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

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

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

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

And of course, there were the fortune tellers.

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

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

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

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

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

New York Tribune Illustrated
October 30, 1904

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But by 1906 such camps would become all but impossible. That year the elevated IRT (today’s one train) arrived in Inwood. With it came aggressive real estate speculation and development. The flowing pastures needed for a proper encampment were either developed or spoken for.

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

Click here for more Inwood History.

One of the most important if not enduring images of the Great Depression is Dorothea Lange’s haunting portrait of a migrant worker cradling her two young children. Her eyes tell a personal story of quiet desperation, while the photo itself serves as a tragic commentary on a country in the throes of economic devastation so great that even its children were put in harms way.

Less familiar, but of equal importance, at least locally, are the images and stories of Inwood and points nearby, as the Crash of 1929 spread like a cancer through American society.

This is a story of tragedy and hardship, of coming together in time of need, of unemployment, public works, arts and ultimately survival.

While the scope of Great Depression seems unimaginable from a modern perspective, it is important to remember that this nation had been though a series of economic crisises before the big crash. In 1907, 1910 and 1921 the nation endured other depressions, though at the time they were referred to as “panics.” To add to the chaos, the whole Kingsbridge area suffered terribly in 1922 when the Johnson Ironworks closed its doors on some 1,200 workers to make room for construction on the Spuyten Duyvil.

And while these “panics” and layoffs had a profound effect on Inwood, the Great Depression was a different animal all together. By 1926, working class New Yorkers had followed subway construction north, carving out a denser, apartment based community, where before existed mainly farmland. The landscape had changed. This time there would be casualties.

4740-46 Broadway at Thayer Street, 1936

Even through the eyes of a child the drawn out day to day downward spiral was evident and terrifying. Lifelong Inwood resident Peter Dongan, who sold newspapers after school to help support his family helps set the scene:

“I developed an acute awareness of the Great Depression in Inwood. I have vivid memories of seeing people’s possessions carried out of their homes and deposited on the curb, and usually without terrible preparation . The Sheriff would appear and say ‘you’re evicted’ and there was no time to pack. So you would have a tearful scene, with people sitting on the sidewalk amidst their belongings.

It was a practice for people to go around the neighborhood and ring doorbells and say ‘we’ve been thrown out of our house,’ and collect a dollar here, a dollar there, whatever people could give, and get themselves moved back in again.” (Source: You Must Remember This, Jeff Kisselhoff, 1989.)

Harlem River and West 207th Street colony, 1933.

But many from in and out of the neighborhood had no such generosity to rely on and set up clapboard shacks, tents or lived in derelict boats along the riverfront.

To the east, along the Harlem River sat one such community. By all accounts this floating Hooverville, in the vicinity of 207th Street, functioned in a fairly civilized manner with neighbors watching each others backs. Some even grew their own vegetables.

Author Helen Worden, who walked the perimeter of Manhattan in the early 1930’s while researching her book, “Round Manhattan’s Rim,” describes Inwood’s east side:

Harlem River and West 207th Street. 1933.

“A curiously individual group they are, these house-boat homes. The personal taste of the people who live in them is reflected in the shape, ornamentations and furnishings of the houseboats. All had porches, many flowers, and one boasted a stained-glass dining-room window.

Harlem River and W 207th Street colony, 1933.

A houseboat costs about eight hundred dollars. Ten dollars a month is the docking charge. The majority have telephones, electricity and water from the city. Year in and year out these boats anchor off Two Hundred and Seventh Street. All have names. Sunny is printed on the life preserver of John Olsen’s boat, and Jennie’s House appears on the side of a neighbor’s dwelling. Sailors handiwork in the form of rope-knotted curtains, carved frames and silk-embroidered flags dress up the rooms.

Harlem River and West 207th Street ,1933.

Jess Thomas is the guardian angel of the houseboat settlement. He is a great, tall, blue-black Negro from Binnettsville, South Carolina, with a friendly smile and a pride in his neighborhood. He reminded me of the descendants of the African chieftains who live on Edisto Island off the coast of South Carolina.

Harlem River and West 207th Street colony, 1933.

It is Jess’s sweet-potato patch and peanut crop that has made a farming community of this locality in a city of six million. ‘Shucks, they told me peanuts and sweet potatoes can’t be grown up here!, he chuckled. ‘But look at ‘em.’ He pointed to the healthy plants. ‘After frost hits the vines I’ll be able to dig ‘em.’”

