grutman bought the property, Kadel, Sheits and Weiss acting as their attorneys.   Albert Hirst represented Mrs. Edith Herz.  Demolition will start at once; the two new buildings must be ready by next summer so that tenants can enjoy a “free summer” in the pleasant altitudes above Spuyten Duyvil Creek.  The apartments will be Colonial in design and accommodate fifty-two families.  They will be restricted against stores.

On the west wall of the stable-house is a sun-clock, in faded colors of gold and bronze.  On its face is the singularly appropriate reminder in Latin that life is brief indeed.

Except for the sun-clock that can go on somewhere else, about the only thing that can, except the stone the house is made of.

So, if you want a last look at an ancient (from our standards) edifice built with tremendous blocks of granite after the fashion of an Egyptian tomb, and intended to house luxuriously the fine horses of our landed gentry, tramp over the snow-covered garden of the Herz House.  The place has recently been used by a fermenting firm and is full of medical literature.  There are pictures on the wall of Clark Gable.  The four colonial pillars before the arched entrance still have an inviting look; inside is the foyer with great stone slabs for the walls.  Mr. Herz refused to cover them.

Poetry Carved on Walls

When he fell in love with the stable he decided to carve the most beloved phrases of his favorite poet upon the walls.  And that is why so many of the lines of Goethe are to be found cut into the stone blocks.  He made the stable into a nine-room house, modernized it in every way and still did not touch the walls.

In the office of Lawyer Hirst I learned other interesting things about Mr. Herz, “Along with being very rich,” explained Mr. Hirst, “Herz was cultured, art loving.  He had come here poor at the turn of the century.  He wanted to bring to his new land some of the art treasures of his old land.  He amassed a collection of rare cameos, of Bibles, and other objects d’art, and had Vienna craftsmen make elaborate cases for them.  These he housed in several rooms.”

One of his two sons was born in the Herz House, but the family moved to East Seventy-fifth Street a few years ago upon the death of the inventor.  They took the collections with them.

Near the stable entrance is a block of granite that will give the wreckers a headache.  (‘The place will be as hard to destroy as a steel building,” says Mr. Hirst.) This is off doubtful usage in the old days, probably was a watering trough, but it makes a romantic garden seat.

The two new apartment buildings will occupy plots 100 by 100 feet and ramble with the land as do other near by apartment houses.  Some of them have several stories more on one side than the other.

Gustave Leoplold Herz 1919 passport application.

Edith Herz 1920 passport application.

New York City has always been a popular subject when it comes to the world of postcards. I like to call the collection that follows “Postcards from the Edge.” For the most part, I’ve tried to focus on Inwood proper, but other subjects, like the George Washington Bridge, Edgar Allan Poe’s cottage in the Bronx, Castle Village and many, many others, seemed too close to pass up. Enjoy!

New York Institute for Deaf and Dumb postcard, 163rd Street and Fort Washington Avenue, 1910.

Harlem River Speedway, undated postcard.

George Washington Bridge postcard with airplanes, undated.

Fort Washington Point postcard, Hudson River and 180th Street, 1914.

Entrance to Fort George Amusement Park postcard.

Approach to High Bridge postcard, 1913.

Dyckman House, 1918 postcard.

George Washington Bridge at night, undated postcard.

The so called “Farmer’s Bridge” across the Spuyten Duyvil in postcard by Charles Buck.

Views of Old Dyckman Homestead on Harlem Ship Canal in postcard by Charles Buck.

Private residence on the Spuyten Duyvil in postcard by Charles Buck.

Handcolored postcard of the Cloisters, circa 1930′s.

The Cloisters, undated postcard.

Fort Washington Memorial postcard, 1910.

George Washington Bridge by photographer photographer H. W. Hannau.

Hudson River and Palisades postcard, circa 1910.

1950s postcard of George Washington Bridge West Side Highway.

Dyckman station and Fort George postcard.

Harlem River from Fort George, New York by publisher H. Hagemeister, 1910.

Spuyten Duyvil Swing Bridge by Charles Buck, 1906.

Kenny Building Postcard, 308 Dyckman Street

Swimming hole at Tubby Hook. Currently the site of La Marina at the end of Dyckman Street.

Inwood and the Hudson, 1910 Postcard.

Dyckman House sketch

Miramar Pool

Kingsbridge Hotel from postcard by Charles Buck.

Fort George Amusement Park swing ride postcard, 1909.

Fort George Amusement Park, Old Barrel. This huge barrel actually housed a tavern.

Seaman Drake Arch captured in 1911 postcard.

Dyckman House

Dyckman subway postcard, 1909.

Columbia Lion Baker Field in 1930 postcard.

Purchase of Manhattan from the Indians, 1909 postcard.

Old Dyckman Mansion on 218th street.

1905 Singer Sewing Company Postcard.

Fort George, Paradise Park, 1915.

Cloisters vintage postcard.

Castle Village

Hudson River swimmers.

Dyckman Street grocery belonging to Robert Veitch.

Fort George subway tunnel.

Tubby Hook Depot, 1907.

Hudson River and Palisades, 1910 postcard.

