In 1840 a Scotch Irish builder by the name of Samuel Thomson bought a huge tract of woodland on the northern end of Manhattan.  Thomson christened his new estate “Mount Washington” in honor of what had been a Revolutionary War outpost.  On the property, today known as Inwood Hill, Thomson and his wife Ann, would build a magnificent home in which they would raise ten children.

Samuel Thomson, unknown artist, NYHS.

Samuel Thomson

Samuel Boyd Thomson was born in Baltimore, Maryland on June 15, 1784.  As a youth Thomson apprenticed in a tannery, but quickly grew bored with the work.  An uncle named James Thomson would later take young Samuel under his wing and teach him the carpentry trade.  In 1804 Thomson moved to New York where he would earn a reputation as a first rate builder.

A deeply religious man, Thomson would devote much of his labors to constructing houses of worship for the Presbyterian Church.

In building circles he was best known for his unfinished work on the Custom House, also known as Federal Hall.  After a famous dispute with his superiors Thomson walked off the job after completing only the lower level.    He took all his plans with him forcing his replacement to start from scratch.

Mrs. Samuel Thomson, unknown artist, NYHS.

On February 2, 1807 Thomson was married to Ann Strean, a distant relative of his mother, by the Rev. Dr. Samuel Rudd, at Elizabethtown (now Elizabeth) New Jersey.

“During the War of 1812,” wrote a descendant,  “Mr. Thomson served as lieutenant in the 3^rd New York Volunteer Heavy Artillery. The regiment was stationed at Fort Gansevoort, on the banks of the Hudson River near the present foot of 14^th Street.  As the British did not come to New York during the war, the regiment was never in battle.” (Notes on Samuel Thomson written by Clement Rutter Thomson, New York, in March of 1881.)

Thomson also served as an early director of the Merchants Exchange Bank and was involved in the establishment of the New York Life and Trust Company in which he was a trustee until his death in 1850.

Mount Washington

Mount Washington residence of Samuel Thomson, by William S. Jewett 1847, MCNY.

“In 1835,” according to a family history,  “he removed his family to that most northern point of the present city limits, now known as Riverdale, on the banks of the Hudson River, got a temporary residence; whence in 1840, he removed about two miles below, purchasing a lofty wooded tract of land immediately south of Spuyten Duyvil Creek, called “Tubby Hook” but Thomson changed the name to Mount Washington.  The purchase consisted of eighty odd acres, and was thickly covered not only with the native forest growth but also with gigantic rocks innumerable and had never known a plough or the habitation of men, with the exception of the temporary occupation of its northernmost point in 1776, by a small detachment of Americans to defend a redoubt placed there called “Cock Hill Fort.”  Mr. Thomson, built a large house, laid out walks and otherwise beautified the place. 

Samuel Thomson house fire New York Morning Herald, September 7, 1840.

The family had just taken up their residence in the new house when it was found that the roof leaked.  Atin Smith was sent for.  He carelessly left the furnace full of glowing coals on a beam while he went for dinner.  On his return he found that the beam had caught fire, but if water had been applied promptly, no great damage would have been done, but the man being dilatory, the consequence was that the house and most of its contents were destroyed.  The ashes hardly had time to cool when a new house was in the process of construction. 

It is related that the man, frightened at the consequence of his carelessness, went to Mr. Thomson and begged him to intercede for him with his employer.  He was told, without the slightest shade of anger in voice or manner, “If you do not fear to meet me you need not fear your employer.” (Notes on Samuel Thomson written by Clement Rutter Thomson, New York, in March of 1881.)

Building a Church

As construction on his new home was underway, Thomson would often pass his neighbors working the fields of the then rural area while on his way to worship.

Mount Washington Church, Daily Graphic April 21, 1885.

The nearest Presbyterian Church was some four miles away and, being a man of means, the handsome builder set to work building a beautiful wooden chapel for the benefit of his Godless neighbors.

Interior of the Mount Washington Presbyterian Church in 1928, MCNY.

Mount Washington Church on early 1900′s map.

The Mount Washington Presbyterian Church, which once stood on Thomson’s property at the current confluence of Dyckman Street, Broadway and Riverside Drive, held its first service on August 18, 1844.  The sermon was devoted to the Biblical passage, “Who hath despised the day of small things.” (Zechariah 4:10)

Inwood In 1844

Thomson Estate, New York World, December 26, 1886.

In 1844 Inwood, or Tubby Hook, as the region was commonly referred to until the 1850’s, was a rural outpost of the city to where folks from downtown rarely ventured.

“A stage then ran from the Battery to Harlem,” wrote a church historian, “and people wishing to reach Tubby Hook had to walk from that point, or to ride on their own conveyances.”

“Thick woods covered all this upper part of the island,” the writer continued.  “A lovely country road wound about the heights above the Hudson and through the dales and copses of the historic grounds near Fort Washington.  No more beautiful drive could be found than that along the old Bloomingdale Road… It was affirmed that it would require centuries for the city to cover such a vast territory.” (The Story of Mount Washington, 1844-1932, Published by the Mount Washington Presbyterian Church, 84 Vermilyea Avenue, New York City)

A Glimpse of Mount Washington

In March of 1834 twenty-two year old Walter Carter, whose older brother Robert had married Thomson’s eldest daughter, Jane, came to New York after being extended an offer of employment working alongside his sibling.

Walter Carter was immediately impressed by the family patriarch and was eventually invited to visit the family compound.

“One day in May,” Carter recalled, “he invited me to visit his family and home at Mount Washington, and my heart rejoiced.  The Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway), in that day was the loveliest drive near the city; at that time it began at Madison Square, and as a good macadamized road, extended twelve miles to Kingsbridge, a lovely, shady road all the way.   As at the time the Third Avenue and the Boston Post Road were the only avenues to the end of the Island, it was full of carriages and horsemen.  With Mr. Thomson’s company, the ride was a rare treat.  He called my attention at 65^th Street that the little Dutch Reformed Church was the only Evangelical Church from there to Yonkers on that road.  As we entered his gate at the road, we seemed to leave the world behind us, as it was one-half mile though the primeval forest to his residence.  As we wound slowly up the hill, the view at the top, down over New York Bay and Staten Island, and up the river to the Highlands of the Hudson, amply repaid the fatigue of climbing.  I was cordially received by the family and felt at home at once and ever afterwards.  In the morning I rose early and rambled through the woods an in the lovely garden.  As I passed an open window I saw Mr. Thomson with his large Bible in his hands and his face beaming with delight, as he drank in the promises and rested on the Word of God.” (The Story of Mount Washington, 1844-1932, Published by the Mount Washington Presbyterian Church, 84 Vermilyea Avenue, New York City)

A Name Fades Away

Samuel Thompson, (Source: The Story of Mount Washington, 1844-1932, Published by the Mount Washington Presbyterian Church, 84 Vermilyea Avenue, New York City)

When Samuel Thomson died of apoplexy, inside his residence on June 10, 1850 at the age of sixty-six, all ten of his children were at his bedside.

“The closing scene,” wrote a church biographer,  “was truly touching.  On the morning of the day of his death, unfavorable symptoms showed themselves, all the members of his family gathered around his bedside.  About nine o’clock he inquired, ‘Were they all here?’  He was answered in the affirmative.  Again he asked ‘How many?’  He was told ten.  ‘It is right,’ he said.  ‘I love them all.’”  (The Presbyterian, June 22, 1850)

Samuel Thomson’s grave in Rhinebeck Cemetery, New York, Dutchess County.

The family would soon sell the home and by 1856 the name “Inwood” would replace “Mount Washington” in church records and descriptions of the region.

Samuel Thomson’s Legacy

Old Mount Washington Church (The Story of Mount Washington, 1844-1932, Published by the Mount Washington Presbyterian Church, 84 Vermilyea Avenue, New York City)

In 1927 Thomson’s little church in the valley was condemned to make room for subway construction.

New Mount Washington Presbyterian Church, 84 Vermilyea Avenue.

The original church was demolished and a new house of worship was constructed on 84 Vermilyea Avenue near 204^th Street.

And, while Thomson’s “Mount Washington” home since vanished, the woods of Inwood Hill have changed little since this founding father occupied his home on the ridge.

Thomson’s Buildings

Thomson’s churches, like the one in Inwood, were made of wood and one by one vanished from the cityscape.  One, however, did manage to survive.

Portico Place, 143 West 13th Street, designed by Samuel Thomson, MCNY.

Thomson’s Mount Washington residence, New York World, December 26, 1886.

Portico Place, located at 143 West 13^th Street in Greenwich Village, is a former Presbyterian Church built by Thomson in 1846.  The Greek Revival style structure, which was converted into condominiums in 1982, is the spitting image of Thomson’s former Mount Washington home.

Dry goods store of Robert Veitch. Once located on Dyckman Street just west of Broadway. From turn of the century penny postcard by Robert Veitch.

Sometime in the mid-1800′s grocer Robert Veitch opened a general store beside the railroad tracks in a sparsely inhabited region of northern Manhattan known then as Tubby Hook.

Veitch’s dry goods store would become the center of commerce, news and gossip in the little hamlet now known as Inwood.

1867 map show store in original location by the railroad tracks along the Hudson River.

The imposing brick building that housed Veitch’s wares originally stood near the far western end of Dyckman Street (called Inwood Street through the late 1800′s).

Veitch railroad postcard, circa 1907.

The location, opposite the railroad depot, would serve Veitch well through the turn of the century.

Realizing the arrival of the subway was imminent; Veitch had the foresight to move his business east, near Broadway, to be closer to the development that would surely follow.

But Veitch didn’t just switch locations; he took the decades old brick edifice along for the ride.

The move was a Herculean task involving horses and well muscled help who literally dragged the massive structure east where it was laid to rest near Broadway beside the Mount Washington Church.

1913 map shows location of store after move east towards Broadway.

In those early years of Inwood’s development Robert Veitch was a tireless civic-minded servant and neighborhood booster. In addition to selling dry goods, his shop would double as the local post office. He was a generous benefactor of the Dyckman Free Library and local school, P.S. 52.

While utterly dedicated to his Inwood neighbors, running the shop and tending to his growing family, Veitch somehow found time to indulge in his true passion—photography.

Over several decades, beginning in the 1880’s, Veitch would capture stunning images of his neighborhood.

Dyckman Street looking west in Veitch postcard.

Dyckman Street subway station from Veitch postcard.

Tubby Hook swimming hole (now the site of La Marina) in Veitch postcard.

Veitch turned many of the recognizable images into penny postcards, which he would sell from his Dyckman Street store.

The more personal photos—the church socials, street scenes and family shots—were tucked into a suitcase where they might have been lost forever.

If not for a recent discovery.

Nearly a century after Veitch snapped his last photo his great-great grandson, Jason Covert, began to explore the collection.

Jason Covert: Great-great grandson of Inwood photographer Robert Veitch.

A photographer and graphic artist himself, Covert immediately realized he had inherited a collection of great historic significance.

According to Covert, “In 2004 I was approached by my mother and handed a small leather case, worn but sturdy, containing more than 100 antique glass negatives, taken by my great-great-grandfather.

I was instantly taken aback; not just by the uniqueness of these negatives, but by the fact that I was being handed a never-before-seen (outside of a few family members) chronicle of New York City history, and one that just happened to double as a 100+ year-old family album. ‘Maybe you can do something with this,’ my mother remarked.”

In the video that follows, Covert takes us inside the collection of Inwood founding father Robert Veitch.

Info on Jason Covert and His show, “The Bridge.”

Old Veitch grocery captured in the background of a photo taken in the 1950′s. From the collection of Evelyn Strobel Ruggiero

4930 Broadway: Southeast corner of 207th Street and Broadway.

Recently, a neighbor asked me to research the southeast corner of Broadway and 207th Street (4930 Broadway).   She was curious what businesses had occupied the corner through the years.

Unsure, I posed the question to some longtime Inwood residents via social media.  The responses were so chock full of history that I’ve decided to post the findings MyInwood.net.

Undated photo by William Davis Hassler shows West 207th Street between Vermilyea Avenue and Broadway, New York City- stationers, tobacconist, notary, Borden’s storefront and horse-drawn cart visible. Third shot in a 3-part panorama. Probably taken from Hassler’s apartment at 150 Vermilyea Avenue.

The storefront, most recently occupied by a Mexican restaurant called La Piñata, has a rich history. The above photograph by William Davis Hassler, who once lived on Vermilyea Avenue, shows that the building was one of the first commercial structures built in the then fledgling neighborhood.

Arras Inn, 1910, Source: MCNY.

Arras Inn, 1910, Source: MCNY.

As early as 1910, as evidenced in the above photo, the corner was home to a restaurant called the Arras Inn.  The Arras Inn began as a place to grab a drink and a meal.  They were best known for their seafood—particularly their lobster.

Arras Inn ad NY Evening Telegram July 1913.

Arras Inn interior from vintage postcard.

The restaurant would go on to become a notorious speakeasy during Prohibition.

By 1919 the Arras Inn would share its space with a Chevrolet dealership.

Southeast corner 207th Street and Broadway, 1926, NYHS.

4930 Broadway in 1925, NYHS.

4930 Broadway in 1926, NYHS.

Photos taken between 1925 and 1926 show the B.F. Curry Chevrolet dealership the corner storefront on 207^th Street and Broadway.

In the 1950’s through the early 1960’s local residents say the corner was home to a tobacco shop— which sold cigars, pipes and pipe tobacco blends, lighters, newspapers, paperbacks and magazines.

Photo of 4930 Broadway Courtesy of Helen Oppenheimer Katz.

From the mid-1960’s through the 1980’s the space housed a hosiery shop called Value Hosiery.

Southeast corner 207th and Broadway in 2011.

Southeast corner 207th and Broadway in 2011.

Over the last two decades it has housed a Tropical Chicken restaurant, which specialized in “roasted” chicken, a  Dunkin Donuts, a steam-table seafood establishment called Marisco Express, another fish joint called Boca Chica, a coffee shop called Cafe Espresso and most recently La Piñata, a Mexican restaurant.

If you have a memory or old photo of this location that you’d like to share, please write in.  

Inwood Hill Park

Inwood Hill is a 196-acre park located on the northern tip of Manhattan.  The words “wild” and “untamed” are often used to describe the meandering trails, caves, cliffs and otherworldly geological formations that together make Inwood Hill so unique.

Turn of the Century view of Inwood Hill and the Palisades from the Isham Estate, NYHS.