On the west side of Inwood along the Harlem River stood Camp Dyckman, another Hooverville, this one based on land. By the time Helen Worden visited the camp sometime before 1934 most of its residents, mainly World War I veterans, had relocated south to the infamous Camp Thomas Paine located on the Hudson in the West 70’s. Worden gave this description of what she witnessed looking west from Inwood Hill:

“Below a straggling settlement of shacks and lean-tos fringed the water.
A man swinging an ax hacked at a wood-pile near a house. We watched him with idle interest. A short distance away stood a soda-pop stand tended by a ragged aproned proprietor. Suddenly the wood-cutter stopped, gave a shout, picked up his ax and charged at the soda-stand owner, who dived out from his store like a frightened rabbit and scuttled down the shore-line to a small hut. He locked himself in just as the man with the ax arrived. After hanging around for a few minutes the big fellow went back to his wood-chopping.

Squatters Colony for unemployed workers (Camp Dyckman) Just north of Dyckman on the Hudson, 1934.

‘What is that settlement over there?’ we asked at Captain R. T. Windle’s boat shop when we reached Dyckman Street.

‘Used to be a B. E. F. village,’ some one volunteered.

‘It ain’t much of anything now. Why don’t you walk, up and take a look at it?’

We followed the shore, climbing over the cans, rocks and refuse to the wind-swept group of shacks. A man and a dog guarded the first one, the same man who had wielded the ax. He stared at us through surly eyes, but called to his dog to be quiet when it barked. Just beyond his house was a small tar-papered hut marked head-quarters. From the top of it waved a tattered American flag and posted up on the front in bold letters was this verse:

‘Hoover was the Engineer
Mellon rang the bell
Wall Street gave the signal
Then the country went to Hell.’”

Spuyten Duyvil Boxcar Camp near 225th Street, 1933.

In Marble Hill, just across the Spuyten Duyvil a remarkable woman named Sarah J. Atwood and her daughter Mavis, ran a boxcar village. Atwood, a widowed mother at the age of 22 was no stranger to the plight of the unemployed. A former employment agent, Atwood operated a food kitchen on Ellis Island during an economic downturn in 1914. She spent most of her adulthood espousing the same mantra– handouts only make matters worse–”Provide employment. That’s all. Make work. Make jobs.”

Testifying before Congress in 1916, more than a decade before the Great Depression , Atwood stated: “If there is employment made, and these men are taken and given good, wholesome, outdoor work, portable buildings can be put up, rock crushers can be started. Those men can be well fed, and in 90 days would learn the habit of industry, and some of them, perhaps, might begin a very different life.”

Spuyten Duyvil Boxcar Camp near 225th Street, 1933.

And while Atwood’s boxcar jungle was no walk in the park, it was, by all accounts well run and maintained. The fifty or so men living in the encampment were expected to contribute several dollars a week for room and board. The men slept four to a boxcar. Dinner likely featured Atwood’s signature “Mulligan stew,” a hearty pot of cabbage and other vegetables cooked over an open fire. While ammenities were obviously limited, each boxcar was equipped with a wood stove and nails to hang clothing. Idle hours were simply spent tossing horseshoes.

While running a Westchester railroad labor camp in 1941 Atwood was killed in an automobile accident. By then the 72 year old firebrand had put some one million men to work.

WPA Workers in Inwood Hill Park, 193

By the mid-1930’s Parks Commissioner Robert Moses began using W.P.A. funds and labor to build bridges, swimming pools, parks and playgrounds around the city. In Inwood Hill Park labor gangs set quickly to work demolishing old structures; derelict, but once beautiful mansions from a previous gilded age, and began carving out the familiar trails hikers enjoy today. Joining them in the Depression labor pool were workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal public relief program whose workers often included teenagers eager to learn a trade.

WPA Workers in Inwood Hill Park, 1938. (Note Henry Hudson Bridge in background)

In June of 1935 workers began construction on the Henry Hudson Bridge. The bridge, first promised in 1909, was a source of bitter debate and protest. Many felt the bridge would mar the natural beauty of the area, but Moses ignored the local outcry. By December of the following year his bridge was complete. The project came in five million dollars under budget.

Much like the Parks Department, the arts also benefitted from the pool of unemployed talent created by the Great Depression.

Harold Faye, WPA 1938-39 , "Last Train", shows MTA station at Spuyten Duyvil.

Artists including H.A. Weiss and Harold Faye were brought on board by Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) to document the fruits of Inwood’s labor on canvas. They quickly turned their eyes to the Spuyten Duyvil, which was and remains a source of inspiration for countless artists.

"Spuyten Duyvil Bridge" by H.A. Weiss.

While the ill effects of the Depression would be felt until World War II, the residents of Inwood learned to adapt and overcome. In some pockets a barter system was created for the exchange of goods and services.

Inwood Mutual Exchange System coupon from 1933.

Scarred, a little battered, but otherwise intact, Inwood had survived the Great Depression.

Author’s request: If you or someone you know have depression era stories you would like to share I encourage you to leave a comment below.

Herb Maruska with Ford Station Wagon in 1968

Frequent MyInwood contributer Herb Maruska grew up in Inwood.  His memories of post World War II Inwood are as detailed as they are fascinating.