Fort Tryon Park wading pool.

Broadway and Dyckman showing old Mount Washington Church.

Dyckman House

House of Mercy

Edgehill Inn, Spuyten Duyvil, 1916.

Century House (Former Nagle homestead)

Inwood and the Hudson

George Washington Bridge

Fort Tryon Hall (Home of C.K.G. Billings)

Dyckman Street Subway Station

Harlem River and Fort George.

Broadway and 230th in 1890.

C.K.G. Billings residence.

Tubby Hook, undated postcard. In the upper right you can see the Mary Magdalene Home and Refuge for Young Women and Girls which was later converted into the Jewish Memorial Hospital.

Arrowhead Inn, 177th and Hudson River, 1914 postcard.

Claremont Hotel

George Washington Bridge

High Bridge

High Bridge

High Bridge Tower

Paterno Castle

Harlem River Speedway

Claremont Hotel

The Cloisters

The Cloisters and Hudson River.

American League Baseball Park, Washington Heights, 168th Street in 1912 postcard.

Fort George Amusement Park

Fort Washington, Lover’s Lane.

George Washington Bridge, 1963.

High Bridge

High Bridge

Harlem River Speedway

Harlem River Speedway

Harlem River Speedway

Harlem River Speedway

Claremont Inn and Riverside Drive

Fort George Amusement Park

Fort George Amusement Park

George Washington Bridge

1909 Hudson Fulton Celebration postcard. The proposed concrete span was never built.

Inwood on the Hudson. Note the old Jewish Memorial Hospital at the western end of Dyckman Street.

Orphan Asylum, Kingsbridge.

Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, Bronx, NY.

Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, Bronx, NY.

Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, Bronx, NY.

Riverside Drive

Harlem River Speedway

West Side Highway

CKG Billings Home, Fort Tryon Hall.

The Cloister

Fort George Amusement Park

Fort Tryon

Fort Washington Point

Fort Washington, Lover’s Lane.

Harlem River view.

Riverside Drive with Paterno Castle on right.

Harlem River Speedway, circa 1905.

Harlem River Speedway

Harlem River Speedway

Abbey Inn and Fort Tryon.

C.K.G. Billings residence

Fort George

Fort Tryon

High Bridge

High Bridge

Hudson River from Fort George

Inwood on the Hudson with old Jewish Memorial Hospital on right.

Harlem River Speedway

Harlem River Speedway

Arrowhead Inn

Claremont Inn

Hudson Fulton celebration postcard.

Hebrew Orphan Asylum

Fort George and Harlem River.

Fort George Amusement Park

Harlem River Speedway

Cabrini Shrine

Fort Tryon Park

Hudson Fulton celebration postcard, 1909.

Libby Castle

NYU Hall of Fame undated postcard.

NYU Hall of Fame postcard.

Fort Washington postcard by Thaddeus Wilkerson.

Abbey Inn and Fort Tryon by Hagemeister, 1912 postcard.

Fort Washington Point by Thaddeus Wilkerson, 1910 postcard.

Sanctuary of Blessed Frances Cabrini Chapel, Washington Heights, NYC 1941, postcard.

Fort Washington Point postcard.

Fort Washington Point The Palisades postcard.

NYU Hall of Fame, 1903 postcard.

Woodland Path, Ft Washington Park, NY by publisher Sontag, 1908 postcard.

Veterans’ Hospital No. 81, Kingsbridge, 1920′s.

Veterans’ Hospital, Kingsbridge, 1953.

Convent of Jesus Mary, Church Street, Kings Bridge, New York by Charles Buck.

Kingsbridge police station, 40th Precinct, Boston Avenue by Charles Buck.

Abbey Inn and Fort Tryon in 1911 postcard.

Ben Riley’s Arrowhead Inn at West 246th Street postcard,1939.

Broadway looking north from 153rd Street in undated postcard.

Broadway looking south from 162nd street in undated postcard.

Claremont Lounge Postcard from 1907.

Fort Washington Park in undated postcard.

Fort Washington Piont along the Hudson River in 1918 postcard.

Grant’s tomb and Riverside Drive postcard, 1929.

Harlem River at 138th Street in 1908 postcard.

Harlem River in 1909 postcard.

Harlem River Speedway Postcard.

High Bridge and Harlem River postcard, 1906.

High Bridge on the Harlem River Postcard, 1907.

High Bridge on the Harlem River Postcard, 1907.

Moonlight on the Hudson in 1905 postcard.

Morris Heights seen from Fort George in undated postcard.

Sailing on the Harlem River in 1907 postcard.

Washington Bridge in undated postcard.

Washington Bridge postcard, 1907.

Washington Heights postcard showing various sites, 1909.

Polo Grounds, 155th Street and Eighth Avenue postcard, undated.

Polo Grounds postcard,1918.

Polo Grounds postcard,1918.

Polo Grounds, 1942 postcard.

Kingsbridge, Public School Number 7, Charles Buck postcard.

Jumel Mansion, 1905 postcard.

Washington Heights Free Library, 1910 postcard.