Inwood Hill and Henry Hudson bridge in 2014

The history of Inwood Hill, like that of the surrounding city, is equally fascinating and can be broken down into several periods:

• The Native, or pre-history, of Inwood Hill.
• Colonial village and Revolutionary War outpost.
• The age of the merchant class where grand estates lined the ridge.
• The era of institutions and asylums.
• Finally, the creation of Inwood Hill Park and on into the present.

Below you’ll find a rough timeline of a park many tourists will never see.  An ancient, magical place seemingly removed from modern Manhattan.

The Indian caves on Manhattan, from New York walk book : Suggestions for excursions afoot within a radius of fifty to one hundred miles of the city, 1923.

Pre-1609: Native Lenape use the current park site as a seasonal camp.  One of the oldest of the Algonquin cultures, they were known as “The Ancient Ones.”

Today visitors to the park can view caves once used by the Lenape.  Oyster shells from long forgotten Native feasts can be found under foot throughout the park.

Depiction of Henry Hudson’s voyage from 1929 print, NYPL.

1609: Explorer Henry Hudson passes Inwood Hill while travelling up the Hudson River. (While Hudson’s name has long been associated with the area, Verrazano likely sailed past Inwood Hill in 1524)

1626:  Peter Minuit allegedly purchases the island of Manhattan from the Lenape for a handful of trinkets.  Today a bronze plaque affixed to a large rock marks the site of the transaction.

1686:  During an organized hunt early settlers exterminate the local wolf population. (Reginald Pelham Bolton, 1924)

1715:  The last Native Americans to inhabit Inwood Hill “were induced to abandon the place.”  (Inwood Hill Park on the Island of Manhattan, Reginald Pelham Bolton, 1934)

November 1776-1783:  British and Hessian troops occupy Inwood Hill during the Revolutionary War.  Today all that remains of Cock Fort Hill is a rocky outcropping on the north summit of the ridge where cannon were once trained to the north and east.

Mount Washington residence of Samuel Thomson, by William S. Jewett 1847, MCNY.

1840:  Builder Samuel Thomson purchases eighty odd acres of land compromising the bulk of site we know as Inwood Hill.  Thomson names the hill “Mount Washington.”  The greater region was more commonly referred to as “Tubby Hook.”

Railroad bridge on Hudson and Spuyten Duyvil, January, 2009.

Spuyten Duyvil Railroad bridge from old advertisement.

1848:  Railroad bridge is built over the Spuyten Duyvil.  Members of the downtown merchant class begin to build summer residences in the newly accessible area.

“Cotton King” Frederick Talcott, dry goods magnate James McCreery, Macy’s co-founder Isidor Straus, Brooks Brother Elisha Brooks and others build grand homes on the hill.

Late 1840’s:  The name of the region, formerly known as “Tubby Hook,” is changed to Inwood.

According to an account published by C. Benjamin Richardson in 1864 the railroads inexplicably changed the sign at the local crossing. “The eye of the traveler on the Hudson River Rail Road is occasionally attracted by a new sign board at a station, and his ear by a new call by the conductor. The latest transportation is that of time-honored but unromantic, ‘Tubby Hook’ into ‘Inwood.’ Now ‘Inwood’ is a much prettier name…but it is not likely there ever was or would be another ‘Tubby Hook.’”

Many early sources also refer to the area as “Inwood on Hudson.”

1871:  Train service is rerouted around the Spuyten Duyvil and down the Harlem River line leaving property owners cut off from downtown Manhattan.  Members of New York’s merchant class abandon their summer residences.

In the absence of wealthy residents, Inwood Hill is given over to institutions and asylums.  For decades it remains a bleak and desolate place of incarceration and suffering.

1880: Inwood chosen to host the 1883 World’s Fair.  The plan was later abandoned.

“Indian caves” in Inwood Hill Park.

1890: Alexander Crawford Chenoweth discovers “Indian caves” not far from his Inwood home.  Exploration of the caves unearths countless Native American artifacts.

House of Mercy in 1932 photo.

1891:  Bishop Henry Codman Potter consecrates the Inwood House of Mercy on the ridge of Inwood Hill.  This imposing home for wayward girls is the first of three institutions to open in what will later become Inwood Hill Park.

1891: Workers widening the Harlem River Ship Canal find the remains of a Mastodon.   According to one account, “While laborers were working in the Harlem Canal, near Dyckman’s Creek, King’s Bridge, recently, they uncovered a mastodon’s tusk.  Assistant Engineer Doerflinger had it removed with great care, and it was found to be in a great state of preservation. It was four feet long and six inches in diameter at the larger end.  The tusk was sent to the curator of the geological department of the Museum of Natural History, New York.” (The Highland Democrat, December 19, 1891)

Harlem Ship Canal under construction, photo by Gilman S. Stanton, circa 1893.

June 17, 1895: The Harlem Ship Canal opens for marine traffic after decades of construction.  The new canal, which connects the Harlem and Hudson Rivers, drastically alters the landscape—replacing a stream so shallow that it was referred to as the “wading place” by the Lenape.

1895: Andrew Haswell Green, the “Father of Greater New York,” makes a public plea that Inwood Hill should be acquired by the City for use as a park.

House of Rest for Consumptives, 1910 postcard.

1903: The House of Rest for Consumptives opens on Inwood Hill.  Local residents opposed the establishment of a home for tuberculosis patients in their own backyard.

Magdalen Society depicted in a penny postcard.

1907: The Magdalen Asylum, a home for wayward girls, opens on the southern end of the park bordering Dyckman Street.

The institution is closed in 1920 after several of the girls succumb to mercury poisoning during treatments to cure venereal diseases.  The building will later house the Jewish Memorial Hospital.

1909: Educator and philanthropist Thomas Davidson opens a camp for immigrants on Inwood Hill.  His foundation, the Educational Alliance, focuses on educating young Jewish immigrants, teaching them the nuances of “American English,” and ultimately providing them with college educations so they, in turn, would be in a position to help their own people.

1910: The American Scenic and Historical Society fights to preserve Inwood Hill for park purposes.  This after the City spent six years and $30,000 surveying the area in preparation for laying out streets.

1912 Isham Park opening celebration poster.

1912: Nearby Isham Park opens after generous gift of land from the Isham family.

1912: New York based motion picture syndicates use Inwood Hill as a backdrop for silent western films.  One news account describes the production of “Wild West” pictures “by the score” being shot on Inwood Hill. (New York Herald, July 21, 1912)

Film production will quickly move to Fort Lee, NJ before relocating to Hollywood.

Inwood Hill amphitheatre proposal, New York Herald, May 17, 1914.

1914: An open air amphitheatre is proposed for the northeastern slope of Inwood Hill. Think the Central Park Summerstage on a much grander scale, with bleachers lining the hill creating a Coliseum-like view.

Mission of the Redeemer, Isham Street and Seaman Avenue, New York City, September 5, 1915, NYHS.

1915: (Date approximated) Mission of the Redeemer Church begins services inside the current Inwood Hill Park near the intersection of Seaman Avenue and Isham Street. In 1927 the church merges with Holy Trinity Episcopal Church currently located on 20 Cumming Street.

Inwood Hill Park opens, New York Times, May 9, 1926.

Opening ceremonies of Inwood Hill Park, collection of Cole Thompson.

May 8, 1926:  Inwood Hill Park officially opens. Native Americans participate in the opening ceremonies attended by more than 1,000 New Yorkers.  Newspapers noted that the majority of the spectators were children.

All told the City spends slightly over five million dollars on the land acquired from property owners and condemnation proceedings.

Indian Life Reservation, New York Sun, January 21, 1926.

1926: The “Indian Life Reservation” is created inside the newly opened park.

Native Americans who staffed the “reservation” came from different tribes, continents and backgrounds and played out the lives of the original Lenape inhabitants for a curious public.

The western side of Inwood Hill Park along the Hudson River is made of landfill.

Western side of Inwood Hill park along the Hudson River–created using landfill in 1928.

1928: Workers, using landfill, create 9 ½ new acres of park space along the Hudson River side of Inwood Hill Park.

According to a 1928 Parks Department report,  “Filling operations are now under way in Inwood Hill Park along the Hudson River waterfront, extending north from Dyckman Street to about the center line of 212^th Street, approximately 1400 feet in length.  The fill is to extend to the U.S. bulkhead line, which is about 185 feet west of the right-of-way line of the New York Central Railroad.  An approximate area of 9 ½ acres of new land has been added to the park and at some future time it is intended to lay out and plan this park area to harmonize with the surrounding park land.”  (Annual Report of the Department of Parks, Borough of Manhattan, 1928)

WPA Workers in Inwood Hill Park, 1938.

WPA Workers in Inwood Hill Park, 1938

Inwood Hill Park stairs in 2014.

1930:  Depression era work gangs begin improvements in the park.  Trails are blazed and widened and near century old homes are destroyed in an effort to return the park to Nature.

According to a Parks Department annual report, “It has been the aim of the Park Department to retain Inwood Hill Park as far as practicable in its original state as a beautiful piece of natural woodland overlooking the Hudson River, and with this in view the work was begun of demolishing the old buildings which had outlived their usefulness and were rapidly becoming dilapidated.  The plan suggested by Mr. Jules V. Burgevin, Landscape Architect of the Park Board, was carried out largely through the use of the three-day-a-week men employed under a special appropriation by the City to provide work for the unemployed. “(Annual Report of the Department of Parks, Borough of Manhattan, 1930)

1930:  Drought affects trees throughout the city parks.

According an Annual Report of the Department of Parks, “In some of the parks we found it impossible to water the trees sufficiently on account of the inadequate water system and the difficulty of getting into the park with water wagons.  This was especially the case in Riverside, Fort Washington and Inwood Hill Parks, there being no hydrants on the park side of Riverside Drive, therefore the watering of trees had to be done with the use of water barrels and tanks on horse-drawn trucks.” (Annual Report of the Department of Parks, Borough of Manhattan, 1930)

Tulip Tree, Manhattan Parks Department annual report, 1930.

Repairs to Inwood Tulip Tree, Department of Parks Annual Report, 1930.

1930:  Parks Department tree surgeons use cement to repair damage to the old tulip tree.  According to legend, it was under the ancient tulip that Native Americans traded the Island of Manhattan for a handful of trinkets and Guilders.  (Annual Report of the Department of Parks, Borough of Manhattan, 1930)

Glacial pothole in Inwood Hill Park.

1931: Glacial potholes are discovered alongside a trail in a part of the park known as the “Clove” by Inwood resident Patrick Coghlan.  After Parks Department workers clear away the undergrowth, geologists examine the site.  Experts determine the phenomenon was the result of a glacial retreat tens of thousands of years ago.

1931:  More relief for the unemployed.

900 laborers are assigned to clean up Highbridge and Inwood Hill Parks and assist in such work as “cutting down dead trees, removing rocks, cleaning roads and filling in depressions…” (Annual Report of the Department of Parks, Borough of Manhattan, 1931)

1931:  Work crews continue demolition of structures, now derelict or inhabited by squatters, throughout the park.  “Ninety-seven buildings, not including foundations, were demolished and removed.” (Annual Report of the Department of Parks, Borough of Manhattan, 1931)

The Dragon Murder Case takes place in a fictionalized Inwood Hill.

1933: Mystery writer S.S. Van Dine uses Inwood Hill as the location for his novel, The Dragon Murder Case. The book is later made into a film.  In the book the park’s glacial potholes turn out to be the entrances to caves inhabited by murderous dragons.

Construction on Payson Avenue comfort station, April 24, 1934, Source NY Municipal Archives.

Play area and comfort station opens on Dyckman Street near Payson Avenue, August 8, 1934. (Source: NY Municipal Archives)

August 8, 1934: Playground and comfort station open near Dyckman Street and Payson Avenue.

Summer day camp, Inwood Hill Park, August 20, 1934 , from NYC Parks Dept.

1934:  Summer camp opens for New York City youngsters in Inwood Hill Park.

According to a history on the Parks Department website,  “Following the consolidation of the City’s parks system under Commissioner Robert Moses in January 1934, the Parks Department announced plans to establish day camps for 2,500 children with both an educational and recreational mission. The activities were jointly managed by Parks Department play leaders, as well as staff from the Board of Education. The day camp depicted here was at the northern tip of Manhattan near the ‘old House of Mercy,’ and afforded views from the bluffs overlooking the Hudson. The programs consisted of games, nature and geology studies, arts and crafts, story telling, drama, and community singing among various activities, and children were provided free transportation and lunch.”

Harry Houdini Hinson killed in sledding accident, New York Times, February 18, 1934.

1934: Houdini’s nephew, Harry Houdini Hinson, is killed in a sledding accident near his aunt, Bess Houdini’s,  home on 67 Payson Avenue.

May 21, 1935:  The Department of Parks announces the opening of bids for the construction of the Henry Hudson Bridge across the Spuyten Duyvil.

Amazingly, construction lasts just one year and the project, under the leadership of Robert Moses, comes in under budget.

Henry Hudson Bridge opens, New York Times December 11, 1936.

Henry Hudson Bridge postcard. (Collection of Cole Thompson)

Henry Hudson Bridge postcard. (Collection of Cole Thompson)

1936: Henry Hudson Bridge opens for traffic.

1935 photo shows the Spuyten Duyvil just before the final cut.

2013 satellite image of the Spuyten Duyvil from Google Maps.

1936:  Engineers make a direct cut through the peninsula that once extended from the cliff  today marked by the “Columbia C.”  The tip of the former peninsula, now an “island,” is today home to the Inwood Hill Park Urban Ecology Center.

Princess Naomi in front of Indian caves in Inwood Hill Park. (New York Times, Nov. 15, 1936)

December 1936:  Robert Moses evicts all “squatters” from the park.  Eviction notices are issued to the Inwood Pottery Works and Dyckman Institute curator Naomie Kennedy (commonly known as Princess Naomie)

“The hullabaloo,” Robert Moses would write, “about disturbing the princess, the kiln, the old tulip tree, and other flora and fauna was terrific.” (Public Works, 1970)

1893 photo by Ed Wenzel shows area long before the landfill project.

Boats moored in Inwood Hill basin in 1935. The site of the Gaelic field housed a marina before being covered with landfill.

A newly planted Gaelic field shortly after the landfill project, courtesy Betty Lee.

Gaelic field today.

June 11, 1936:  Parks Department announces plan to use landfill to add 24 acres of land to the park in an area now commonly known as the Gaelic field.  The plan coincides with the War Department’s decision to straighten the Spuyten Duyvil.