This time around Herb takes us into the kitchens, basement and furnace of his childhood home located in 157-159 Vermilyea.  He calls this piece “Coal and Soap.”

Thanks Herb for this peek into a life before many of the modern conveniences we now take for granted.

Coal and Soap

Written by Herb Maruska:

The apartment house at 157-159 Vermilyea Avenue was built in 1910, so coal was originally used for heating the building. Although in the years following the Second World War, many buildings in the neighborhood slowly converted to oil heat, Mrs. Lichtenstein, the owner of the building, did not want to spend the money necessary for conversion to oil. So even in the 1960’s, the building continued to rely on coal.

157-159 Vermilyea Avenue in 1964

The coal was delivered from the Weber-Bunke-Lange Coal Yard on the Harlem River at 203rd Street. The coal was brought to the yard in barges, and dumped into a huge pile of coal on the shore. Coal was delivered to various apartment houses in coal trucks. When the truck arrived at 157 Vermilyea Avenue, it needed to come up on the sidewalk so that the coal could be dumped into the coal bin in the basement using a slide. The first apartment on the ground floor on the left side of the building served as the coal bin.

Weber-Bunke-Lange Coal 203 Street and Harlem River in 1935

On the day when the delivery of coal was scheduled, Harry  “Wujeku” Konopka (Wujeku means uncle in Polish), the super, would line up garbage cans in the street to prevent a car from being parked where the coal truck needed to cross over the sidewalk. When the truck was in place, he would open the front widow of the apartment and the coal chute would be set at the back of the truck, ranging through the window. Then the truck driver would raise the hopper and let the coal slide into the basement.

The coal then needed to be moved through the building to the furnace. A wheelbarrow was employed for this task. Konopka would use a shovel to fill the wheelbarrow with coal, and then he had to maneuver the load though the hallways back to the furnace. This was not an easy job for an elderly man, but he persevered. He would then open the heavy front door of the large cast iron furnace, and pitch the new load of coal into the flames.

Vermilyea Avenue- View from window in 1965.

Coal was not the only fuel that was burnt in the furnace at 157 Vermilyea Avenue. All of the garbage that tenants sent to the basement in the dumbwaiter cabinet was also burned. Remember that the functioning dumbwaiter was located in the back end of the hallway, near the rear apartments, and you just loaded your bags of trash and pulled the rope to send the trash downstairs. Wujeku would unload each bag and critically examine the contents, looking for small valuable items such as alarm clocks and food scraps for his guard dogs. But then, what was he supposed to do with the undesirable garbage? Why, he dumped it all into the furnace! The garbage served to supplement the meager coal rations which Mrs. Lichtenstein purchased from Weber-Bunke-Lange.

Burning garbage is actually quite unpleasant. Typically the supply consisted of many copies of the New York Daily News. The pages would all catch fire in the furnace, but then the strong current of hot air would lift the flaming pages up through the chimney. Yesterday’s Daily News pages, all blackened around the edges, would then flutter slowly back down to the ground in our courtyard. But if there was a gust of wind at just the right moment, a page or two would drift into our apartment through an open window. My father would not read the Daily News: he was too intellectual. He read the New York Times. But as a kid, I enjoyed being able to read the simpler stories in the Daily News which were delivered a day late through our kitchen window.

Weber-Bunke-Lange Coal at 203 Street and Harlem River in 1935.

Old burnt newspapers weren’t the only effluent from the coal furnace which wafted through the kitchen window. We also got coal tar. Naturally the ancient coal furnace had no scrubber system. Whatever chemicals were generated from burning the filthy coal just went up the chimney. Coal is not a clean source of heat. It contains all sorts of junk, including pieces of ferns and dead dinosaurs. So when the coal was being burnt, black smoke puffed out of the chimney. The chemicals quickly cooled in the atmosphere and forming tiny black droplets of tar, which sank back to earth, much like the Daily News pages. This coal tar would slowly but surely make its way in through our kitchen window. A coating of black slime would be deposited on the window frame, the window sill, and on Aunt Vera’s plants. These evergreen plants came originally from Dr. Manisoff’s house downtown, where Vera worked as a housemaid when she originally arrived from Slovakia.

Little Herbie Maruska in a tree, October, 1948.

After awhile, the green leaves of Aunt Vera’s plants would turn black and get slimy from the coal tar. The kitchen window region needed a thorough cleaning to remove the residue of coal tar. But first, how did the coal tar residue get inside the apartment?

From somewhere back in the 1800’s until around 1950, homes were supplied with coal gas to provide lighting, heat, and cooking gas. The process for turning solid chunks of coal into gas was originally developed in Germany around 1780. Basically, in the processing plant they burn coal while spraying water onto the fire. You get the following basic chemical reaction:

C + H2O -> CO + H2

This reaction reads:  C (coal) + H2O (water) yields CO (carbon monoxide) and H2 (hydrogen). The carbon monoxide and hydrogen mixture was then funneled into a pipe and sent to an enormous gas storage tank. The gas storage tank which was located on Fordham Landing Road and Cedar Avenue just across the Harlem River from Inwood is shown below. Carbon monoxide is extremely toxic. At a concentration of 1% in the air in a room, a single breath is instantly fatal. At a concentration of 4% in room air, hydrogen can detonate. Good grief! And this deadly gas mixture was routed from the cast iron storage tank into all of the apartments in the neighborhood. What if the stove leaked? How did we survive?