Recently, MyInwood.net reader Frank Yannaco wrote in to tell me about the concession stand his family once owned and operated inside the Isham Street entrance to Inwood Hill Park.

Inwood Hill Park Concession stand on the corner of Isham and Seaman in 1977. Louise & Frank Yannaco pictured with merchandise in the background.

We soon began a dialogue that included a promise of photos and descriptions of his life in Inwood.  True to his word, Frank soon emailed me photos and descriptions from Inwood’s not so distant past.  I would like to thank Frank for his valuable contribution and encourage other readers to reach out and do the same.

Yannaco family poses for photo in front of the concession stand in 1977.

“Joe” and Frank Yannaco, 1960

According to Frank, “Joe’s” Concession Stand was located in Inwood Park on Isham Street across the street from Good Shepherd Church. My Family owned the stand from the mid 1920′s when the Presbyterian Medical Center was built.  It was given to my Grandfather James Pupley and his brother Peter by the NYC parks department when they arrived in this country from Greece in the 1900′s. They went to the Parks Department with the idea to sell snacks in the park. His original stand was on the site of the Presbyterian Medical Center. They asked him what park he wanted to relocate to and he chose Inwood Park.

Joe (his real name was Pete) sold candy, soda, hot dogs and ice cream. Frank and Louise, his niece, took it over in 1971 and remained until 1988. It has since been torn down. All the original owners – James, Pete, and Frank and Louise (my parents) have passed away.”

Along with his description of the concession stand, Frank also included this ode to Inwood in the 1950’s penned by his wife, Mary:

Mary Tolfree (Yannaco) and sister Eileen TolfreeSherman Avenue on Easter Sunday, 1957

Inwood in the 1950′s we did not
have a TV much less the Internet.
You got together at friends homes
to watch a show in black & white.
There was not many “networks” or “choices”.
A phone I don’t think so.
The stoop was the meeting place.
Your relatives were down the block
or a bus ride away to the Bronx.

Our Family went to St Jude’s Chapel
on Sundays and said the Rosary
as a family every night.
Our friends waited on the stoop for us
to come down.
{The Bazaar was held for many years
to make money to build the church.
Before that, mass was held in the movie theater.}
Then you were Proud to be a Catholic,
bless yourself in public when
you passed a Church,
and bowed at the name of JESUS.

All the stores were closed on Sunday.

Regina’s Bakery, 1958-Eileen Tolfree

Except for Regina’s Bakery.

The Tolfree kids on Academy Street next to Moe’s Candy Store in 1957 (four of seven children in the family)

My mom Eileen worked there back in the 50′s
In Washington Heights there was a bakery
called Home Made Pastry on 188th
and St. Nicholas Ave. She worked there for years.
On Sunday that was servile work unless
you had to feed your family.

Our family The Tolfrees lived at
584 Academy Street.
We 3 boys and 4 girls have 24 children; with
grandchildren we total around 92 decedents of
Herbert and Eileen Tolfree.

We lived across from Moe’s candy store.
Remember the egg creams and cokes in
the paper cone and metal holder cups.
The stools that spun and Moe.
We lived near the corner and there was
a “Meat Market” at 584.
Outside in the nice weather Pop with his umbrella cart would sell hot dogs and orange drinks.

Mary (right) and her sister Rita  Tolfree on Academy Street looking east down Sherman Avenue

I moved from 584 in 1959.
Went to Saint Jude’s School till
3rd grade 56-59.
Remember 1st grade Sister Mary Magellan
and Miss Scott from kindergarten.
All of my family went to either St. Jude or Good Shepherd.

First Friday Mass at St Jude’s Chapel.
Remember the luncheonette near St Jude.
We would go there for breakfast after
First Friday Mass before returning to school because we had fasted from the night before.
Those were the days.
Navy Uniforms white shirts and beanie hats.
Back then women and girls would wear hats, then scarves, then doilies and then tissues.

Now we don’t wear hats at all!!!

Louise & Frank Yannaco working the concession stand in May, 1977.

Across from Good Shepherd in Inwood park
there was a octagon stand that sold hot dogs, candy and soda.
The man’s name was Joe, so they called him.
His real name was Pete.
He was my husband Frank Yannaco’s uncle.
Then he retired and Frank & Louise
Yannaco took it over.
It was in the family for 40+ years.
They gave up ownership in 1989.
Louise also worked at Miramar pool in the 50′s.
near the pool was a luncheonette on 210 St
and 10th ave.
Frank’s grandfather owned that in the 50′s.

Tolfree Girls at the Academy Meat Market on Sherman and Academy in 1959

Remember the fish store with the live fish.
The Bazaar and Miss Rinegold.
The stoop we sat on and
the gutter we kept out of.
(They had nothing to do with rain.)
Connecting roofs we climbed over.
Fire escapes we use to hang out on.
Both my husband and I were born in
Jewish Memorial hospital.
Re-named in 1936 in honor of the
Jewish Soldiers who died in WWI.