According to a Park’s Department press release, “Upon the completion of the reclamation in the new area, the Park Department will have provided the public with a new yacht basin capable of caring for well over 100 boats.  Adjacent to the yacht basin will be a new clubhouse and roadways and a parking area capable of taking care of 300 cars.  There will be an additional large recreational area including a baseball diamond.  The whole plan is pleasing in appearance, will be well landscaped and amply provided with walks and roadways.  It is anticipated that these additional park facilities will be subjected to intense use.”  (Parks Department press release, June 11, 1936)

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

1938: Inwood’s famed tulip tree dies.  The tree was 280 years old.

Bridge across railroad tracks in Inwood Hill Park.

January 26, 1938: “Plans and bids on construction of a pedestrian bridge over the New York Central Railroad tracks in Inwood Hill Park by Henry Hudson Parkway Authority.” (Parks Department press release, January 26, 1938)

9:50 am, January 26, 1938:  Brooklyn resident Harry E. Butcher, a chauffer for the Safety Fire Extinguisher Company, drives the seven millionth car to pass over the Henry Hudson Bridge.  The Henry Hudson Parkway Authority awards Mr. Butcher a fifty-trip booklet of toll passes.  (Parks Department press release, January 28, 1938)

Upper deck of the Henry Hudson Bridge opens to traffic, New York Times, May 7, 1938.

May 7, 1938: Upper roadbed of the Henry Hudson Bridge opens for traffic.

Yacht basin proposal, New York Times, May 7, 1939.

1939: Parks Department again announces plans for a new yacht basin.

According to the New York Times, “The new neck out into the Harlem River becomes an extension of 218^th Street.  Passing Baker Field and the Columbia University crew house and shell sheds, the automobiles of yachtsmen will proceed along a riprapped isthmus to a special parking area near the basin and the dock master’s house that are soon to be erected.  Two inverted L-shaped bulkheads have been designed on the blueprints to accommodate the berths for forty-five cruisers up to fifty feet or so over-all.”  (New York Times, May 7, 1939)

The project is never completed.

June 22, 1939: Letter to New York Times complains of “deplorable” conditions in Inwood Hill Park.

The park, wrote F.L.S., “has become a stomping ground for all sorts of vandals, who break and carry off blooming shrubs, flowers and even branches within reach.”

“The park is littered with old newspapers and refuse,” the letter continues. “It is overgrown with poison ivy and ragweed.  It has no benches, drinking fountains or toilets.  And all that, in spite of the fact that the park is visited daily by hundreds of children. “

November 26, 1940: “The Department of Parks announces that plans are being made for a marker to be erected on the site of Cock’s Hill Fort, Inwood Hill Park…  Preliminary sketches for the proposed memorial development of the site, which is roughly 80 feet square, indicate a 75 foot flagstaff supported by a simple granite base upon which a suitable inscription will be incised. Comfortable park benches will be arranged about the memorial under the fine old trees which shade the site.” (Parks Department press release, November 26, 1940)

The project was never realized.  Today the site remains unmarked.

Tennis courts and ballfield open in Inwood Hill Park, 1941, Source, NY Municipal Archives.

1941: Tennis courts and ball fields open on eastern side of Inwood Hill Park along Seaman Avenue.

New York Post, March 30, 1948

March 1948: The Parks Department, for the first time, opens Inwood Hill Park to bicycles and roller skates.

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

Yannaco family poses for photo in front of the concession stand in 1977. (Photo courtesy Frank Yannaco)

1950′s-1988: The Yannaco family operates a concession stand inside the Isham Street entrance to Inwood Hill Park.

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

1954: The Peter Minuit Post of the American Legion dedicated a plaque marking the location of the fabled Inwood Tulip Tree.  According to the plaque the site was also the location of the alleged 1626 transaction between Peter Minuit and the Lenape for the purchase of Manhattan.

July 20, 1956:  Free puppet show at the playground on Isham Street and Seaman Avenue.  Description: “Miss Pink Elephant, the Ballerina heroine of ‘Happy the Humbug,’ has a remarkable talent—crying strawberry tears from which delicious ice cream sodas can be concocted.  Children secretly sympathize with the villains, Cock and Bull, who kidnap her in order to profit by her unusual gift.  However, as the plot unfolds, they understand why Happy must rescue her and want to see the villains outwitted.” (Parks Department press release, July 20, 1956)

A fallen “Lindsay Light” in Inwood Hill Park.

1966-1973: Lamp posts are erected throughout the park during the administration of Mayor John Lindsay.  The lights are quickly vandalized.  The posts come to be called “Lindsay Lights.”

November, 1971: 100 National Guardsmen are deployed in Inwood Hill Park to help a short-staffed parks department clear dead trees and trash.

According to Daniel Nelson, an official of the union representing park workers, “The city has no money now, the park needs rehabilitation, and the guardsmen need the experience.”  (New York Times, November 13, 1971)

April 1972: National Guardsmen ordered to leave after neighborhood protests.  Residents claim that heavy construction equipment is destroying the park’s fragile ecology.

1992: Legislation is introduced by Council Member Stanley Michaels to name the natural areas of the park “Shorakapok” in honor of the Lenape.

1995:  Inwood Hill Park Urban Ecology Center opens

2002: Urban Park Rangers begin a five-year project to reintroduce Bald Eagles into the park.

Storm damage in Inwood Hill Park in aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

Inwood Hill Park Urban Ecology Center in 2014.

2012: Hurricane Sandy knocks down trees and floods the Inwood Hill Park Urban Ecology Center.  Two years later the facility remains a ruin.

Muscota Marsh Park in 2014.

January 2014:  One-acre Muscota Marsh Park opens next to Columbia University’s Baker Athletic Complex.

Now that we’ve finished our magical history tour of Inwood Hill Park its time for you to boot up and hit the trails.  Below are some of my favorite maps of the park.  why not start your own historical exploration?  Let me know what you find.

(Click any map to enlarge) 

1879 real estate map by G.W. Bromley and Company.

1891 map by G.W. Bromley and Company.

Inwood Hill map, circa 1910.

1925 Inwood Hil map.

Inwood Hill Park map, Inwood Hill Park on the island of Manhattan, Reginald Bolton, 1932.

Inwood Hill trail map from 1970′s. One of my favorites as the trails have changed very little.

Top photo shows grand staircase inside the Hurst residence on 215th Street and Park Terrace East in 1920′s. (Photo courtesy of Hurst family) Lower photo taken in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

In 1912 an Irish architect named James O’Connor constructed a beautiful brick home on Park Terrace East and 215^th Street.

1920′s photo of the Inwood home of William H. Hurst. Note Isham Gardens under construction to the right. (Photo courtesy of Hurst ancestor JoAnn Jones)

Undated photo of the Hurst home. Photo is taken from Isham Park looking north to 215th Street. Stone building in the foreground was the Hurst’s garage. (Photo courtesy of Hurst descendants)

While O’Connor would later go on to design “Great Gatsby” style playhouse homes for wealthy clients, this particular design had children in mind.

Lots of children.

William H. Hurst. (Photo courtesy of Hurst family)

Hurst family portrait June 24, 1924. (Photo from Hurst family)

William H. Hurst, the President of the New York Stock Telegraph Company, and his wife Minnie, needed an especially large home to accommodate their thirteen kids. The grand home at the top of the newly constructed 215^th Street stairs, which remarkably still stands today, suited their needs perfectly.

1915 photo of Hurst home. The Hurst’s garage is to the right and behind that the Isham home. (Photo courtesy of Hurst descendants)

The house had a stone garage out back where Bruce’s Garden sits today.  The brick house bordered Isham Park, which had been donated to the city by the Isham family the very year the Hurst’s moved to the neighborhood.

The interior was spectacular.

Interior of the Inwood home of William and Minnie Hurst. (Photo courtesy of Hurst descendants)

Interior of the Inwood home of William and Minnie Hurst. (Photo courtesy of Hurst descendants)

Interior of the Inwood home of William and Minnie Hurst. (Photo courtesy of Hurst descendants)

Interior of the Inwood home of William and Minnie Hurst. (Photo courtesy of Hurst descendants)

Interior of the Inwood home of William and Minnie Hurst. (Photo courtesy of Hurst descendants)

Interior of the Inwood home of William and Minnie Hurst. (Photo courtesy of Hurst descendants)

Interior of the Inwood home of William and Minnie Hurst. (Photo courtesy of Hurst descendants)

Interior of the Inwood home of William and Minnie Hurst. (Photo courtesy of Hurst descendants)

When William and Minnie Hurst died, months apart from one another in 1929, the home was sold and the brick building, with terra cotta detailing, was converted into a convent.

Gerard School for Girls. Class of 1959.

In 1946 the grounds were expanded to create the Gerard School of the Academy of the Sacred Heart of Mary, as well as a high school, and once again the joyous sounds of children at play could be heard throughout the neighborhood.

Gerard School for Girls. Class of 1959.

Gerard School for Girls.

For many decades generations of young women, like the Hurst children before them, roamed the hallways of this neighborhood institution. Then, in the 1970’s a terrible thing happened.  The house, which had given so much to the community, fell into disrepair.

Hurst House today.

The former Hurst home, now owned by the Seventh Day Adventists, was bricked up and allowed to deteriorate. The building, though not in use, is part of the Northeastern Academy campus.

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

Hurst house in 2012. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

In 2013, several generations of surviving Hurst’s visited the old house, “530″ they called it. They were greatly dismayed by the condition of their ancestral home.

Hurst family reunion, June 22, 2013. (Photo by Cole Thompson)

The future of the former Hurst estate seems up in the air.  Lacking any historic preservation status, the structure could be torn down tomorrow.

Mary “Minnie” and William H. Hurst. (Photo from great grandson Kevin Wright)

I imagine William and Minnie Hurst, if they were around today, would love to see their home converted into a community center or public space—someplace where the children of Inwood could again laugh and feel safe.

A place we could all be proud of.

For more information on the history of the Hurst home, click here.

Inwood under construction in 1905.

Inwood boomed with the thump of heavy equipment at the dawn of 1905.  The newly arrived elevated subway had ushered in unprecedented development. Apartment houses were erected at a dizzying pace. The chaotic environment grated one’s nerves. Early residents, lured  uptown with hollow promises of “Country Quiet and Pure Air,” found themselves living amid a dusty construction site. Work gangs hammered and dynamited away inconvenient rock formations.  Horses, hitched to heavy wagons, snorted and whinnied under the strain of impossible loads.

New York Sun, March 24, 1904.

There were no parks.  No playgrounds.  No places to gather.

For new residents the situation was worrisome, but a homegrown solution lay around the corner.

School Garden, Public School 52. Source: Fiftieth Anniversary of the Inwood School, P.S. 52, Manhattan, New York, 1858-1908.

That spring the students of Public School 52, on Academy Street and Broadway, became part of a pilot program that introduced urban students to gardening.  The experiment took root in a wonderfully unexpected manner and soon the new arrivals, often under the tutelage of their sons and daughters, transformed empty lots across the neighborhood into impromptu community gardens.

“This spontaneity, this mixing of rewarding work and play,” wrote sociologist Sanford Gaster “must have made these gardens prized features of Inwood indeed.  One imagines men in shirtsleeves, women in house slippers, children barefoot—all chatting, arguing, joking, perhaps eating and drinking—enjoying their new homes, far from the urban clamor…” (A Study of an Urban Community and Its Children, City University of New York, 1993)

Bureau of School Gardens

Fannie Parsons, Source Henry Parsons, Children’s Gardens, 1910.

In 1902 reformer Frances Griscom Parsons established the first “farm garden” in De Witt Clinton Park on the west side of Manhattan. Parsons, who answered to “Fannie,” believed that all children, even city kids, should be instructed in the practices of agriculture.  After approaching city officials, she was granted three-quarters of an acre to begin her experiment.

Source Henry Parsons, Children’s Gardens, 1910.

Dividing the allotment into 360 miniature plots, Fannie, herself a mother of seven, gathered the children around her in this unlikely oasis.  There, in the shadows of tenement buildings, Parsons taught her tiny field hands how to cultivate crops that included corn, radishes, peas, cabbages, turnips and spinach.

“The contact with nature,” Parsons would write, “the learning to use Her ways for himself is a wonderful educator for the street boy, whose knowledge is limited to stone pavements and one small room in a tenement house.”

Parsons’ first garden proved so successful that within three years the program had expanded to include several schools around the city—including Public School 52 on the northern tip of Manhattan.

Inwood’s First School Garden

PS 52 in 1905 postcard by Robert Veitch.

In 1905 the Bureau of School Gardens deemed  P.S. 52  “favorably situated” for a gardening program.

That spring some 200 students worked the soil of the initial 150 square foot plot.  Parents were encouraged to become involved in the program and were considered vital to its success.   This was to be a community project.

School Garden, Public School 52. Source: Fiftieth Anniversary of the Inwood School, P.S. 52, Manhattan, New York, 1858-1908.

“From the outset,” wrote P.S. 52 Principal Van Evrie Kilpatrick,  “the children prepared their plots individually, and used tools which they brought from home.  The work of the first year was, however, nearly destroyed by cattle, which broke through the poor fences. But the teachers had watched with great interest the development of a new expression of childhood in education.  They had seen a little child and a growing plant—his care for it—his love for it—his new life and intensified interest in his schoolwork and things about him.  So, out of the seeming failure of a first year, the teachers planned early for a new garden the next year.  The Board of Education was induced to repair the fence and prepare the soil.  The ground was laid out into beds about five feet wide and eight feet long.  Each child in school who wanted a plot was given one, and the interest was such that almost every child took one.” (The School Journal, Vo. 74, 1907)

PS 52 seen in center of 1908 photo. Source: Schools and School Days in Riverdale, Kingsbridge, Spuyten Duyvil, New York City: The History of Public Education in the Northwest Bronx by William A. Tieck.

The children of the neighborhood took pride and delight in their Broadway farm.

“As early as eight o’clock in the morning the little gardeners came, and each tended to his little plot,” wrote Principal Kilpatrick “his radishes were first to appear, then lettuce, beans, beets, carrots and tomatoes.  The older children were given flower seeds.  All the work was performed before and after school hours, and during the noon recess.” (The School Journal, Vo. 74, 1907)

The Program Expands

When the Isham family donated land in the Park Terrace area in 1912 for use as a public park part of the property was set aside to expand the children’s gardening project.