Coal Gas Storage Tank on Fordham Landing Road

The answer to survival in case there was a deadly gas leak from the kitchen stove was to keep the kitchen window open at all times. Summer or winter, rain or shine, our kitchen window was always open.

Parakeet on kitchen windowsill in 157 Vermilyea Avenue.

You see, both carbon monoxide and hydrogen are lighter than air, so the gas molecules would tend to rise up and float out the window. Some birds might inhale the fumes and fall out of the sky, but at least we were all safe. But since the kitchen window was always open to allow the carbon monoxide to exude from the house through the window, this open window also provided an ingress for coal tar emanating from the chimney. A dangerous health trade-off! But coal tar, like the tar from cigarettes, leads to a slow death later in the future, while carbon monoxide promised instant death. So my parents chose to leave the window open.

So how was my poor mother, Emma Maruska, supposed to clean the slimy dark coal tar off her window frame, and especially off the leaves of her Sister Vera’s plants which were living in our apartment. This task required Grandma’s Lye Soap. Julia “Ciotka” Konopka provided facilities for manufacturing Grandma’s Lye Soap in the basement of 157 Vermilyea Avenue. The Lye Soap was created in a large steel vat which had been produced originally by Wujeku. The vat was square, maybe four feet by four feet in area, and maybe with sides two or three inches high. To make lye soap, you needed lye and lard.

An Example of Grandma’s Lye Soap.

Women from the Old Country tended to fry most of the meat which they prepared for the family dinner. So, for example, pork chops would be fried in a pan on a top burner of the stove, with the pan filled with gobs of Crisco. The heat was produced by burning the coal gas.

Emma, Herbie, Betty at 214 St 1946

Afterwards, a prudent lady like Emma would pour the molten lard, flavored with pork fat, into an empty jar. Of course, Julia Konopka and a few other ladies in the building would also save all of their used cooking fat in little jars. When there were sufficient jars of used fat, they were taken down to the basement. Julia provided cans of Draino, which is lye. The fat and the lye, along with some water, were all loaded into the Grandma’s Lye Soap vat. Julia Konopka had a secret recipe from Poland so she knew the exact ratios of the components which were needed. All of the ingredients were carefully stirred together with a large wooden spoon. The vat was placed on four old red bricks and heat was supplied from below. The soap was brewed for several days. Finally it became a smooth yellow mass, spread evenly throughout the vat. Now the heat was removed, and the lye soap was allowed to cool. Afterwards Ciotka took a large carving knife and sawed the soap into convenient pieces, about two inches wide, and four inches long. The soap bricks were stored on a shelf. Then Emma could come down to the basement and get a bar of lye soap, which in addition to cleaning tar off the kitchen window, was useful for cleaning pots and pans, and doing the laundry in the kitchen sink.

Grandma’s Lye Soap was popular throughout the land. In fact, in 1952 Johnny Standley made a hit record about Grandma’s Lye Soap which spent two weeks at number one on the Billboard Pop Music Survey:

It’s in the Book
By: Johnny Standley

Do you remember grandma’s lye soap
Good for everything in the home?
And the secret was in the scrubbing
It wouldn’t suds and couldn’t foam

Then let us all sing right out of grandma’s lye soap
Used for, used for everything on the place
For pots and kettles, the dirty dishes
And for your hands and for your face

Little Herman and brother Thurman
Had an aversion to washing their ears
Grandma scrubbed them with the lye soap
And they haven’t heard a word in years

Then let us all sing right out of grandma’s lye soap
Sing all out, all over the place
The pots and kettles, the dirty dishes
And for your hands and also for your face.

Mrs. O’Malley, out in the valley
Suffered from ulcers, I understand
She swallowed a cake of grandma’s lye soap
Has the cleanest ulcers in the land

Then let us all sing right out of grandma’s lye soap
Sing right out, all over the place
The pots oh, the pots and pans, oh the dirty dishes
And for the hands and for your face.

There was I, eight years old, roaming around Inwood Hill Park, warbling this delightful song. I especially liked the part about Herman and Thurman getting their ears washed with lye soap. No, my mom never washed my ears with the stuff!

Thanks again Herb. I think we’ll all have this song stuck in our heads for some time to come.

If you’d like to read more about Herb and his Inwood childhood, click here.

While last week’s blizzard missed upper Manhattan, today’s snowstorm really clobbered us.  Some reports even say we’re in the middle of another blizzard.  It certainly feels like it.