Rita Tolfree on confirmation day, Academy and Sherman, Moe’s Candy Store, 1952

Inwood for me was a real
neighborhood back then.
In the heart of NYC zip code “34?.
Even though I did not know it then.
My neighborhood was special.
The “Super” would wash the floors
every Saturday and polish the brass
handrails and mailboxes.
On Saturday everyone
would clean their house.
Nobody worked on Sunday because
you went to mass and had a special
dinner to prepare for the family.

Neighbors you could turn to by just
yelling out the window or down the alley.
The place many of us yearn for now.
I think Inwood is still that place,
my building is still standing and
I’m sure 50 years later people are still yelling out
the windows to their neighbors….

Finally, before we leave the concession stand, a photo from Herb Maruska, who writes, “This is so wonderful! I never expected to see Joe again! Thank you!
Joe sold Good-O beverages. My parents, suspicious people from Europe, would not allow me to drink them. One day, I picked up several Good-O bottles thrown away in the woods, and I tried to return them to Joe for the deposit money. Joe said, “Hey, I know you kid, you never bought those sodas from me. Get outta here!” He refused to give me the deposit. So I threw the bottles in the trash.”

Joe’s Ice Cream Stand in 1968. Contributed by Herb Maruska who writes, “Notice that the stand was green, not orange and blue.”

Incinerator and sign from Indian Life Reservation, photo by Reginald Pelham Bolton.

In the winter of 1926 Inwood historian and local archeologist Reginald Pelham Bolton began work on a curious and eclectic exercise, the creation of an Indian reservation in Inwood Hill Park.   Bolton’s vision was not to be a true reservation, but rather a recreation of what a Native American encampment might have looked like.

“The Indian Life Reservation,” as Bolton called the site, would provide a tranquil environment where New Yorkers, especially children, could learn about the people who lived in the park hundreds of years before the settlement of Manhattan by the Dutch.

“The Indian Life Reservation” was to be staffed by actual Native Americans, though from different tribes, continents and backgrounds.  These “actors” would play out the lives of the original Lenape inhabitants for all to see.  While on duty the staff would dress, perform pow-wows and even pretend to live the lives of Inwood’s long forgotten aboriginal peoples.

While today the political correctness of such a facility would likely be the subject heated debate, New Yorkers at the time saw no problem with Bolton’s vision.  Turn of the century New Yorkers had watched with curiosity and admiration for decades as Bolton and a team of intrepid volunteers combed the local soil for Native American remains, tools and shell middens.

Inwood dig site, Reginald Bolton seated in pit. (undated)

And so it was, nearly a century ago, under the auspices of the Dyckman Institute, that Bolton began work on what is now just a footnote in New York history.

Later, Bolton would write, “The then Park Commissioner, the Hon. Francis D. Gallatin, welcomed the offer, and appointed the Institute honorary curators of an interesting tract of about 20 acres, which included the historic evidences of aboriginal life.  This he designated the “Indian Life Reservation,” and included therein the Great Tree, the little cottage nearby, and the buildings which house the Inwood Pottery.” (Inwood Hill Park on the Island of Manhattan, Reginald Pelham Bolton, 1932).

Inwood Hill Park, 1932 map by Reginald Pelham Bolton.

Bolton described the backbreaking work necessary to prepare the site “then littered with tons of waste materials, bricks, timber, iron-work, broken glass, ash cans, furniture, parts of automobiles and boats, and bedsprings.”

“Under the direction of the Institute a gang of men dug deep holes in the soft ground in out-of-the-way places and buried these unsightly materials and objects,” Bolton wrote.

The Cottage by the Great Tree, photo by Reginald Pelham Bolton.

For a visitor’s center, Bolton and the Dyckman Institute set up shop in a 120 year old cottage located near the old tulip tree today marked by a large boulder marked with a plaque describing the site.  “When acquired by the city,” Bolton wrote, the cabin “was in a semi-ruinous condition, uninhabitable, and surrounded with a wild tangle of weeds.”

After considerable renovations, Bolton described the improvements.  “The cottage now provides a public room and a spacious porch that can be utilized as a shelter by visitors.  In the public room there is a small library of books of reference, and some cases in which are exhibited objects illustrating aboriginal life found in the park, such as stone implements, flaked points, and many fragments of native pottery.  There is also an exhibit of the pottery made by Aimee Voorhees at the Inwood Pottery, developed by that talented artist from Indian designs and forms.”

“Near the cottage,” Bolton continued, “there is a model of a native Bark Hut, made in cement by Emilio Diaz, chief of the Chibcha Indians of Colombia, whose craftsmanship will be seen in the well-casing and the rock pools in the vicinity of the Cottage.”

Fred Tarzian, who was born in 1917, described the tranquility of the park and the staff of the Dyckman Institute as an oasis from his impoverished home life on 207^th and Seaman.  Among his favorite haunts was the old cottage where he spent many an afternoon reading novels in the Institute’s library.

Marie Noemie Boulerease Constantine Kennedy in Indian dress.