Public School 52 garden, Isham Park, New York City, September 14, 1914, NYHS.

Working in the Public School 52 garden in Isham Park, New York City, August 5, 1914. NYHS.

Children working in the school garden in Isham Park, New York City, August 5, 1914. Photo by William Davis Hassler, NYHS.

Children working in the Isham Park school garden, New York City, August 16, 1915. Shot from the roof of the conservatory, NYHS.

William Gray Hassler with corn plants in his school garden, Isham Park, New York City, September 14, 1914. Photo by William Davis Hassler, NYHS. Photo by his father William Davis Hassler, NYHS.

By 1914, as evidenced by photographs, students of P.S. 52 tended to crops in a idyllic surrounding removed from the construction and traffic of Broadway.  Inside the new park this next generation of farmer tended to corn, potatoes, cabbage, beets and lettuce atop a hill with commanding views of the city.

In 1917 students raised  $564.28 selling surplus produce from a stall attached to the Isham Park garden.  Adjusting for inflation that equals slightly more than $10,000 in today’s economy.

Other Inwood Farms

The children of Inwood, who established their farm sixty-five years before the first Earth Day, were not the only area residents with green thumbs.

Original caption: 6/2/1917-”Somewhere in New York City,” just a few blocks from the upper boundary, to be exact, the Inwood Community Garden Association is cultivating a stretch of ground, composed of 60 lots, each 20 by 40 feet, in persuance of President Wilson’s recent call to the people to raise their own food. This photo shows Japanese people working on one of the plots. The man is Dr. Minosuke Yamaguchi and the rest are Mrs. H. Muroyama and her family. — Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

02 Jun 1917 — Original caption: “Somewhere in New York City,” just a few blocks from the upper boundary, to be exact, the Inwood Community Garden Association is cultivating a stretch of ground, composed of 60 lots, each 20 by 40 feet, in pursuance of president Wilson’s recent call to the people to raise their own food. The ground is situated amid tall apartment houses and the surface cars family in the association cultivate one lot. — Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

During World War I , when President Woodrow Wilson urged that “food will win the war,” community gardens became a common sight around the nation.  Several photographs, captured in 1917, depict members of the Inwood Community Garden Association cultivating a plot on the east side of Broadway just south of Dyckman Street.

Benedetto farm on Broadway and 213th Street, 1930, Collection of Cole Thompson.

There were also commercial ventures that included the Benedetto farm on 213^th Street and Broadway.  The family farm, located on the site today occupied by a mini-storage facility, is considered to have been the last working farm on the island of Manhattan.

Aftermath

Gardener’s cottage near Broadway entrance to Isham Park in 1925. Source: NYHS.

While support for the Children’s School Farm movement diminished in the years following World War I, there is evidence that gardening continued in Isham Park through the late 1940’s.  Longtime Inwood residents recall a gardener’s cottage and potting shed.  There are also descriptions of a large greenhouse that burned down in a “terrific” fire.   Shortly after the greenhouse fire, according to one oral history, the Parks Department “came with bulldozers and took down the potting shed and cleared the place.” (A Study of an Urban Community and Its Children, City University of New York, 1993)

Colonial Gardens real estate brochure. Courtesy of the New York Real Estate Brochure Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

As many of you know, I both sell and rent apartments in the Inwood area.  So it was a true joy to come across the following article describing the Inwood rental scene of 1936.

I am intimately familiar with many of the buildings described below.  Many are still rental properties.  Others have gone co-op through the years.

At the time the article was written, not a single apartment rented for more than $100.  For comparisons sake, today,  in 2015, a studio rental in the neighborhood rents for about $1,300, a one-bedroom $1,700 and two-bedrooms start in the $2,200 range.

Now, step into the real estate time machine…

The New York Sun December 12, 1936
What Inwood Offers Renters
Modern Apartments at Modest Rentals Are Filled as Fast as They’re Built
By Gerry Fitch

The Dyckman section of upper Manhattan is becoming so popular as a residential locality that it seems almost as if tenants lie in wait for a new apartment building, to swoop upon it the minute it’s finished and fill it up overnight.

The reasons are simple, pleasant ones, that make for happy home life.  Convenience, comfort without ostentation, handsome dwellings and unpretentious rents.  It’s ideal for the family on a limited budget.

Not only are the apartment values remarkable, but garage rents are in keeping.  Just about everybody can produce a car around here, especially on Sundays.  It’s so easy to get to and from the country if you live here that Sunday motorists are home when most New Yorkers are just beginning the long grind through traffic.

Rapid Transit New

The Eighth avenue subway is an appreciated blessing.  It gets Dyckman residents to Times Square in half an hour—a bit more for Chambers street.  The section lies close to the Hudson River, near where Spuyten Duyvil Creek flows into the Hudson, and boasts wooded hills—like Inwood Hill, and a delightful park—Isham Park.  It has high rocky ground, fresh air and lots of charm.  Not to mention a fleet of new apartment buildings, with others about to open, and still others in the skeleton stage promised for next summer.

Colonial Gardens real estate brochure. Courtesy of the New York Real Estate Brochure Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

Just a few steps from the 207^th street subway station is the largest of the new apartment structures, the Colonial Gardens at 4915 Broadway.  It is of a Colonial design, with two wings, and a court surrounded with little Christmas trees.  It was opened last October 15 and of the ninety-six apartments only ten are available, most of them not quite completed.

It must have taken overtime to finish the foundations of this building—surely the workmen paused for historic reflection as they turned up old bayonets, cannon balls, shoe buckles, jugs and muskets.  For the site was a Revolutionary War camp.  Right alongside the Colonial Gardens is the old Dyckman farmhouse, the only eighteenth century farmhouse still standing on Manhattan Isle.  It was built in 1783.  Fortunately it is now preserved as a museum.  Tenants of the Colonial Gardens look down on this sturdy little farmhouse constructed of huge planks and imported Dutch bricks, set among green lawns.  To explore the house is to feel you have read a fascinating book covering several generations in a few minutes. The completely equipped Dutch kitchen in the basement has achieved international fame.  A replica of a Revolutionary camp hut, built of pieces found near the farmhouse, stands in the grounds, near a picturesque grape arbor.  The fine old place gives the name Dyckman to the section, that in turn reflects its modest dignity.

What You Can Rent

Colonial Gardens real estate brochure. Courtesy of the New York Real Estate Brochure Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

But back to the Colonial Gardens.  It is decorated in brown and cream, and has wallpaper picturing warring Indians.  The two, three and four-room layouts have an extra half room, and this dinette is so large in some instances as to be a fourth room.  I saw a three and one-half-room unit on the fourth floor for $66.  It has the most beautiful parquet flooring in herringbone design that a most fastidious admirer of fine floors could desire.  Three closets are off the foyer, the bath is a gem, and the furniture is so smart it has cupboards with ward-proof doors.  All the little nothings that mean so much are here in profusion.

A slightly larger apartment is available on the same floor for $70. Overlooking the garden of a retired professor who has never been known to miss a day among his plants.  Master bedrooms are 12 by 18 feet—living rooms 13 by 22 feet.

With the exception of this and another new building around at Payson avenue and Beak street, the apartment dwellings in the Dyckman section dispense with doormen.  Colonial Gardens and Payson House have higher rents because of the stipulated doorman in the lease.  Payson House has five-room suites for $100, and the average in the building is about $20 per room.  This whole section specializes on the apartment of five rooms and less, with rentals under $100 top.  On up Payson avenue, opposite Inwood Hill, are several new buildings, all rented.  The neat rows of names printed in white on black in the entrances haven’t a blank name among them.  There is obvious need of the new building now under construction nearby.

More Modern Features

The recently opened six-story structure with corner easement windows, at 207^th and Cooper avenue is also 100 per cent rented.  It is gay with colors of black and salmon.

Lobby of 145 Seaman Avenue, Inwood, NYC.

The tenants of another new building at 145 Seaman avenue have plants in their wide windows without exception, most effective.  The color scheme here is black and yellow.  An electric fire glows invitingly in the foyer and the odor of good cooking—when I happened to be there—was something to be remembered.

680 West 204th Street lobby. This former rental building is now a coop.

You will find one high-class apartment after another in the new buildings of this neighborhood—at 680 and 687 on 204^th street; at 60 Cooper street; across the way at Cooper Court.  All feature the artistic use of frosted glass with chromium trim.

If you feel a bit happier in a building that doesn’t vibrate with modernity; if you’ve held on to the old Spanish chasuble and like to drape scarves over the grand piano, there is still that large and lovely apartment building known as Isham Gardens, with some off the most enticing rentals in the city.  This Venetian looking place, has a very grand stairway fronting on Isham Park.  The tenants like stairs anyway; they have to.

Isham Gardens courtyard in 2009.

They get lovely suites of four and five rooms for $66 a month, and outlooks across Spuyten Duyvil Creek, or down into the fountained courtyard, but they have to walk up five flights to get them.  Those tenants I saw took the stairs easily, with babies in arms, or big dogs on leashes, and they looked enviably content.

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.

New York Sun, November 5, 1938.

In early November of 1938 newspapers around the globe trained their headlines on a stunning victory on the Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, Maryland.

The heroic story of Seabiscuit, a small, knobby-kneed horse who preferred sleeping to racing, over War Admiral, the four to one favorite, captured everyone’s imagination.

The underdog had slain Goliath and stoked the hopes and dreams of a nation emerging from the Great Depression.

Amid the backdrop of this inspirational tale, New York Sun reporter Gerry Fitch was given the rather tedious assignment of documenting the impending demolition of a once splendid mansion on the northern tip of Manhattan.

New York Sun, November 5, 1938.

The mansion in question, the old Seaman-Drake estate, was nearly a hundred years old and Fitch would soon become well versed, and possibly even enchanted, by its rich, romantic history.

Inwood’s Seaman Mansion in 1892, photo by Ed Wenzel. (Click on photo to enlarge)

Fitch soon realized he too was witnessing an historic moment.  But in his story, the beloved underdog, once dubbed the “Mount Olympus of northern Manhattan,” hadn’t a chance.   A scarcity of real estate combined with a local building boom rendered the once fantastic home obsolete.  The home would soon be razed in order to make room for a five-building housing development to be named Park Terrace Gardens.

A magnificent stable a block away, once also owned by the Seaman family would also be demolished to make room for even more apartment houses.

Seaman Mansion in grander days.

When Fitch visited the home in 1938 the old mansion was truly a shell of its former self.  The statuary, the gleaming white marble, even the stunning cupolas that could once be seen from miles away, had long since been stripped away.

Seaman Mansion ready for demolition in mid-1930′s.

Only one section of the home was still inhabitable.  In that wing lived builder and architect Thomas Dwyer, who had purchased the home from Seaman descendant Lawrence Drake in 1906.

Thomas Dwyer advertisement, New York Society of Architects, 1920.

Dwyer ran his business, The Marble Arch Corporation, from the attic of the arch, which graced the Broadway entrance to the property.  Dwyer, an architect of some note, was well known for his work on municipal projects, monuments and museums around the metropolis.  His Soldiers’ and Sailors’ monument on Riverside Drive remains, even today, part of Manhattan’s urban landscape.

Aquarium in Castle Garden (also called Castle Clinton), 1893, Source: Corbis.

His more fanciful designs included the aquarium inside New York’s former Castle Garden and marble detail work for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

During discussions with Dwyer, reporter Gerry Fitch learned the history of the grand old marble mansion as well as the former stable that was also slated for demolition.

Dwyer was obviously distraught to see his former home taken apart by the wrecker’s ball, but was a builder and a pragmatist.

Standing there, on that November day, Dwyer and Fitch realized the import of what was soon to transpire.  This was the twilight of the old neighborhood, that fleeting moment in history where the knobby-kneed neighborhood favorite is finally defeated by the march of time.

Before: Seaman Mansion seen in 1937 aerial.

After: 1939 aerial shot of Park Terrace Gardens, New York Times, August 13, 1939.

Amazingly, the marble arch, from where Dwyer designed forgotten landmarks of old New York, survived.   The arch, its walls supported by low-slung garages on either side, can be seen today on the west side of Broadway at 216^th Street.

Below is Fitch’s article describing the last days of the old house on the hill.

New York Sun
November 5, 1938
Last Days of Old Mansion
Dwyer House in Inwood Will Soon Give Way to Modern Apartment Buildings
By Gerry Fitch

Inwood is high and handsome and has become so popular that even the many new apartment buildings cannot satisfy all the Manhattanites who have re-discovered this northerly end of the city.  So it is welcome news that a group of five new eight-story apartments, built around large gardens, will shortly be erected on one of Inwood’s highest points, to be ready for occupancy next summer.

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

The 118,000 square feet of property to be thus occupied is the tract bounded by Park Terrace West and Park Terrace East, 215^th to 217^th Street.  It is a desolate surface of exposed rock and corroded earth, topped by a gloomy mansion that has made many a passing motorist gaze up toward it as though it might have been a setting for a Bronte novel.  It is of gray stone, with a high square tower, and it stands skeleton-like, windows gaping, stone parapets broken, commanding a view over the Hudson, Harlem and East rivers.

Seaman mansion and arch from a distance in 1903.

This house is known as the Dwyer house. Its present owner, Thomas Dwyer, who was a prominent contractor, has lived in it nearly thirty years; when he bought it long ago it was already fifty years old.  If you climb up to the house you will notice that while most of it could correctly be called a ruin, there is one section that is in neat repair, its bright and curtained windows affording strange contrast to other broken windows made steadily worse by the rocks of passing schoolboys.  This conditioned section is the one Mr. Dwyer has made his own in recent years, hating to leave until, as his “For Sale” sign on the property sets forth, he could find a “perfectly responsible party” with whom he “might take an interest in the improvement of the property.”

Park Terrace Gardens apartment advertisement, August 31, 1939, New York Times.

Such a party was found this week.  In one of the largest sales of vacant Manhattan real estate closed in several years, the Thomas Dwyer family sold the property through Jacob and Emil Leitner, brokers, to a corporation headed by David Rose.  The corporation’s plans for development of the site call for more than two acres of landscaped gardens, the five fireproof buildings occupying a comparatively small portion of land.

A Former Showplace

Each structure—they have been designed by Architect Albert Goldhammer—will contain eighty apartments with suites of three, four and five rooms.  Rentals have not been set, but rentals for attractive suites in the Inwood section are around $75 a month for three and four rooms.