A special thanks to Jimmy, a Park Terrace Gardens porter, for cutting it up in what is becoming a MyInwood tradition.

See last year’s “Inwood Snow Day” here.

Back in 1906 the elevated IRT train (today’s one train) first reached Inwood.  With it came the first true housing boom the neighborhood had ever seen.  Seemingly overnight apartment buildings sprang up east of Broadway to house working class folks lured uptown by an affordable, and suddenly accessible, part of Manhattan. Below is a 1906 real estate ad for just such a building.

Hanover Apartments 127-135 Sherman Avenue, The Sun, Sept. 23,1906

Using an inflation calculator, $32.50 in 1906 would  equal about $770.00 in today’s economy.  But of course,  even in 1906 prices were known to fluctuate. By November of that year  the owners shaved $2.50 off the asking price for a top of the line apartment.

The same block today.

Hanover Apartments 127-135 Sherman Avenue, The Sun, Nov 11,1906

And while I’m not sure who would have qualified as a  ”desirable tenant” in 1906, with a free month of rent and no mention of a broker’s fee,  I’m guessing it was  a renter’s market.

Click here for more Inwood history.

Today’s Inwood real estate scene.

As many regular MyInwood readers know, I love collecting oral histories and old photos of the neighborhood. A while back I put out a call for for memories on the old Inwood Lanes and the response was overwhelming. Within days readers sent in photos of the pro-shop and so much more. Truly amazing.

This time around I’ve chosen Bickford’s, once located on Broadway and Dyckman. From what I’ve heard Bickford’s was once a neighborhood institution. The accompanying article from the Heights-Inwood newspaper from 1974 describes the closing of another Bickford’s located on 181st.

If you have memories or photos of either location, please share them with me and other readers. Just post a comment below and I’ll get ahold of you.

Thanks in advance. I hope you are up to this latest Inwood challenge.

In the late 1800’s Northern Manhattan was still very much a wilderness of farmland dotted with occasional country inns and taverns, but that rural tranquility would end with the industrial age. The clean air and remoteness of the area soon attracted newly minted millionaires who created splendid monuments to their own wealth. For a brief shining moment Inwood and parts of Washington Heights became a turn of the century equivalent to the Hamptons or Martha’s Vineyard.

Enter real estate tycoon Dr. Charles V. Paterno who, in 1905, began construction on a four-story castle designed by John C. Watson for the then outrageous sum of $500,000. The castle, which sat on over seven acres of property, was located on the site of today’s Castle Village Apartments.

Paterno Castle in early 1930's

The son of immigrants, Paterno’s family sailed from Castelmezzano, Italy in the 1880’s after a devastating earthquake left the family real estate business in shambles. In short time, the Paterno’s had established themselves as players on the New York real estate scene, developing luxury apartment buildings up and down the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

A physician by trade, Paterno left medicine upon his father’s death and assumed the helm of the family business.

Greenhouses and driveway leading to Paterno Castle in early 1930's.

Why he built the home is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it reminded him of a structure from his Italian homeland.

The beautiful white stone, turrets, greenhouse and pergola set Paterno’s castle apart from his neighbors, with the exception of nearby Libby Castle, in terms of design.

Paterno Castle's swimming pool in 1930's.

Paterno spared no expense in designing his dream home. Among the mansion’s many features were, a swimming pool surrounded by birdcages, a mushroom cellar and, measuring twenty by eighty feet, perhaps the largest master bedroom the neighborhood has ever seen.

Paterno Castle, 1936

As old age set in, Paterno found himself spending less time in the castle of his youth. Settling in Greenwich, Connecticut, Paterno ordered his castle demolished in 1938 to make room for Castle Village.

Castle Village, 1939

…But while Paterno’s Castle is gone, its memories live on.

In the 1930’s, Inwood resident Florence Schwartz, the daughter of Russian immigrants, had unique access to Paterno’s estate. The father of one of her childhood friends was the heating engineer for the sprawling complex. In her own words, Florence takes us onto the grounds when Charles Parteno was still king of his castle and she was just a young girl.

“I used to go to the estate in the 1930’s to visit a friend who went to PS 187. That was the elementary school.

They had a garage and there were probably four or five Rolls Royce’s. That’s the only car they drove. At that age I thought that must have been pretty nifty.

Paterno Castle 1915 postcard

My friend’s father worked on the estate. I never paid any attention. We were just going to pick up Eleanor. We didn’t go though any front gates. We went down where; I presume everyone lived—because all the chauffeurs lived on top of the garage that I remember. I don’t remember where the gardeners lived. I was a kid—who pays attention to that?

As I was walking onto the grounds there were paved walkways and my friend lived in a very nice little house, it wasn’t a bungalow, it was a little house. I don’t know if that was where he took care of the heating or not. When you’re ten or eleven you don’t think about that.