“In the wintertime I loved to go down there in my snowshoes, take my shoes off and put my feet up on the potbellied stove and read books from their early American library.” Tarzian told oral historian Sanford Gaster. “They had a lot of James Fennimore Cooper books which I read and the people who lived there were a Cherokee Indian Princess” named Naomi who lived there with her son; a professional boxer named Billy Kennedy.  (Public Places of Childhood, Sanford Gaster, 1995).

“Sometimes in the late evening when he got home he would put a punching bag out on the trees and he would practice punching the bag.”

And the cottage?

“Well,” said Tarzian, “all you had to do was just walk into the park.  And you couldn’t miss it.  There was a spring nearby.  We would always go down and fill up our cider jugs with water and take it home and everybody that visited us would love to drink from the sparkling clean water.  The spring had fixed above it what looked like a tree trunk, and there was another Indian that lived there, he was from Colombia, his name was Emilio Diaz.  He was like a worker in the park.  In the fall, on Sundays, he would have me clean the paths of fallen leaves and I would earn fifty cents.  He would build what looked like tree trunks in the park, but on one side there would be a large hole.  This was for garbage disposal, and he would burn the garbage in there.  And he made them out of chicken wire and he would plaster and he would stain it a nice brown so it would look like a tree trunk.”

A lifetime later, Fred Tarzian still had fond memories of the Indian Life Reservation and the refuge it provided for him and other depression era children.

Indian festival day in Inwood Hill Park, 1930′s. (Source: Public Places of Childhood, 1915-1930, Sanford Gaster)

“I really enjoyed visiting these Indians.  All my friends, in fact, considered them to be my relatives, and whenever I would go down to visit them; they would say ‘you’re going down to visit your aunt and uncle.’ I loved them.  They were very nice to me, they were humanistic type people.  If you know anything about American Indians, you know they were very humanistic.”

The opening day celebration, May 8, 1926, was, according to oral historian Sanford Gaster, “as much a celebration of the ‘Indian’ as it was of the park, and, far more than was the case with any other park opening in Inwood, children were addressed specifically as beneficiaries of the new facility.  Filling the park that day were not only the usual gathering of city officials and local boosters, but Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Campfire girls; the press estimated that of the thousand spectators present ‘the majority were children, attracted no doubt by the announcement that Indians would be present.”

“Bolton, who ran the day’s program, declared that it was fortunate that so many children were present, since the restoration of the ancient village of the first inhabitants of Manhattan Island was designed, among other things, to show that the American Indian ‘was not always brandishing his tomahawk and twanging his bow and arrow, but that he followed the peaceful pursuits and was of a generous and loyal disposition.”

And with that we turn to a newspaper account on the Indian Life Reservation dated January 21^st, 1926.

New York Sun, January 21, 1926.

Indian Life Reservation
New York Sun
January 21, 1926

City to Have an Indian Village
Building Plans call for Birch Bark Construction in Inwood Park

A village of birch bark through the paths of which Indians will walk as they walked three hundred years ago and more is to be set down within the boundaries of modernity which is Manhattan; watch fires will burn as they burned before the coming of the white man under the shadow of Inwood Hill; moccasins will wear new paths whence ancient ones have vanished.

New York, in other words, is to have an Indian reservation—a re-creation of aboriginal life more complete and more exact than can be found elsewhere in the United States.  Plans for it have been formulated by Reginald Pelham Bolton, consulting engineer and antiquarian, with the cooperation of Francis D. Gallatin, Park Commissioner.

A reproduction of the village of the Unami tribe of the Delaware, who lived in New York between Dyckman street and Spuyten Duyvil and claimed sway as far south as Thirty-fourth, will, under the plan, be constructed in what is known as “Cold Spring Hollow,” which fifty years ago was a tract south of the Spuyten Duyvil Creek and alongside Inwood hill.  The center of the village is to be at approximately what would be the intersection of 215^th street and Thirteenth avenue.

Under the plans of Mr. Bolton, whose excavations on the proposed site of the new village and the established site of the old have proved the existence of this probably earliest of New York settlements, a group of Indians—Delawares or Algonquins—will be hired to live in the village and to guide tourists through it.

Will Have Modern Improvements

These later Algonquins, however, will not be asked to live under the amazingly arduous circumstances which prevailed in other days.  They will be given a modern cottage and modern food, both at sufficient distance to avoid any modernizing of the village itself.  But during the periods when visitors are expected they will be clad precisely as their ancestors were, and will sharpen their stone weapons and perhaps cast their fishing nets as was done in other days.

The village under expert guidance will be reconstructed to accord in every detail with that in which lived the “Wick-quas-keek” (men of the birch bark country).  The huts, with their half cylindrical roofs of bark, will offer the same sort of shelter the Dutch found so many years ago.  The rock shelters will be completed with the same skin and birch bark curtains, and the fires will burn in them on the spots where the marks made hundreds of years ago show that they then were built.

Inwood Hill Park, 1934.

The “Indian life reservation” will be near the center of Inwood Hill Park, title to which was acquired less than a year ago by the city.  Condemnation proceedings are now being pressed.

On the site of the proposed village, the Unami tribe, under the leadership of Chief Ranachatun, was securely ensconced when the Dutch came.  For years they camped beside trade routes and traded—or camped beside trade routes and robbed, depending upon their moods.  They were the first of the New York bandits.