Down will come the Dwyer mansion before many weeks.  Thomas Dwyer will move not far away, however—just down the street known as park Terrace East to an apartment at No. 10.  And when the new buildings are up he can move back to the very plot he has kept for so long.  He hates to see the house come down; he can remember when it was a showplace of northern Manhattan.

Seaman Drake Arch captured in 1911 postcard.

You arrived at the estate and were confronted by an imposing stone arch.  You drove under this and then round and round the grounds in spiral ascendance until you arrived at the great stone steps.  There was an impressive entrance and much outside statuary. Inside were large rooms, with ceilings fifteen feet high; wall niches with more statuary, grand stairways and mantelpieces, conservatories, balconies.

Marble arch in 1929.

It all remains in altered form.  Jammed up against the stone entrance arch—it looks about the size of the one in Washington Square and faces Broadway at 116^thStreet—are now small shops that hide all but the top of the arch.

Seaman Mansion in September, 1937, MCNY.The grounds have been so dug out in places that they look like a series of trenches surmounted by a sort of old gray army tank that is the towered house.

Mr. Dwyer added a third story of ten rooms, and the tower thirty years ago, but has always been sorry he did.  During late years a number of visitors, failing to observe the lived-in section and thinking the place abandoned, have climbed the stone steps to the entrance and jangled the bell, just to see if it would ring.  That’s what I did, and, believe me, the bell rings.  It is something of a shock to have the door suddenly open and a young man in a bathrobe, obviously disturbed, trying very hard to be polite over the intrusion.  No wonder the Dwyer family is reconciled to moving.

Near Two Subways

The neighborhood is now quickly reached by both the Eighth Avenue and Seventh Avenue subways.  On a nearby height to the south stands the tower of Mr. Rockefeller’s medieval cloisters.  To the north is Baker Field.  Historic Dyckman farmhouse is a few blocks away.  Spuyten Duyvil Creek flows into the Hudson just beyond.  All around are charming English-type one-family brick cottages and new apartment houses, “modernistic” or Colonial in design.

In 1933 Nazi storm troopers entered the home of Max Brauer, the Socialist mayor of Altona, a working class German suburb just west of Hamburg.

Brauer and other leaders who publicly denounced Hitler had been slated for roundup.

German Mayor Max Brauer spent World War II exiled in Inwood, on the northern end of Manhattan, after fleeing the Nazis. He lived in 687 West 204th Street before moving to 10 Park Terrace East. From 1927 photograph.

But the handsome forty-six-year-old politician with a cleft chin and shock of dark slicked back hair had already fled.

He eventually landed in the Inwood section of northern Manhattan where he remained in exile until the conclusion of World War II.

Bloody Sunday

Bloody Sunday. 6,000 Nazi supporters march in Altona. The march and ensuing riots are known in German as “Altonaer Blutsonntag.”

As early as 1931 Brauer openly opposed Hitler and his fast-growing Nazi party.   He and other colleagues considered Hitler an amateur—believing the German citizenry would soon lose interest in the charismatic Nazi leader.

Brauer’s optimism was shattered on July 17, 1932.  That “Bloody Sunday” some 6,000 Nazi supporters staged a march in Altona.  Eighteen were killed in frenzied violence that ensued.

Site of the 1932 Altona Bloody Sunday Massacre. Source: Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

On treacherous political footing Brauer found himself accused of corruption, a common smear tactic, but was acquitted at trial.

Brauer was a Lutheran and not subjected to the religious persecution that befell his Jewish countrymen, but his political views had targeted him for a different type of abuse.  The legal proceedings had been a message—we can destroy you.

After shots were fired into his home he moved his family to the countryside.  He engaged an armed guard.

Flight

On January 30, 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Reich Chancellor of Germany.

Little more than a month later, on March 5, 1933, the day of the general election, police raided Brauer’s home.

But the house was empty—the politician, using a friend’s passport, had fled to Bavaria.  (He had already sent his wife and two children to Oberhof, a German resort town 260 miles south of Hamburg, hoping they would be safe until the family was reunited.)

A Glassblower’s Apprentice

Max Julius Friedrich Brauer was born in 1887 in the blue-collar district of Ottensen, along the right bank of the River Elbe.   The eighth of thirteen children, his family had been desperately poor when Max was a child.    His father, Wilhelm, was a glass blower. Max and his siblings lived in employee housing on the grounds of the C.E. Gätcke Glass Factory.

C.E. Gätcke glass factory where Max Brauer learned the glass blowers craft alongside his father.

Children of glass workers. In the background are dwellings of the CE Gätcke glass factory workers.

Brauer left school at the age of 14 to apprentice on the factory floor. Given the large number of children to feed everyone in the household was expected to contribute. A sister described Max as an inquisitive boy who devoted every spare moment to reading books.

Brauer was not destined to spend his life toiling on an assembly line. The youngster had radical ideas of fairness in the workplace and began to organize fellow workers. He spoke out for an eight-hour workday and proper housing.  After leading a series of strikes he was placed on a national glass manufacturing black list.

World War I would end his unemployment.  Brauer served alongside of six of his brothers on the Russian front.  Brauer is known to have suffered an injury in 1915 that ended his military service.

A year after returning from combat he married Erna Pehmöller.  The couple had two children, a son, Werner,  and daughter,  Brunhild, who everyone called Bunny. (A second son died during infancy).

Brauer entered political life  1918 and was elected to the City Council of Altona, then part of Prussia, on the Social Democrat ticket.  In 1924, after the death of the previous incumbent, Brauer was chosen as Mayor.

Under Brauer, Altona grew and prospered—surrounding villages were incorporated, public projects including housing developments and job centers were launched.

But, in 1933, a fugitive from his homeland, those past accomplishments must have felt so very far away.

A Man Without a Country

Brauer’s brother-in-law joined him in his flight from Hitler’s police. The two men, both disguised as day-trippers, first fled to Austria.  After a harrowing journey Brauer reunited with his family in Switzerland in mid-April of 1933.  Now on a Nazi most-wanted list, he settled briefly in Paris before being invited by the League of Nations to join other German exiles in China while his family remained behind in Geneva.

Brauer’s time in China was difficult.  He felt isolated.  He longed for a German revolution that would bring an end to the Nazi state. Rumors swirled in the ex-pat circles that a revolution was to be expected. It was all talk.  Third hand gossip at best.  But it kept them going.  He drew up plans for a post-Nazi Germany.

In the fall of 1934, under diplomatic pressure from the German government, Chinese officials expelled Brauer and his fellow exiles.  It was just as well.  He had received a telegraph from Erna imploring him to return to Europe. She and the children were out of money and were being expelled from Switzerland for passport violations.  “Meet me in Paris,” she would write.

Dollar Steamship Co.’s passenger liner SS President Pierce underway, date and location unknown.

On September 29, 1934, Brauer departed China through Shanghai. On a manifest for the S.S. President Pierce, a twin-screw passenger liner, Brauer listed his occupation as “diplomat.” A year into what he would later wryly refer to as his “world tour” Brauer stopped over in the United States on his way to France to discuss job opportunities with another exile, Leopold Lichtwitz, in New York.

Brauer spent two months in New York exploring job possibilities before boarding the Red Star passenger ship Pennland bound for London.  Typed neatly on the manifest for the trans-Atlantic passage were several details:  “In transit to France”— Occupation: “Officer of the League of Nations”—Citizen of: “Germany.”

The Pennland arrived in London on December 10, presumably in time for the Brauer family to spend Christmas together in Paris.

Arrested

The following year, 1935, proved utterly demoralizing.

Job inquiries in Paris, Belgium, the U.K. and Sweden went nowhere.  On Christmas Day his worst fear was realized. French police, acting on a request from German authorities, arrested Brauer in his home. Brauer spent a week behind bars before his lawyer, Jean Longeut, an expert on political asylum and a grandson of Karl Marx, secured his temporary release pending extradition to Germany.

During his window of freedom Brauer secured an invitation from the American Jewish Congress to become part of a U.S. lecture tour. On September 11, 1936, Brauer, now a seasoned traveller, boarded the S.S. Lafayette at Le Havre, a large port city on the northwest coast of France, for another trans-Atlantic crossing.  The Lafayette’s manifest listed the forty-nine-year-old Brauer’s occupation as “lecturer.”  Under nationality was written a single word: “WITHOUT.”

Nazi Public Enemy #1

Max Brauer, Syracuse Journal, October 6, 1936.

Brauer’s talks, up and down the east coast, were heavily covered by the press, which nicknamed him “Nazi Public Enemy #1.”

“I was listening to the radio one night and I heard a speaker say than an order had been issued for my arrest,” he told a Syracuse, NY Kiwanis group in October of 1936. “So I escaped before they came to get me and fled to Switzerland. Since then I worked on behalf of the co-operative movement there and in China and also as an advisor to the league of Nations. I am now lecturing throughout the United States.” (Syracuse Journal, October 6, 1936)

Speaking perfect English Brauer warned audiences of the “megalomania” that infected the Nazi party.

“All religious discussions in the press and public are forbidden in Germany,” he told members of a Presbyterian church in Buffalo. “Reports to the foreign press as well as private letters sent abroad touching upon the conflict are considered high treason.  The facts are concealed: the truth is suppressed. Only repetition of the Nazi ideology, the totalitarian state, the community of the nation and the racial principle is permitted.  The totalitarian state and all that goes with it simply means despotism treated as a principle.” (Buffalo Express, January 18, 1937)

Max Brauer lecture in Nassau, Nassau Daily Review Star, December 9, 1942.

In Methodist conference dinners, Presbyterian churches and university auditoriums Brauer repeated his mantra.

Brauer explained that anti-Semitism was a cornerstone of the Nazi ideology and that Jews in Germany and elsewhere must be supported internationally.

German spies were rumored to have attended his talks.

Reunited

Brauer returned to Paris in 1937 to pick up his nineteen-year-old son. He and Werner returned to New York aboard the French passenger ship S.S. Paris that departed Le Havre on September 18^th.

His wife and daughter followed a year later.  Brunheld, an athletic young woman who once dreamed of becoming an opera singer, had been seventeen when her family fled Altona.  She was twenty-two when her ship arrived in Ellis Island. Onboard she met her future husband, Horace Liebler, another refugee in flight from Nazi persecution.

The Brauers settled in the Inwood section of Manhattan, a mainly residential neighborhood on the very northern edge of Manhattan.

Exile in Inwood

687 west 204th Street. Once home to Max Brauer.

A 1940 census taker found the family living in a rented apartment located in 687 West 204^th Street.  The now fifty-one-year-old Brauer reported that he worked in the advertising industry.

The Brauers, while nearly four thousand miles from home, had landed in a neighborhood full of German immigrants.  Inside their six-story art deco building the family enjoyed the familiar smells of German home cooking—perhaps the sausage, carrots and potatoes in a neighbor’s Steckrübeneintopf simmering on the stovetop.

The heads of seven other families in the Brauer’s handsome brick building, Michels, Moeckel, Brandt, Rapp, Lilienfeld, Hickenberg and Edinger, all listed Germany as their place of birth. (1940 Federal Census)  Russians, Swedes, Polish, Hungarians, French, Chinese, Irish and native New Yorkers rounded out the multi-ethnic mix.

When not dining at home, the Brauer’s might have treated themselves to ice cream at Shillingman’s on Dyckman Street, sugary confections from Broger & Luessen on 207^th Street, pastries from Nasch’s Bakery or sandwiches from Schwartz’s Deli.

10 Park Terrace East. Former apartment building of the Brauer family in Inwood, NYC.

The family later moved ten blocks north to another rental apartment inside 10 Park Terrace East near Inwood Hill Park, a picturesque 196-acre green space that borders the Hudson River.

By 1940 some 20,000 German natives, many of them Jewish, had settled in northern Manhattan.  Brauer would revel in the company of other Germans, but every conversation eventually circled back to the war.  He launched a newspaper, The New People’s Daily, and raised funds that allowed hundreds of refugees to secure ship passage to American shores.

1944 Max Brauer petition for naturalization, 10 Park Terrace East, Inwood, NYC.

1946 Petition for Naturalization for Erna Amanda Brauer, 10 Park Terrace East, Inwood NYC.

In 1943 Brauer and his wife became United States citizens.  Though proud of his adopted country, Brauer would consider the move a temporary measure.  He longed for Germany and hoped one day to return.

Max Julius Friedrich Brauer WWII draft registration card.

To firm up his allegiance he registered for the draft, joined the Rotary Club and continued his lecture tour.

When the war ended he knew he must return to Germany to help rebuild his shattered homeland.

Return to Hamburg

In July of 1946 Brauer returned to Hamburg on a mission funded by the American Federation of Labor.  Friends persuaded him to run for Mayor— a move that required he give up his U.S. citizenship.

On October 25, 1946 Brauer renounced his American citizenship and signed the document that made him, once again, a German subject.  (Earlier, a clerk had inked over the swastika on his citizenship paper as the interim government was still using forms generated by the Third Reich.)

“You can’t change nationality like a shirt,” Brauer would tell an American reporter.  “I was lucky in America and I was proud of my adopted country.  But I believe the front-line battle for democracy is right here in Germany.  When the Social Democrats asked me to stand for election here in Germany, I felt called upon to give my lifelong experience to the city where I was born.  I was sorry to foreswear my allegiance and give up my good life in New York, but it is right here that my duty lies.” (New York Sun, Dateline: Nov. 27, 1946)

Max Brauer’s German citizenship document.

Bürgermeister

On November 22, 1946, after a decade in exile on U.S. soil, Brauer was sworn in as Hamburg’s first post-war Mayor—a post he would hold until 1953. (He served again from 1957-1960)

Max Brauer profiled in 1950 edition of The Rotarian.

Days later, surrounded by the rubble and despair of post-war Germany, Brauer would comment, “It is tough for me to accustom myself to German rations.  The 1,500 calories I get here daily are about what the average New Yorker has for breakfast.  My wife, now living at 10 Park Terrace East, Manhattan, will have a shock when she joins me.” (New York Sun, Dateline: Nov. 27, 1946)

Max Brauer and son Werner, Yonkers Herald Statesman, November 30, 1949.

Brauer was eighty-five when he died in 1973.

On June 17, 1915 a procession of more than fifty automobiles gathered in Inwood to mark an historic occasion—the inauguration of the new Dyckman Street ferry, which would make its maiden voyage across the Hudson River, to the popular recreation sites along the New Jersey Palisades, later that afternoon.

Dyckman Street Ferry opens, The Sun June 18, 1915.