Opera Star Rosa Ponselle

I never met Dr. Paterno. The only thing I ever heard come from the castle was when one of his children was married and they did it there. Rosa Ponselle, the opera star, sang for them and everyone knew about that.

Did you ever go into the swimming pool? No, no one ever went into the swimming pool. They just showed it to me. Eleanor’s father showed it to us.

Nobody in the neighborhood seemed to notice the castle because they had just built some new apartment buildings with elevators. That was something new—elevators.

I think people got more excited when the George Washington Bridge was being built. That was pretty exciting.

You didn’t have telephones, but they had a switchboard downstairs in the building where I lived. That seemed pretty good.”

The infamous retaining wall seen in the 1930's.

Read more local history here.

Author’s note: Intimate portraits of the neighborhood like this wouldn’t exist without the active participation of the community. If you, or someone close to you, has old photos or memories you would like to share, I encourage you to contact me. Again, a special thanks to Florence for sharing her uptown memories.

We’ve seen photos documenting the splendor of old Northern Manhattan. Breath-taking mansions of a grander time, now gone except for a forgotten arch or lost driveway meandering around a city park. That these architectural wonders were photographed at all is remarkable.

But to step inside one of these homes, to see the art, the table settings, the beds in which these Captains of Industry slept….Well, for that you would need a time machine.

Luckily, a publishing fad erupted among the rich and famous near the turn of the century in which  the millionaire set  showcased their wealth in thick, expensive, leather-bound volumes printed in limited, private runs. Cornelius Vanderbilt himself commissioned a twelve volume set documenting his physical wealth. “These volumes were presented to his admiring friends at first, though I think, in later years this distinction was reserved for his enemies.” (Valentine’s Manual, 1928)

Estate of C.K.G. Billings

Such was the case with the private realm of Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings who in 1910 commissioned just such a book allowing a privileged few to inspect his inner sanctum.

Above slide-show of Billings’ home from privately published book.

Beginning in the 1901, the forty year old President of the People’s Gas, Light and Coke Company of Chicago retired, pulled up stakes and moved to Manhattan where he would shower New Yorkers with his eccentricity for years to come.

Indulging in yachts and, perhaps most importantly for this story, fast horses, Billings followed the recently opened Harlem River Speedway uptown and quickly fell in love with Manhattan’s northern edge.
He soon set to work on a 25,000 square foot lodge and stables, in what is now Fort Tryon Park, for entertaining guests.

In 1903, his lodge complete, Billings ordered an indoor, full-service, horseback dinner catered by the then famous Sherry’s Restaurant. By popular demand Billings relocated the dinner to Sherry’s midtown ballroom where 36 guests sat atop living, breathing, whinnying horses while waiters dressed as grooms catered to their every whim.

More at ease in Fort Tryon than his 53rd Street home, Billings had architect Guy Lowell build him a proper French-style mansion accessed by an S-shaped driveway that snaked up the bluff looking over the Hudson River.

Completed in 1907,  Billings magnificent home had all the trappings of the modern capitalist, a heated swimming pool, a two story squash court lined in maple and even a “fumed oak” bowling alley.

In 1916, Billings sold his beloved estate to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who planned on destroying the home before donating the land to the City for the creation of Fort Tyron Park. The home was spared the wrecking ball after loud local protest. But like so many monuments to old New York, the home was leveled by a 1926 fire so great the Times reported, it “spouted fire and smoke like a volcano.”

This article on the Billings’ estate would not have been possible without the help, generosity and even encouragement of Inwood enthusiast Don Rice. The book, likely one of only a handful in existence, comes from Don’s private collection. Don, thank you again for sharing this book with me, and, now, the public.

Click here for more Inwood hstory.

A while back I wrote a history of the old Seaman mansion that once stood on the grounds currently occupied by Park Terrace Gardens. Today the only trace of the Seaman estate is the crumbling marble arch located down the hill on Broadway.

Seaman mansion and arch from a distance in 1903.

The following description from 1869 finds the home occupied by its original inhabitants, Mr. John Seaman and his wife Ann. This slice of life shows a happy couple surrounded by fine art and sculpted gardens entertaining admiring friends in the mansion they lovingly called “Mount Olympus.”  (Bewildered neighbors had a different name for the shining white fortress on the hill: “Seaman’s Folly.”)

While Mr. Seaman made considerable money as a drug merchant, he lost his fortune through a series of bad investments. As luck would have it, Ann (below sketch) was a very wealthy, if not eccentric, woman. Her money came from a rich uncle who forbade her to marry “Johnnie” lest she lose her inheritance. As soon as the uncle died the two were married in Europe.

John Seaman lived out his golden years puttering about his gilded palace as his wife collected an ever-increasing army of poodles. In fact, the tombstones mentioned in the below description could be those of her beloved pooches whom she buried with the loving attention one might mourn a child.