Near them on the Spuyten Duyvil there was a ford—the “wading place.”  It also was called “paparinemin” or “place of a false start,” because the peculiar formation of the creek and the Harlem River led to a duplication of tides, one arriving somewhat behind the other and giving the point four tides a day.  Through this ford all the trade routes went, one branching then north to Dobbs Ferry—where the chief sachem of the nation dwelt—another east to Pelham and a third south into the Bronx.

Had an Oyster Bar

The tribe conducted, it is thought, the first oyster bar, selling oysters, of which they gathered in great profusion, to other tribes which had better hunting.  Hunting, even in those days, was not as good on Manhattan Island as it had been.  There were not even bulls and bears.  But there were many fish, including sturgeon, and oysters for whoever would gather.

The remains of oyster feasts can still be found in “shell pits,” where the Indians were wont to throw shells, used safety razor blades and whatnot.

The Indians lived largely upon beans and corn, besides their shellfish.  These modern representatives will be given a more varied diet.  They shaved their heads, so that only a ridge of upstanding hair ran from forehead to neck, thereby giving themselves a most startlingly ferocious aspect.  They dressed in skins, and their costumes will be copied in the new village.

Mr. Bolton, who is a member of the New York Historical Society, the Museum of Natural History, the City Historical Club and many similar organizations, and the author of several books, has been excavating in the vicinity for more than fifteen years, finding skeletons, cooking vessels and other traces of this vanished village, in which lived the first families of New York before the tribe moved out under pressure of the Dutch in 1715.

An automobile park for the benefit off visitors is planned on 207^th street.  So modernity will be served.

Isham Gardens Advertisement, New York Evening Post, 1924

Between Seaman Avenue & Park Terrace West

Designed in 1924 by the architectural team of Springsteen and Goldhammer, Isham Gardens was the brainchild of builder Conrad Glaser. Glaser envisioned an uptown utopia where middle class New Yorkers could live amidst a resort like atmosphere.

And, Springsteen and Goldhammer were up to the task. They designed a romantic Italianate manor with sweeping views of Isham Park.

Wall Street Journal announcement for Isham Gardens dated Aug. 30, 1924

The consummate salesman, Glaser began a relentless advertising campaign where he espoused the clean air and vacation-like qualities of Isham Gardens.

A 1924 advertisement published in the New York Times promised a doctor, dentist, valet, barber, beauty salon and taxi stand all on premises. In a March 26, 1924 article printed in the New York Evening Post, Glaser also boasted that his 1,500 perspective tenants would also enjoy a ballroom, billiard room, roof garden and even a swimming pool.

Where Glaser intended to find room for all these amenities, which included a band-shell for hosting twice weekly concerts during the summer months, remains a mystery.  Glaser’s pitch also included an observation tower so that all residents could take in the majesty of the Hudson River and the Jersey Palisades.

A Times article dated August 16, 1924 described Isham Gardens as it neared completion:

“The Isham Garden Apartments, located in the heart of Isham Park and overlooking the Hudson River and Spuyten Duyvl inlet, is nearing completion and will be ready for occupancy Oct. 1. The first unit of the project will contain 191 apartments with a total of 425 apartments ready by May 1, 1925.  The entire group of buildings face along 214th Street and cover the blocks bounded by Park Terrace East, Park Terrace West, Seaman Avenue and Indian Road.

Isham Gardens is but one block from the beautiful Baker Oval, Columbia University’s athletic field, 304 feet from Spuyten Duyvil inlet, immediately adjoining the New York Park Department nurseries, several blocks from Inwood Park, which is to be enlarged by 111 acres of land the city is buying this Fall, and but three streets from Inwood’s shopping centre.

Each apartment of Isham Gardens overlooks a  strip of public property.  This was made possible by Conrad Glaser, owner of the project, having purchased half of the Isham estate. The Isham famly bought the land over 200 years ago and several years back presented the city with Isham Park and the balance of the land was sold to the present owner.

The apartments contain twin, three, four and five rooms with all the latest improvements.  Some of the features of Isham Gardens is the radio equipment installed on the roof for the use of the tenants in hooking up their sets; a large, beautiful ballroom for social activities of the new community, four tennis and handball courts, free to the tenants and their friends, and boating on the Hudson.”

Sadly, Glaser’s utopia did not include elevator service.

An early photo of Isham Gardens shows a gatehouse/rental office and a bus offering free rides up the hill from Broadway.

Isham Gardens, New York Evening Post, Sept. 20, 1924

And while the reality of Isham Gardens modern amenities didn’t last long, Glaser’s skills as a pitchman helped jumpstart a real estate boom in the neighborhood that continues to this day.

Isham Gardens, Buffalo Morning Express, May 4, 1925

Isham Gardens today

Mrs. Addison J. Rothermel, New York Herald, January 24, 1909.

Near the beginning of the last century, Mrs. Addison J. Rothermel faced both an agonizing loss and a difficult decision.  Tuberculosis had taken her husband and doctors warned that her two teenage boys, Addison Jr.  and Royale Valray, might also succumb to the “white plague” if they continued to live in the cramped and unventilated apartments of the day.