“The procession, marshaled by Mr. Thomas Leonard, started at 2 P.M. from 207th Street and Sherman Avenue, and went by way of Broadway, Nagle, Avenue, Dyckman Street, Post Avenue, Academy Street, 10^th Avenue, Broadway and Dyckman Street to the ferry.  At the latter point the exercises were held on a temporary platform.” (Source: Annual Report on American Scenic and Historic Preservation, Volume 21)

Dyckman Street ferry launched, 1915.

“Members of the Inwood Business Men’s Association were particularly active in the parade. The Englewood Board of Trade was well represented.  The only walkers were the suffragists of the Twenty-third Assembly district and the Mothers’ Club of Public School 52.  The Suffragists reached the reviewing stand ahead of the rest of the parade and took a conspicuous place near it.” (The Sun, June 18, 1915)

George Waldbridge Perkins,Sr (Source:Library of Congress)

Presiding over the festivities was George W. Perkins, president of the Interstate Park Commission.

After a brief prayer by Reverend George Shipman Payson, pastor of Inwood’s Mount Washington Presbyterian Church, ten-year-old Estelle Loeb, stole the show with a song titled, “We Take Our Hats Off to You, Mr. Perkins.”

Initially, the ferry, a joint project overseen by The Board of Trade of Englewood, New Jersey and the newly organized Dyckman Street Board of Trade, planned to run boats across the river at twenty minute intervals on weekdays and every five minutes on Sundays when a rush of picnickers and hikers was expected. The East River Ferry Company was under contract to provide additional boats if necessary.

Dyckman Ferry, 1936.

On that Thursday afternoon thousands of New Yorkers made the crossing to explore new park system and gaze back across the Hudson from this exciting new vantage point.  The trip across the water was likely equally exciting.

Dyckman Street Ferry ad, The Evening World, May 28, 1921.

Initially the toll was a mere three cents, but the fare was quickly rounded up to a nickel.

The “America” ferry and Dyckman Street slip in 1926. Note the Jewish Memorial Hospital in the background.

The ferry was of particular interest to the new-fangled automobilists, and the fresh roaming grounds now easily accessible for the first time—decades before the construction of the George Washington Bridge.

Dyckman Street ferry, New York Sun, October 20, 1927.

According to Sanford Gaster, who compiled oral histories of older Inwood residents in the 1980’s,  “It is interesting to note that so many recreationists would leave Inwood, or pass through it, in order to reach a wooded, waterside place.  While this attests to how much open land Inwood had lost, it also suggests the new popularity of mass recreation, which required modern facilities.” (Source: Public Places of Childhood, 1915-1930, Sanford Gaster)

Dyckman Ferry canoe diving, The Buffalo Evening News, September 22, 1926.

Riding the wake of a ferryboat in a canoe, Scientific American, August 16, 1919.

Among those Gaster interviewed was longtime Inwood resident Rose Creel who fondly recalled the beautiful park facilities across the Hudson:

Bathing beach in the new park on the New Jersey Palisades, circa 1915. (Source:njpalisades.org)

“Here were pavilions with tables and benches for picnickers.  Many people of different nationalities came with exotic smelling food, radios and sometimes musical instruments to make their music for singing and dancing. It was a place clean enough to go diving and swimming.  Fishermen sat on the rocks with their crab baskets and many a good catch they had.  In the spring the shad boats came and the fishing was good.” (Source: Public Places of Childhood, 1915-1930, Sanford Gaster)

From its beginning the ferry was a riotous success. On hot summer evening’s passengers would often take the ferry back and forth as they gossiped and sang—the cool river breezes refreshing both body and spirit.  Musicians, who paid a concession fee to perform on the boats, did much to enliven the mood.

Dyckman Street at Hudson River, 1925.

In those early days motorcars were pushed on and off the ferries to prevent a backfiring engine from spooking the horses, which were still a popular mode of transportation.

By 1923, with the automobile becoming increasingly popular, the need for expansion became evident. A new ferry slip, capable of handling an additional 125 to 150 cars an hour, was constructed.

According to a schedule published in the New York Times,  “The first boat will leave the New York end at 6am and on the New Jersey side the service will start at 6:15 am.  The regular daily service will be at 10 minute intervals, the last boat leaving Dyckman Street at 11 o’clock at night, and from the Englewood side at 11:10 pm.  On Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, when the motor car traffic is especially heavy, the boats will continue until midnight or later if necessary.”

Of course not everyone in Inwood cheered the ferry’s success.  Some felt the terminal carried with it a host of problems, namely noise, crowds and traffic.

Dyckman Street near Henshaw, 1928.

Long-time Dyckman Street residents, gathered on their front porches, watched in horror as their bucolic little hideaway from the cacophony of downtown suddenly became one of the most congested streets in all Manhattan.

According to a 1924 New York Times article titled “Inwood, the Wild: “There are old houses on Dyckman Street; they have cupolas, some of them, and lace frills done in woodwork, and they look down somewhat disapprovingly on the knickered hikers scurrying to the Palisades ferry at what once was (and may still be on some legal document) Tubby Hook.”

Theses ominous changes reached all the way east to Broadway:

“The increasing popularity of the Dyckman Street Ferry for motorists and its use by thousands of young people from all parts of the city during the warm weather to reach the open spaces of the Interstate Palisades Park on the New Jersey shore make Dyckman Street one of the live uptown thoroughfares. The junction of Broadway and Dyckman Street is also the terminus of the northern extremity of Riverside Drive, and is one of the most congested traffic points in the city on Saturdays and Sundays, although traffic is always heavy there every day in the week.” (“Upper Manhattan,” 1926, p. 16)

1930 photo of Dyckman Street ferry terminal.

In the year 1930 the line carried 1,286,177 vehicles and 965,000 pedestrians. (Source: The Hudson River Through the Years, Arthur G. Adams)

And while the ire of a handful of Dyckman Street residents was understandable, most New Yorkers simply loved the ferry.

In one published account, former passenger Arthur G. Adams describes the ferry as an affordable treat for the common man and his family:

“…During the war years of gas rationing, a frequent outing would be to drive to the Hudson River shoreline at Englewood or Alpine and watch the steamboats passing by in the evening.  Maybe your father would spring for a round trip across on the ferryboat to Dyckman Street or Yonkers in the cool of the evening, with the itinerant accordionist and violin players offering a serenade and passing the cup. It certainly was not sophisticated, but you did see the great steamboats passing by. The ferryboat was a window on the greater world.” (Railroad Ferries of the Hudson by Raymond J. Baxter and Arthur G. Adams, 1953)

While initially built to serve a recreational, mainly summertime crowd, an increasing number of New Jersey based business professionals began to rely on the ferry to transport them to higher paying jobs in Manhattan.

But the harsh winters of the day often made river traffic impractical if not impossible.  Many years ferry service was discontinued for months at a time as ice floes covered the surface of the Hudson.

By 1930, according to the New York Sun, ferry pilots had become adept at dodging ice floes in the treacherous icy waters:

“It was recently published,” said a resident of Inwood, just above Washington Heights, “that the Dyckman Street ferry, which takes persons over to Jersey and back, had not closed during the entire year of 1929.  This was news to old-time residents of the section who knew it used to be the custom to close the ferry when the ice became too thick in the Hudson for the boats to plow through it.

“In fact it used to be symbolic of real winter when folks in Inwood used to say to one another: ‘The Dyckman Street ferry is closed.”

“Naturally old timers go to wondering how the ferryboats now do what they do when they were one time unable to do and the reason has been lately discovered by a man who lived in Inwood since 1916. The answer is that the boats do not plow through the ice, they dodge around the large floes and do everything but cut through them.

“This old timer stood on Riverside Drive extension the other day when large floes were coming down the Hudson and watched a boat on its way to Jersey. When it left the slip it did not take a beeline course across the river because great masses of ice were running south.  But through the open spaces between the floes the boat steamed its way and it was out in the open in no time, although two or three blocks to the south of the site of the ferry house.

“It certainly was a nice piece of steering on the part of the pilot and must have been diverting to those on board.  And it solved a big mystery.”

Dyckman Street ferry terminal in 1934 with George Washington Bridge to the south.

Surprisingly, despite construction of the George Washington Bridge in 1931, ridership on the ferry continued unabated, though there were complaints that the boats had fallen into a state of severe disrepair.  Perhaps the owners realized the end was in sight and saw further investment as foolhardy.

Dyckman Ferry, 1936.

In a letter to the New York Times, A. Burr wrote, “Last Sunday I made a trip on the Dyckman Street ferries across the Hudson and I was horrified by the condition of these boats.  They must be the oldest ferryboats in the United States, they are unsanitary and their old frames squeak. Life-preservers are placed high on the wall, and the hooks to tear the wooden shelf on which they are stored are even higher than the shelf itself.” (New York Times, June 21, 1935.)

The ferryboat “Florida” in 1939.

Of course all good things must come to an end.

Dyckman Street ferry terminal in 1937.

According to Arthur Adams’ history of the Hudson River, “The line operated until May 21, 1942, when the only remaining usable float-bridge at Dyckman Street collapsed, pinning the boat in the slip.  The Second World War discouraged any thoughts of restoring service immediately.”

Dyckman Street Ferry, lithograph by Raymond White Skofield,1937.

But the story of the Dyckman Street ferry doesn’t quite end in 1942.

New York Times, July 4, 1949.

In 1949, an upper east-sider named Fred Kosnack applied for and was granted the ferry concession.

His sixty-foot boats, capable carrying 65 passengers, did a brisk business that summer.  New Yorkers have always been a nostalgic lot, and in a post-war environment, Kosnack’s little boats did much to boost people’s spirits.

According to the Times, “Mr. Kosnack, a river man for the last twenty years took his time in piloting his boat across the calm waters. “Let them inhale the cool air,’ he said. ‘The good Lord knows they will go back to the sweltering apartments at the end of the day.’” (New York Times, July 4, 1949)

On October 15, 1949, Kosnack’s concession expired and the Dyckman Street ferry became but a fond memory in the hearts of generations of New Yorkers.

Site of the old Dyckman Street ferry terminal on the Hudson River in 2013. Currently home to “La Marina.”

Firemen and rescue workers search icy inlet in Inwood Hill Park for bodies after tragic skating accident on Christmas Eve of 1932. (Photo from collection of Cole Thompson)

On Christmas Eve of 1932 some thirty children were skating and sliding on the frozen inlet at the base of Inwood Hill when the ice gave way.

Photograph of the 1932 accident site taken on Feb. 20, 2015.

Noemie Kennedy, who curated a Native American museum from a cabin near the water’s edge, told reporters that the kids had told her of their plan to play on the ice.  She told them the idea was dangerous, but they failed to heed her warning.

Marie Noemie Boulerease Constantine Kennedy. Photographed in Inwood Hill Park.

Naomie watched helplessly as child after child tumbled into the freezing water.

Niagara Falls Gazette, December 24, 1932.

Had police and volunteers not quickly responded to the scene the loss of life might have devastated the Inwood community.  Despite the rescuers brave efforts, ten-year old James “Red” McGuire, who lived in 10 Cooper Street and attended nearby Good Shepherd School, drowned in the accident.

“The tunnel with its long row of dimly shining electric bulbs becomes a banging, hissing, vibrating pandemonium; a dozen compressed-air drills thud away in all directions, with boys pouring water into the drill holes, and Italians scrape and shovel away the debris at the bottom of the slowly disappearing wall.” (The World’s Work, Vol. III, 1901)

Tunneling the subway through Fort George Hill, The Century Illustrated Magazine, 1902.

October 24, 1903

Timothy Sullivan glanced at his watch. It was minutes before ten o’clock. The sliver of a new moon dangled above the camp.

“Back to work boys,” the Irishman shouted as he gestured toward the ragged hole at the base of Fort George Hill.

Sullivan, a construction foreman for New York’s ambitious subway system, was in charge of the northern end of a deep tunnel project that would soon stream mass transit riders beneath Washington Heights.  The tunnel would forever change the rural nature of northern Manhattan—with its stables, red brick schoolhouse and quaint country church.  Soon the farm-strewn Inwood valley would be connected to downtown. Speculators were already erecting apartment houses along Dyckman Street.

The project was a tremendous endeavor.  Miners with work experience all over the world signed on for the job.  They spoke in underground jargon and swapped tales of operations in Colorado, Johannesburg, the Klondike and Siberia.  Not one of the men referred to the work before them as a tunnel—below ground everyone called it the “mine.”   When completed it would be the second largest two-track tunnel ever constructed in the United States—surpassed only by the Hoosac tunnel in western Massachusetts.

Fort George tunnel, 1904, NYHS.

Fort George tunnel, 1904, NYHS.

The dangerous conditions created by the unpredictable Hudson schist—called “bastard granite” by the workers—and recent heavy rains, caused all sorts of delays.  Three crews worked round-the-clock, in eight-hour shifts, to make up lost time.   General contractor John B. McDonald took a personal interest in the work. McDonald was familiar with the region, having attended Public School 52, just blocks from the tunnel entrance.

Map and elevation diagram of NYC subway, circa 1904. (Click on image to enlarge)

The forty-five-year-old foreman’s orders carried his crew south from 200^th Street—digging, drilling and blasting their way though some of the most unforgiving rock in Manhattan as two teams worked on separate sections up from 157th Street.  With any luck the three tubes would connect sometime around Christmas.  That October evening the two northern ends were separated by only 500 feet of rock.

It was a Saturday night and the gang of mostly Italian drillers, muckers and cleaners had just finished their supper break. Italians, along with Irish immigrants, represented the backbone of the subway dig—now entering its fourth year.  A common laborer might earn as little at twenty cents an hour, but tunnel duty offered hazard pay.  Some in Sullivan’s crew likely earned more than three dollars a day—at least twice as much as ­workers who toiled in other parts of the system.

Fort George tunnel, 1904, NYHS.

The previous spring, when 4,000 striking Italian workers protested wages as low as  $1.87 for a ten hour day, the system’s largest sub-contractor, Michael Degnon, responded: “I will not give them one penny more under any circumstances and I will not reduce the working day one hour…we have in Maryland, working for us on the Wabash railroad, 4,000 negroes.  If necessary I will bring these men to New York, secure the best quarters for them on the negro side of town and put them in the places of these Italians.”  (New York Sun, May 8, 1903)

Fort George tunnel, 1904, NYHS.