The Seamans would in fact die childless. When Ann, who outlived her husband, died in 1878 more than 140 distant relatives contested her will. The lucky winner, nephew Lawrence Drake who was so despised by John Seaman he was forbidden access to the property during his lifetime. Relatives believed Drake had conned the poor, rich old widow out of their rightful inheritance. But that is a story for another time…

Seaman Mansion
New York Herald
August 29, 1869

“Incomparably the finest mansion on the Hudson, and undoubtedly the spot where fortunes have been spent, and well spent is the place of Mr. John T. Seaman, retired drug merchant, who has been the last fifteen years lavishing his extensive fortune upon the grounds that are now universally admired by all that visit them. Not alone Americans, but Europeans and landed gentry seek this spot, and are courteously treated by the venerable possessor, who now nears the sere and yellow leaf. Mr. Seaman is still a fine and healthy appearing man, with well-cut features and a fine stature. His efforts have been tireless to improve his place, and he now has the satisfaction of knowing that he has few rivals along the Hudson. Entering the grand gateway at the northern entrance the slate graveled drive is pursued over an undulating, though ascending, road till a footpath is met coming down at right angles from the northern portico. The steps to this pathway are white marble, and are flanked by two elaborately cut lions, in marble, showing much artistic taste in the sculptor. The way then lies straight ahead, when the drive turns toward the mansion in a southerly direction.  At the turn stands a good figure of “Europe” in marble, resting upon a marble pedestal; and further on, as the drive continues, is a beautifully gilded figure of “Diana,” with her bugle in hand. The white marble statues just on the crest of a hill, sloping off toward Spuyten Duyvil creek, are specimens of substantial architecture, corresponding with the style of the house. To southward of the mansion the drive continues, and a statue of Music is displayed, its spotless white contrasting well with the level lawn.

A small cemetery is observable hidden in a clump of bushed at this point, and the gravestones, white and gilded, shine with a peculiar beauty through the foliage. Following the direction to the westward of the house, under a huge marble porch, the drive brings up before a massive door, shaded by a great arch forming another porch. The mansion is built entirely of white marble, quarried by Mr. Seaman on the spot It is seventy-eight feet deep and in plan is nearly square. It has a main dome reaching a height of ninety feet from the ground, with its top pained a dark maroon color. There are also two smaller domes, whose arches are surmounted by the statues of Love and Music respectively. It is hardly possible to give a correct view of this house—a house that has few equals in the world, and one that is a combination of capacious wings, towering chimneys, vaulted domes, Roman windows and sharply defined, yet not ungraceful lines. If defies classification according to the schools of art, yet it is inferior to none of them, while a combination of all.  The plan of breaking away from what is pure Grecian or Roman is a praiseworthy innovation, and one, which has been followed with triumphant success along the river. From the northern porch the ground assumes a gently declining surface till it touches the drive in continuous groves of beautiful evergreens; from the eastward it descends on eight terraces, along which are constructed the extensive hothouses; from the southward the garden spots and statuary dot the green, and to the southward are the stables and the valley.

Seaman Mansion main entrance (later home to a local driving club).

Let us enter the house. The door is flanked with fine pieces of statuary, and once within a wide and lofty hall, with the usual furniture, is seen. To the extreme south end of the house is the octagonal library, fitted up at great expense. Closets whose doors support long and beautifully gilded mirrors, statues of Scott, Shakespeare, Byron, Milton, Homer, Esculapius, Socrates and Pluto fill niches in the wall, and also the mind from the measures of heroic verse to the eternity of dreary philosophy. Some fine paintings hang on the walls, and the western windows look out into a small conservatory, in which statues of the four Seasons are placed in appropriate positions. These figures are about two feet high.

Seaman Mansion interior near the turn of the century.

The parlors are capacious, with ceilings sixteen feet high, and would do for the throne rooms of a small empire or the east room of a presidential mansion. Venetian mirrors reflect distances and apparently double the size. In these rooms, standing up on a pedestal at the western end, is that well-known statuary, “John the Baptist in the Wilderness,” made to order for Mr. Seaman in Europe. In the reception room he had two busts, of himself and his wife, cut by Mansini; also a statue of the “Flower Girl.”

Ascending the broad oak staircases bronzed figures of the four quarters of the globe stand in alcoves under the main dome in this order—Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. The picture gallery is situated in the western wing in the second story, and there can be seen some very valuable works of art. The original picture of the “Marriage of the Virgin,” by Ludovico Carracci, eight feet square, and worth $20,000, hangs against the southern wall. This picture portrays its subject with a true inspiration, and the touch of genius can be traced in the colors, the lights and shades. The original of “The Shepherds’ Visit to the Virgin Mary,” by Reubens; the original of “St. Martin Dividing His Garment Among the Poor”—a finely colored painting; the “Betrothal of the Virgin,” the “Holy Family,” copy from Raphael, together with his “Madonna” and the “Polish Orphans,” comprise a very rare and valuable collection, in which, it will be observed, no popular daubs have a place.