But where to find fresh air in an overpopulated metropolis?

In 1908, the widow Rothermel, and her two boys, took their doctor’s prescription for an outdoor existence quite literally and began living aboard the houseboat “Valray;” which they docked off Dyckman Street on the Harlem River—just a short walk from the newly constructed and elevated subway station.

It was there, among the squatters, construction workers and other house-boaters that the Rothermels found a home.  Interestingly, the move likely had the most profound impact on young Addison Jr., who perhaps stumbled upon a film set somewhere not far from his floating abode.

A film set?

While hard to imagine, some of the earliest known commercial films were shot in the then mostly undeveloped countryside of the Dyckman Valley.  Not only were there movie lots on Broadway, where some of the first silent films were shot, but Inwood Hill also served as a backdrop for many a western scene.

Universal’s first outdoor studio, established in 1909 at Dyckman Street. In this studio the late Wally Reid began his moving picture career as a prop boy and was converted into an actor by Otis Turner, manager of the studio. Others who worked here for Universal were Herbert Brennon, King Baggot, Tom Ince, Mary Pickford, Ben Turpin and the late George Loane Tucker. (UPI stock photo)

While the uptown film scene lasted no more than a couple of years, (they later relocated to Fort Lee, New Jersey and then Hollywood) the timing was just right for Addison Jr. to be discovered.

Thomas Edison examining film in 1912.

In 1912, Addison, was cast in the role of young Jimmy Hawkins in the first screen adaptation of Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The one-reel silent film, commissioned by Thomas Edison, was shot in Bermuda and was directed by J. Searle Dawley.

According to newspaper clippings, the entire family made the voyage to the far flung tropical isle for production of  Stevenson’s  classic tale of “buccaneers and buried gold.”

It is likely no coincidence that Addison was chosen for the part.  After all, he was well suited to the role, having practically grown up on a boat himself.

The New York Dramatic Mirror, June 12, 1912.

What a thrill the trip must have been for the two teenagers.  The exotic sandy beaches, new technology and and the hunt for hidden treasure in a fantastic world of make believe.  Truly a far cry from their happy, but dank existence, on the Harlem River.

Treasure Island review, Hartford Courant May 10, 1912.

New York Times, April 14, 1912.

Unfortunately, no known prints of the film survive.

But that was 1912.

Now let’s travel back to 1909, when the socialite widow and her two sons had just settled in on the houseboat Valray; unaware of the adventures that lay ahead.

New York Herald, January 24, 1909.

New York Herald
January 24, 1909
MOTHER WINTERS ON HOUSEBOAT TO SAVE SONS
Mrs. A. J. Rothermel Makes Home in Little Craft Anchored at Foot of Dyckman Street; Happy Because Two Boys’ Cheeks Grow Rosy

Fearing for the lives of her two sons, whose father died last spring from pulmonary affections, Mrs. A. J. Rothermel, formerly of No. 208 West Eighty-third street, is passing the winter with them in a houseboat near the foot of Dyckman street.

Warned by physicians, soon after her husband’s death, there was grave danger of her boys Royale and Addison, in their late teens, developing tuberculosis unless given a practically outdoor life.  Mrs. Rothermel followed her counselors’ advice.  A houseboat was purchased and on it the trio passed the summer in the pleasant environs of Echo Bay, near New Rochelle.  Both of the boys constantly gained in health, to their mother’s great relief.  But the prospect of this winter returning to a city apartment and thus providing chance for a fresh attack from the lurking enemy was a dark cloud of worry which kept Mrs. Rothermel in perpetual torment. Finally she decided to remain with her sons throughout the winter on their floating home, the Valray.

The Houseboat Valray, New York Herald, January 24, 1909.

The craft, which is a stanch little affair some twelve feet wide and about thrice that size in length, was towed late in the Autumn to Sherman’s Inlet—a calm little sheet of water near the foot of Dyckman street and convenient to the subway.  This location appeared particularly suitable to the “Cap’n,” as the boys admiringly call their mother.  Opportunity was thus offered for Royale to be near the New York University and easily go to that institution, where he is taking a course preparatory to entering  medical school.  Addison, too, could quickly reach the Dyckman street station of the subway,  the route leading close to a studio in the centre of the city where he is pursuing his studies in art.

Soon after the reestablishment of her floating home Mrs. Rothermel set about to put it in snug shape, the better to withstand the rigors of a climate which would become pronounced ere the arrival of spring.  Two huge “mushroom” anchors fastened to stout wire cables attached to each end of the Valray provided swaying but secure foundation.  A substantial passageway formed of oaken planks and iron railings was nailed to the forward deck of the boat and the dock, some thirty feet distant.  Bunkers, each large enough to hold a quarter of a ton of coal, where fitted on the deck,  and beneath it a capacious reservoir to hold two hundred and fifty gallons of water was built.  Pipes leading from this convey the water to a cozy kitchenette installed in the other end of the boat.