A difficult life presented itself to the laborers who lived in shanties up and down the construction lines. Some compared the Fort George area to mining towns in the Wild West.  Below ground the workers sweated alongside horses and mules used pull rock-laden tramcars to the tunnel mouth.  An army of rats rounded out the menagerie.

As the twenty-man gang entered the tunnel mouth they began “sounding” the rock—tapping on the walls and ceiling with their miner’s hammers to make certain the roof above them was stable.  Earlier, while the crew ate dinner, three small explosive charges, about two pounds of dynamite, were detonated some 1,000 feet down the line where the tunnel ended 110-feet beneath the surface of 195^th Street.

Fort George tunnel, 1904, NYHS.

The foreman and his twenty-year-old electrician, William Scheutte, were the first to enter the blast site.  The German electrician carried with him a string of incandescent lamps to light the way as the team worked past the heavy support timbers that lined the route.

Fort George tunnel,1904, NYHS.

Charles Crocker and Matthew Hargreaves, African American laborers who brought up the rear, heard a frightening rumble just minutes after they entered the tunnel.

“Go back, quick, the ceiling is going to fall!” they heard Sullivan shout before they were blown to the ground by a rush of wind.

Climbing to their feet the men scrambled toward the tunnel entrance and sprinted to the nearby Speedway Livery Stables where a telephone was used to sound the alarm.

Minutes later Dyckman Street came alive.  A stream of ambulances, fire wagons and volunteers swarmed the tunnel mouth—the scene reminiscent of a coal mining disaster with workers trapped in a subterranean hell.

Tunnel entrance in 1905, NYHS.

A small band of individuals that included several surviving workers, Edward Cunniffe and John McGowan, both doctors from Fordham Hospital, a policeman named Dempsey and Rev. Thomas Lynch, from St. Elizabeth’s Church on 187^th Street, volunteered to enter the tunnel to search for survivors.

“Is there anyone here who speaks both English and Italian,” shouted the sixty-year old clergyman.

“I can talk a little English, Padre,” a red-shirted Italian replied.  The frightened young man was concerned that his brother might be one of the workers trapped in the collapse.

“Then come with me and see what the poor fellow would say,” responded the black-robed Irish priest.

Firemen warned against entering the tunnel.

Policeman Dempsey led the rescuers by the dim glow of a lantern commandeered from an arriving ambulance.

Five hundred feet into the darkness the group encountered a horrific scene.

A split second after Sullivan’s frantic scream a giant rock later determined to measure 44-feet-long, four to five feet thick and weighing some 300 tons, had fallen from the ceiling.

A pile of the “bastard granite,” timber and construction debris blocked the rescuer’s path.  Workers, bodies twisted and crushed, hung grotesquely from the mass.

The cries of the dying echoed through the darkness.  Newspapers described a “ghastly chamber of death.” (New York Times, October 26, 1903)

1903 New York Herald, October 26, 1903.

Father Lynch, a white-haired Roman Catholic priest with kindly blue eyes and a ruddy face, quickly worked his way to survivor Alfonzo Annetello whose crushed leg was trapped inside the pile.

“The mass of rock and timbers was perhaps fifteen feet high,” the Times account continued.  “Water dropped upon it from the roof, and little rivulets of blood ran down the side.  Heedless of warnings, Father Lynch made his way up the slippery incline to reach the dying man at the top.” (New York Times, October 26,1903)

“Kyrie eleison,” Lynch intoned softly as he pressed an ivory cross to the man’s quivering lips.  The priest recited the litany of the dead as the young Italian struggled to remain conscience.

When Father Lynch was finished the two Fordham doctors hastily amputated Annetello’s leg.  They then placed the body on a tram and ran alongside the car attempting to bandage the stump as they raced to the tunnel entrance.  The worker was taken by ambulance to Lebanon Hospital where he died at 2:45 that morning.

By this time police reserves and firemen had arrived to assist in the rescue and recovery.

 “Watch out for the rock! Some more will be killed if you aren’t careful,” policemen warned arriving volunteers.

 “Cries and groans from under the mass of stone,” a reporter wrote, “worked many into a nervous excitement, in which they were prepared to undertake any danger to render assistance to the imprisoned.”(New York Daily Tribune, October 26, 1903)

After the amputation victim had been taken out, rescuers, using hydraulic jacks, began the heartrending extraction of three other survivors.

“The three others were standing on a ledge under the semicircular roof when it fell, and apparently had fallen or thrown themselves forward,” wrote one journalist.   “As they pitched headfirst toward the floor their feet were pinioned under a mass of rock, holding them midway between the top and bottom of the tunnel.  They dangled with their heads down and blood pouring from their crushed feet and ankles over their bodies.  All were conscious, and alternately shrieked and prayed for aid.  Their cries maddened the rescuers who worked furiously to get at them, but the piles of rock that blocked the way made that out of the question.”

New York Herald, October 26, 1903.

“As the men hung there,” the account continued, “beating the air with their hands and every few minutes struggling to draw themselves up from their reversed position by gripping their legs until the additional pain and weakness compelled them to let go, men who saw and heard them sobbed like children.  The three laborers at last realized they were close to death and alternated their screams for relief with appeals for a priest.” (New York Press, October 25, 1903)

Doctors administered morphine to ease the pain.

After blasting the giant boulder into smaller and more manageable pieces, rescuers pried survivor Juno Baski loose from the pile.  He was taken by ambulance to Fordham Hospital.  Several other Italians, buried under tons of rock and shale, had been crushed beyond recognition.

New York Tribune, October 26, 1903.

By midnight a large crowd had gathered near the tunnel mouth.

“The wives of the dead and injured congregated in the darkness,” the New York Press reported, “venturing as far into the dimly lighted interior as they dared and gazing fixedly at the body of each workman as it was brought to the entrance on the tram car.” (New York Press, October 26, 1903)

New York Times, October 26, 1903.

The ten-year-old son of foreman Timothy Sullivan, who arrived around 3:00 am, became the most enduring face of the tragedy.

“Get away, boy,” a policeman told the youngster after catching him in the tunnel, “there’s still danger here.”

“No, I won’t,” the boy shot back undeterred, “Father’s in there and I’ll stay here until you get him out.”  (New York Daily Tribune, October 26, 1903)

Around six that morning the body of Sullivan’s young electrician, William Scheutte was discovered near the tunnel face.

“He lay on his side,” read one account,  “his shoulders, chest and legs horribly mashed and twisted, although his face had escaped disfiguration.” (New York Tribune, October 26, 1903)

Scheutte’s step-brother, Joseph Weckisfer, a patrolman attached to the 152^nd Street Station, collapsed in the street when he was told that William’s body had been placed in an empty cell inside the stationhouse.

The body of Timothy Sullivan, the Irish foreman, was found several hours later pinned under huge slab of rock.  Grim faced workers fought back tears as they led his young son deep into the hole.

“The face was recognizable,” wrote the Tribune, “and Samuel saw quickly that it was his father.  He walked soberly beside the tramcar, which carried the body to the mouth of the tunnel.  He climbed into the patrol wagon and went with the body to the station, where he remained dry-eyed until the Coroner permitted the removal of the body to the Sullivan’s home at No. 803 Third Avenue.” (New York Daily Tribune, October 26, 1903)

Around eight that morning the rescuers and laborers put down their tools.  The missing workers had all been accounted for and the search and recovery teams were exhausted.  Water streamed in from the tunnel roof and another collapse was feared.

After more than ten hours below ground Father Lynch exited the base of Fort George Hill and stood, streaked with mud, before a group of newspapermen.

“It was nothing,” Father Lynch would say of his long night in the tunnel. “I was only doing my duty—only doing what priests all over the world are doing every day.  There are priests here in the city who do more than that every day of their lives.”  (New York Times, October 26, 1903)

A few lucky survivors, New York Tribune, October 26, 1903.

Of the ten lives lost in the disaster seven were Italian.  The accident was the single deadliest incident in the construction of the system.

Days after the disaster it was discovered that twenty-eight-year-old Frank Upper, who was crushed beyond recognition in the collapse, had posed as a common laborer in order to learn the tunnel trade. He was, in fact, the son of a wealthy Canadian railroad contractor and the protégé of John B. McDonald, Chief Contractor of the IRT.

Incident Report

The day after the tragedy George S. Rice, Deputy Chief Engineer of the New York Rapid Transit Commission, issued his report.

Rice concluded that the collapse was an accident pure and simple.  He stated that all of the workers were aware of the “hazardous nature of their task” and that every effort had been made to keep them safe.

“Moisture in the rock was in all probability the cause of the disaster,” Rice stated.

“There has been a great deal of rain recently,” Rice continued.  “Probably as a result of that, this 300-ton mass, with moisture filled seams on both sides of it, just slid right out of place.  There was no way to guard against it and there was no way of detecting the danger beforehand…The strange feature of this case is that the rock did not fall till half an hour after the blast.  The men had waited a reasonable time before going back to their work, and were justified in assuming that everything was all right.”

 Postscript
On March 19, 1904, after three of years toiling underground, the two northern tunnel crews made the connection 180-feet below 190^th Street. The southern dig had been completed in 1902 and now the entire two-mile span had been achieved.

The workers gave a celebratory shout and waited for Chief Engineer William Barclay Parsons to make the first pass though the narrow aperture.  Parsons flashed a broad grin to the miners in the northern passage as he crawled out of the hole.  The tunnels lined up perfectly.

Fort George tunnel entrance in 1906, NYHS.

Fort George Tunnel, undated postcard.

On March 12, 1906 the first passenger train departed 157^th Street at six in the morning to surprisingly little fanfare.  The train rolled through the deep tunnel, bypassing the still to be completed 168^th and 181^st Street stations, and exited the base of Fort George Hill where an elevated rail line carried passengers as far as 221^st Street.

The fare was a nickel and northern Manhattan would never be the same.

May they rest in peace:

Timothy Sullivan, 45
William Scheutte, 20
Frank Upper, 45
Alfonzo Armetello, 35
Guisseppe Barone, 35
Luigi Pocci, 30
Giacomo Schaccetti, 27
Ferri Telli, 40
Stanziore Brune
Louis Tippio

In a world of helicopter parenting it is hard to imagine letting a child swim across the Hudson River, but in 1939 six-year-old Stephen “Sonny” Kole became a media darling for his dangerous river exploits.

New York Times, September 4, 1939.

That September Sonny, a blue-eyed, fair-haired youngster who weighed just 59-pounds, dove into the Hudson River from the ferry dock of the Palisades Interstate Park about a mile north of the George Washington Bridge.

The Dansville Breeze, September 7, 1939.

Accompanied by Victor Till, former world champion relay swimmer, the boy swam toward the Dyckman Street Ferry slip on the New York side of the Hudson.

Passengers on the ferryboats “Englewood” and “Florida” cheered Sonny on as he alternated between breaststroke, crawl and sidestroke.

Along the way the six-year-old joked with reporters who trailed alongside in canoes, kayaks and motorboats.

“How about a beer when we get ashore?” the youngster quipped.

“Ride ‘em cowboy,” he exclaimed as he tackled the wakes of passing ferries.

Long Island Daily Press, August 2, 1940.

“Sirens sounded and people cheered as he emerged fresh from the water at De George’s boathouse at Dyckman Street,” wrote on reporter. “His father cheered too and said that Hollywood ought to grab him.”

Long Island Daily Press, September 23, 1941.

“Sonny can hurl a wicked baseball, punt and pass a football, do ten kinds of dives, chin himself fifteen times, do sixty pushups, wrestle, box hurdle, sprint, row a boat and paddle a canoe,” his father breathlessly continued.  (New York Sun, September 4, 1939)

Amazingly the Kole’s, both gym teachers from Edwardsville, IL, weren’t the first to encourage their child to take the Hudson River plunge.

In 1925 six-year-old Johnny “Freckles” Devine swam the Hudson River from the pier at 136^th Street to the New Jersey shore in just thirty-five minutes.

Former Inwood resident Mike Boland recalls cliff diving into the Spuyten Duyvil:

Babe Ruth poses with a 1926 Nash.

On a summer evening in 1935 Julia Straus, a fifty-eight year old resident of 72 Seaman Avenue had a run in with the most famous athlete in baseball—Babe Ruth.

Intersection of Seaman and Cumming, Inwood, NYC.

As it happened Ruth was driving southbound on Seaman Avenue when Straus walked into the path of his car near the intersection of Seaman Avenue and Cumming Street.

Babe Ruth in Seaman Avenue accident, New York Times, August 7, 1935.

The ballplayer quickly loaded Straus into his car and drove her to the nearby Jewish Memorial Hospital for treatment.  While inside the hospital Ruth telephoned police to report the accident.

Straus suffered a possible brain concussion and a bruised right leg.

“The police said that Ruth had been driving with the green light and had had no chance to stop,” reported the Times.  “They placed the responsibility for the accident on Mrs. Straus and took no action against the baseball player.”  (New York Times, August 7, 1935)

One of Captain Flitner’s ships, The Constellation.

There was a time when everyone in northern Manhattan was familiar with the name William Ladd Flitner.  He was after all a bona-fide sea captain who lived on Dyckman Street several blocks east of the Hudson River.

Early in his career Flitner captained the slave ship Choktaw on transatlantic voyages between Gambia and slave markets of New Orleans. Gambia, which borders Senegal on the west African coast, was immortalized as the homeland of Kunta Kinte in author Alex Haley’s Roots.

1775 map of Fort James and James Island near the mouth of the River Gambia. In 2011 the island was renamed Kunta Kinteh Island.

In 1840 Flitner reported that “British cruisers are very busy on the (Gambian) coast endeavoring to destroy the slave trade.”

“The slavers in some cases,” Flitner stated, “have adopted the plan of sailing in companies of five or six vessels, only one being loaded with slaves. Should a cruiser overhaul them they all take separate courses, and the cruiser not knowing which one to pursue, the loaded slaver has a fair chance to escape.”

Flitner warned, in a report delivered in New Orleans after a three-month voyage from the African coast, that the Gambian slave trade was becoming increasingly unstable. Already, Flitner stated, “two slave factories have been burned by British cruisers.” (Daily Pittsburgh Gazette, July 10, 1840)

In 1856 Flitner, who descended from a Maine seafaring family, built for his wife and children their home on 17 Bolton Road overlooking Dyckman Street.  By the time Flitner moved his family to northern Manhattan he had left the slave trade. Until his retirement in 1868 Flitner transported passengers and cargo, usually coal, between Liverpool and New York City.