In this tabloid kitchen was placed a serviceable cook stove, about three feet square, with stubby pipe protruding through the roof.  Thick carpets were placed on the floors of the two cabins, which comprise the living apartments of the “sailors;” an oil heater and trio of kerosene lamps furnished light and extra heat.  Arrangements were made with a milk company to have their distributor on a nearby route leave there each morning the day’s supply, and a news dealer at the Dyckman street station of the subway was willing to deliver the morning papers.

So the life started in.  To the delight of her numerous friends, among them many of the women prominent in several clubs, especially the Minerva and Euterpe, this pioneer in winter house boating has proved capable in cooping with every dilemma presented.  Moreover, Mrs. Rothermel declares herself quite contented in her semi-isolation.  With praiseworthy energy the “Cap’n,” who for the sake of her son’s health has adopted this quasi-nautical life, has arranged very cheery quarters.  One of the cabins is decorated in soft greens, while the other is done in attractive blues.  The oblong windows, six of them, furnish light during the day and ample ventilation at night.  All are adorned with dainty little curtains of silk, and arranged on the ledge of each are pots of fragrant primroses, which give added color to the cabins.  The ceilings of this “house” are an ample seven feet from the floor and are painted a pleasing white.

Valray interior, New York Herald, January 24, 1909.

Pictures, not too many, are arranged artistically on the covered walls.  Two mission style chairs, with a library table in the same type, also a box couch, which is used as a divan by day and the “Cap’n’s” sleeping quarters at night, complete the furnishings of cabin A.  In the boys’ cabin aft is swung a large ship’s hammock, which, they say, “makes a dandy bed.” Besides this there are a table, a chiffonier, corner wardrobes and two chairs.  The kitchenette, or course, is the particular pride of Mrs. Rothermel, who keeps it in tidy and shining condition.  Two steps leading from the boys’ cabin to this niche, for it’s really no more than that, have hinged steps.  Beneath, if you please, is a little “grocery store,” where the flour, sugar and other requisites of cookery are stored.

Royale Valray Rothermel in 1919 passport application.

The rule of fresh air, and plenty of it,  obtains in the ventilation of the Valray, and the boys are thriving upon the abundance afforded.  Royale’s health has consistently improved and he has gained nearly twenty pounds in weight.  This is considered especially satisfactory, for he was the one exhibiting last spring the greater tendency toward pulmonary affectation.  Addison, too, is apparently in the best of health, as is attested by his fast rounding cheeks and sprightliness of step.

“I wouldn’t go back to apartment house life for any consideration,” said Mrs. Rothermel the other morning.  “With my boys progressing so nicely in their fight for health all little inconveniences I undergo count as nothing.

“I surely believe this ‘near’  out of  doors life has all the medicine which physicians prescribe easily distanced.  I am so delighted with the success of my experiment that I hope every mother whose children give evidences of weak lungs will follow the same course.  The expense is not so great, either.  The boat is ample enough for three persons to occupy it in perfect comfort; if necessary more could be accommodated.

“Unfurnished, the Valray cost me in the neighborhood of one thousand dollars, and the man I purchased it from has since tried to buy it back at an advance of $300.  But the Valray and the Rothermels will not part.  The life is delightful.  It costs no more to eat here than in an apartment.  I do all my buying in the city, and of course get the regular delivery service. Then the rent question is beautifully solved.  I am charged $5 a month for tying at this dock and added is the use of storage room for trunks in a building near by.  A few minutes’ walk takes one to the subway.  Indeed, I am an enthusiast concerning the winter houseboat life.  Best of all is the certainty which fills my heart with joy that my sons will escape the dread ‘white plague’ which killed my husband.”

Every Halloween ghosts and goblins haunt the streets, parks and apartment buildings of Inwood–just as they have for hundreds of years.

It is a spooky place where the spirit of a long dead magician might bump into the specter of a headless Hessian, where a Dutch trumpeter fights with the devil himself and cries from disturbed graves are heard by the living.

This October, the most frightening month of the year, MyInwood presents several scary tales from the past.

Cemeteries of Yesteryear It’s hard to imagine an Inwood with mansions on the hill, a dirt road below, and just east of that cemeteries….yep….Cemeteries.
Hundreds of years of even sparse population generated numerous graves. In some lay the long forgotten members of once famous families. In other plots,the fallen dead of the Revolutionary War; even Indians.

Houdini’s Ghost Every Halloween, the anniversary of Harry Houdini’s death, his widow Bess held a seance.
This Halloween, listen to a recording of the final 1936 seance and discover The Houdini Inwood Connection.  Would you believe Bess Houdini lived right here on Payson Avenue?

A Turn of the Century School for the Occult Occultism was all the rage near the turn of the century. Join us as we explore the fascinating and macabre world of Ernest Loomis and his Inwood School of Philosophy. It is a bone chilling ride into another dimension.   His book, “Practical Occultism,” was published here in Inwood near the turn of the century.

The Inwood House of Mercy Finally, choose a cell in Inwood’s haunted old House of Mercy. The institution had a past so dark and scary that the ghosts of its former residents haunt Inwood Hill Park to this very day.