The USS Constellation loading famine relief supplies for Ireland at the New York Navy Yard, in March of 1880. Source: U.S. Naval Institute.

During Flitner’s downtime between voyages on the “Enoch Barnard,” the “Escort” and the Irish Famine ships “Constellation” and “Clarissa Currier,” he likely enthralled his uptown neighbors with tales of high seas adventures.

One can imagine him spinning fantastic yarns inside Robert Veitch’s redbrick general store near the Dyckman Street marina (then called Tubby Hook).

Dyckman Street seen from Payson Avenue on far right to Hudson River at far left, circa 1902, Flitner home highlighted. Collection of Cole Thompson. (click to enlarge)

Site of the Flitner home seen in March of 2015. Dyckman Street between Payson Avenue and Staff Street, Inwood, NYC.

Captain Flitner and his wife Louisa raised five children in their wood-frame house just west of Payson Avenue.  All in the family were active members of the Mount Washington Presbyterian Church; then located just blocks from their home.  The Flitner kids, William, Walter, Clara, Albert and Charles, all attended Public School 52, a hulking brick structure on Academy Street and Broadway.

Free library inside Flitner home on 17 Bolton Road, Inwood, NYC, 1903. Source: NYPL.

The Flitner’s opened the region’s first public library within their Inwood home.

Clara Flitner listed as teacher at PS 52. Source: 1875 NY Board of Education Annual Report.

The Flitner’s lone daughter, Clara, a schoolteacher at P.S. 52, her alma mater, maintained the library.   Of the several thousand books in the collection, some 700 were on loan from the New York Public Library, which lacked a facility in this northern hamlet of Manhattan.  According to a history of the Inwood library published in the 1920’s the Flitner’s reading room was “a favorite resort of the children of the neighborhood…its beautiful location on the hillside, commanding a very charming view of the Hudson River, and its cheerful accommodations rendering it very attractive.  Of its 2,000 volumes, as many as 1,000 have been taken out by its patrons in a single month.”

PS 52 in 1905 postcard by Robert Veitch.

Charles Flitner followed his sister in securing a teaching post at P.S. 52, though he initially worried that he was “poorly equipped” for the position.  Dr. George Shipman Payson, pastor of the Mount Washington Presbyterian Church, allayed his fears by taking the young teacher into his tutelage.  “Dr. Payson saw my need,” Flitner wrote, “induced me to study, taught me Latin at his home, and made a lifelong student of me, for which I owe him a debt of gratitude which can never be paid.” (Forty Years in the Wilderness, 1914)

Young Charles Flitner would eventually find his groove among the blackboards and inkwells and bear witness to the development of Inwood as it grew from farm to city.

Rev. George Shipman Payson

When his pastor, the Rev. George Shipman Payson, retired in 1914, Charles Flitner offered a tender description of the mid-nineteenth century Inwood of his youth for his pastor’s farewell ceremony:

“In my boyhood on the East side of Kingsbridge Road (now Broadway) from 187^th Street there were but seven buildings,” Flitner wrote. “Of these the schoolhouse, the gashouse and the Sowerby house are still standing, and even these will soon be a memory. Only one road led east; going to the Century House on the line of 212^th Street, and to the private cemetery situated near it. On the west, the only road led to the railway station of the Hudson River Railway and a dock at which coal barges landed and schooners from Maine loaded with cordwood and lumber. The name of the railway station had recently been changed from Tubby Hook to Inwood. From this road, almost at its junction with Kingsbridge Road and directly opposite the church, a shady lane wound up the hill.

Flitner House, 17 Bolton Road. Source: MCNY.

As this community was isolated from the great city, its social life was unique. From my earliest recollections the social event of the whole year was the winter skating. A brook ran north of Inwood Street (now Dyckman Street), went under Broadway and continued eastward to the Harlem River. About 300 feet east of Broadway it ran between two small hills. Here, early in December we built a dam, and by Christmas we generally had an acre or two of good ice. During the rest of the winter nearly the whole community including old men and children gathered on the pond in the evening – about the only social life of the community. We assiduously gathered firewood and bought barrels of tar, and on Saturday nights had special ‘illuminations,’ outrivaling, as some of us would maintain, the brilliance of electricity.

Flitner home circa 1915. Source:MCNY.

In the summer the river was a constant delight and attraction. Our favorite swimming ground was in Spuyten Duyvil Creek beyond Mr. McCreery’s.  Here the boys would gather at high tide for all kinds of swimming ‘stunts.’  Many of us had boats, and on moonlit nights we would go up or down the river or into Spuyten Duyvil Creek.  By day we would make longer excursions, and many all-day trips were made. 

Flitner home, circa 1915. Source: MCNY.

The rapid transit of those days consisted of two trains that ran back and forth between 30^th Street and Spuyten Duyvil along the Hudson River.  Most of the men in the community found it convenient to go to business on the 7:53 train.  So we met one another for a few minutes at the station every morning, and we were not so absorbed in our newspapers that we lost interest in one another.  Groups were formed on the platform or in different corners of the waiting room for the discussion of current events, and we had our regular partners with whom we shared our seat on the train and confided our hopes and fears of the day.  Even the conductor seemed to belong to our social group and ran his train, not by his watch, but by the appearance of certain tardy ones.” (Recollections of Charles Flitner, Forty Years in the Wilderness, 1914)

William Flitner admitted to the New York Bar Association. Source: History of the Bench and Bar of New York, 1897.

William H. Flitner disbarred. Source: New York Herald, February 6, 1909.

In 1908 a black sheep son of the sea captain, William Jr., an attorney-at-law, was convicted of grand larceny and sentenced to six years in the penitentiary on New York’s notorious Blackwell Island.  The courts ruled that Flitner had defrauded two sisters of $2,500 in the course of a stock swindle.

Flitner’s sentence was reduced to a year behind bars, but the conviction cost him his license to practice law.

Captain Flitner died on May 27, 1889.  Charles Edward Flitner, the school teacher, died in 1930.  His sister, Clara, died two years later in 1932.

Fire consumes Flitner home at 17 Bolton Road, from photo dated April 12, 1930. Collection of Cole Thompson.

In 1930 the Flitner home, which had provided refuge to sea captains and school children for nearly seventy-five years, fell victim to fire.

Historical Documents to Explore:

William Ladd Flitner 1813 birth certificate

1855 New York State Census

1870 Federal Census

1880 Federal Census

1892 City Directory

1904 Summons for William H Flitner

1908 Blackwell Island Prisoner Log shows admission of William H. Flitner

1920 Federal Census

“Two heads cut off and thrown high into the tree have only the winds with which to scheme.” –Old Norse Proverb

Hervor dying after battle with the Huns. Painting by Peter Nicolai Arbo.

In the early-1890’s Alexander Crawford Chenoweth uncovered a curious stone while excavating a high knoll near his Inwood home. Chenoweth was a respected engineer who designed the Croton Aqueduct and the base for the Statue of Liberty, but on weekends he assumed the role of amateur archeologist. Just years before Chenoweth had discovered caves once inhabited by Native Americans while exploring the northern Manhattan woodland now known as Inwood Hill Park.

Upon close examination Chenoweth noticed what appeared to be carvings on the downward facing surface of the stone.   The striations reminded him of the markings left behind by Vikings during their age of conquest.

Sketch of the fabled Inwood Stone, New York Herald, August 5, 1895

But was it plausible that visiting Vikings left behind ancient Runic writings for future generations to decipher while visiting Manhattan in some bygone era? Or was it more likely that the slight grooves in this “Inwood stone” were drag marks left behind by a glacial retreat some 10,000 years before Chenoweth’s find?

The matter might have been forgotten altogether had it not been for a similar find several years later in rural Massachusetts.

“The Weston Stone”

Two hundred miles from Inwood, in 1893, Cornelia Horsford discovered another stone covered with supposed “Runic” carvings in Weston, Massachusetts.

Cornelia Horsford in 1914 photo. Source: Sylvestermanor.org

Horsford was the daughter of noted chemist and archeologist Eben Norton Horsford.  Cornelia’s father was “an enthusiastic advocate of the Norse claims to the discovery of America at a place which he named Fort Norumbega,” wrote one journalist in 1895.

Eben Norton Horsford (1818 – 1893)

The elder Horsford described Fort Norumbega as a “wonderful city” built by Leif Erickson.  (New York Herald, August 4, 1895)

Ever the archeologist’s daughter, Cornelia Horsford surveyed any new landscape with a keen eye for hidden historical treasures.

“One Sunday morning in October, 1893,” she wrote, “I drove with my sister through that part of Vineland in Massachusetts which is called Weston, a country bearing many traces of a vanished race, and within two miles of Fort Norumbega.  As we were driving through a shady lane past a country place recently purchased by a Boston gentleman, we saw beside the road an inscribed stone.  This stone was lying with a large number of other stones, which within a few days had been brought from a high uncultivated field to be used in the building of two large storm gate posts.”  (New York Herald, August 4, 1895)

The Kalvesten Runestone, Sweden.

Horsford believed the stone was etched with Runic carvings.

She quickly mailed sketches of her stone to Chenoweth for comparison.

Could the two stones be related, she inquired.

“Invasion of Danes under Hinguar and Hubba,” 1130, St. Edmund’s manuscript.

“As I traced the work of the Vinelanders as far south as the east end of Long Island,” she recounted, “it seemed to me possible, if not probable, that this inscription might resemble that on the Weston stone.  Accordingly I wrote to Mr. Chenoweth, asking him if I could get a photograph of the inscription.  He most kindly sent me one within a short time.”  (New York Herald, August 4, 1895)

After examining Chenoweth’s photographic evidence she became convinced that the two stones were indeed connected.  Horsford soon traveled to northern Manhattan to examine the Inwood stone in person.  She concluded that while similar the two stones likely came from different periods.

New York Herald, August 4, 1895.

“The Inwood stone is three feet long, two feet high and two feet thick,” the New York Herald reported. “It had been split across the top and across the bottom, the top having a hammered or pitted surface.  The inscription having been protected from the weather by the earth which has covered it since shortly after it was cut, appears now as it did then, and as the man who made it intended it should appear.”  (New York Herald, August 4, 1895)

While examining the Inwood Stone under Chenoweth’s watchful eye, Horsford set to work translating the ancient message.

Codex Runicus, a vellum manuscript from approximately AD 1300 containing one of the oldest and best preserved texts of the Scanian Law, is written entirely in runes.

Though some of the markings were difficult to read, Horsford was able to extrapolate the words “Kirkjussynir akta” from the surface of Chenoweth’s stone.

“I suppose it to mean,” Horsford wrote, “that representatives of the Church of Rome had been there to tax, or number the people, and that this stone was inscribed to commemorate the event.” (History of Westchester County, New York: From Its Earliest Settlement to the Year 1900 by Frederic Shonnard and W.W. Spooner.)

Norsemen landing in Iceland, Guerber, H. A. 1909.

So is it possible that the Vatican hired a team of Viking census takers to North America for the purpose of conducting a head count?

When called upon at the Metropolitan Club, Chenoweth’s reaction to Horsford’s findings was noncommittal.   Her theories as to the stone’s origins were both “scholarly and plausible,” he supposed, but the gentleman scholar had very little more to say on the subject.

Houdini and his youngest brother Doctor Leopold Weiss.

On the evening of October 6, 1962, Dr. Leopold Weiss, the estranged brother of Harry Houdini, stood on the parapet of his northern Manhattan apartment building. He inhaled one last breath of cool autumn air then plunged to his death.

57 Park Terrace West photographed in 2015.

57 Park Terrace West sits on a tree-lined street one half block north of Isham Park in the Inwood section of the borough. Charles Kreymborg designed the six-story art deco structure, which occupies the northwest corner of Park Terrace West and 215th Street, in 1937.

57 Park Terrace West entrance photographed in 2015.

The Kreymborg & Son architectural firm built dozens of apartment houses in Inwood and Washington Heights.  Another of their buildings, The Embassy, now stands around the block on 50 Park Terrace East.

57 Park Terrace West lobby.

Today, upon entering the newly renovated building, decades after the death of Leopold Weiss, co-op residents pass through a terrazzo-floored lobby decorated with Art Deco murals. The same lobby Dr. Weiss walked across every day after tending to the infirm.

Leopold Weiss in 1907.

An 1899 graduate of Bellevue Hospital, Weiss became one of New York’s first radiologists. A brilliant mind who lived in the otherworldly shadow of the greatest showmen the world has ever known.  The pioneering x-ray technician was the magician’s youngest brother. At times the relationship, the good times, but mostly the bad, must have consumed the respected scientist.

Houdini (center) and his brothers Leopold, Hardeen, Bill and Nathan, circa 1914.

Siblings Leopold and Harry enjoyed a close relationship in their early days.  Their bond was so dear that  Houdini allowed Leopold to join him on tour, referring to his younger brother as “Doc” from the stage.  Ultimately, the two would have a falling out after “Doc” became the center of a family scandal.  In an incredible show of poor taste Leopold married Sadie, the wife of he and Harry’s brother, Nathan, shortly after their divorce.  Sadly, Leopold and Harry were still estranged at the time of Houdini’s death in 1926.

Leopold Weiss obituary, New York Times, October 7, 1962.

Weiss retired in 1949 after his eyesight began to fail.  Some speculated the damage was the result of exposure to radiation emitted from his x-ray devices. The morning of October 7, 1962 the New York Times offered the kind concession that he was killed when he “jumped or fell” off his Inwood rooftop.

Harry and Bess Houdini in 1913 photo.

Weiss was not the only relative of the legendary illusionist to live out his final days in Inwood.  For decades after Houdini’s death, his widow, Bess, lived in a two family home at 67 Payson Avenue. She died on February 11, 1943.

Harry Houdini Hinson obituary, New York Times, February 18,1934

Houdini’s twenty-year-old nephew, Harry Houdini Hinson was killed in a sledding accident in Inwood Hill Park in 1934.

In the Spring of 2015 a lone seal frolicked in the waters of the Spuyten Duyvil. While the Inwood sighting was rare, seals have appeared in northern Manhattan before. In 2009 a harbor seal spent several weeks on the very same Columbia University dock before moving on.

Seal on the Columbia University dock along the Spuyten Duyvil in Inwood, New York City. Photographed on April 17, 2015 by Cole Thompson.

Privately, I’ve nicknamed this little critter “Pop” in honor of “Pop” Seeley who operated a boathouse on the Spuyten Duyvil a century ago.

I hope you enjoy the video.