Seaman Mansion near turn of the century.

The whole house is supplied with water from a large tank on the main tower, which holds 60,000 gallons, and which is lined with lead. The entire upper story and domes are lighted with plate glass let into the roof, and it is also by this means alone that the picture gallery is lighted. From the top of Mr. Seaman’s tower one of the finest, most extensive and varying prospects in this country can be obtained. It should be remembered that his house is located on one of the highest points of the island, and probably as lofty a private dwelling as there is on it.

Looking north can be seen Spuyten Duyvil creek and the rich and fertile acres which it washes; the Harlem river with its torturous course winding like a snake through the tall grass and thick shrubs; a section of the Hudson shining like a lake of molten silver, and tinged with crimson by the setting sun; the misty hills rising from the valley and just perceptible through the haze, the weird glens, the weather beaten crags and torpid mountains. A scene like this is but a portion of what strikes the eye at every point; and this sublime panoramic view has been gazed upon by many eminent Europeans, who declare that nothing equals it in the Old World.

At the entrance to the porch two figures in the dress of the time of Louis XIV stand out in conspicuous prominence, and a statue of America caps the main dome: the interior is frescoed with Cupids. The house is connected from room to room with an alarm telegraph, so, that should burglars aspire to transfer some of Mr. Seaman’s valuables the dial would at once indicate their location and anxieties, when doubtless he would treat them with becoming civility.

Gardener's House on the Seaman Estate, Inwood, New York City

The hothouses are very extensive. They consist of graperies, a pinery and greenhouses. The pinery is fifty feet deep, and is very fruitful. The graperies now groan under heavy loads of their delicious fruit. They are two in number, separated by a plant house, and have a through depth of 212 feet, with a width of 22 ½ feet, with a lean-to quadrant shaped roofs. A steam engine is used to throw the water on the grape vines, which have hothouse peaces just in their rear; and against the wall some rare figs. The whole arrangement of these graperies is a model of neatness. No finer fruit of this kind is grown in America. Every species abounds. There are the black Habburgs, the Victoria Hamburgs, some bunches of which weigh six pounds; the white Nice, the Muscat Alexandrias and the royal muscadines; the Timothy de Burgh, the earliest golden Chasselas, grizzly Frottingaus and white Prottingans. The plant house in winter contains 2,500 pots. The western slope is now broken up for improvements. A small lake is to be constructed; and adjoining, an ice house, so that he can make his own ice.

Entrance to the Seaman Estate, later the Suburban Club. The marble arch still stands on 216th and Broadway.

A new entrance is being built in exact imitation of the Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile standing at the head of the Champs Elysees on a line with the entrance to the Tuileries in Paris. This massive structure will cost $30,000 and is nearly completed. It is composed entirely of white marble and forms a fitting entrance to this empire, which Mr. Seaman has named Mount Olympus. Besides the statuary named, he has Bacchus, Cupid, Psyche and other pieces famed for their beauty and fidelity of design.

Thus has Mr. Seaman succeeded in surrounding himself with the elegances of art, the luxuries of fine flowers and delicious fruits and the comforts of a sumptuous and capacious mansion.”

Seaman mansion sketch from 1895 issue of the New York Tribune.

Click here for more Inwood history.

The year was 1935. Babe Ruth, the Bambino, was reveling in the twilight of his fame. The Sultan of Swat, the King of Swing, the Colossus Of Crash had seen better days. Years of hard living and several automobile accidents had taken their toll, but the Babe could still draw a crowd—and the racially diverse spectators at the Dyckman Oval were his kind of people.

On September 29, 1935 they came in droves.

That sunny afternoon an estimated 10,000 fans came to the 4,600 seat Dyckman Oval to see their hero play on a team of former all stars and minor leaguers in an exhibition game against the New York Cubans of the old Negro League. The price: Fifty-five cents for the grandstands and $1.10 for the big spenders in the box seats.

The game, for which Ruth was paid three thousand dollars, would be one of his last.

Amid the sea of fans, one lone reporter, Tom Meany of the New York Telegram, realized the tragedy unfolding before his very eyes.

“The spectators seemed to sense they were watching something pathetic…There were neither newsreel nor still cameras in evidence and no telegraph keys clattered brassily in the press box, which had less than half a dozen occupants. No civic dignitaries, not even an alderman, could be observed in the crowd.”

Paid to play just the first game of a double-header, which the Cubans won 6 to 1, Ruth took to the plate between games to give the ticket holders a bit more bang for their buck. Over the next five minutes, Meany and the 10,000 fans witnessed a piece of baseball history that would never be entered into the record books.

As pitcher Clyde Barfoot hurled balls from the mound, The Babe, for a fleeting moment, sprung back to life, slamming ball after ball out of the park. Those in attendance swore one particular baseball was hit further than any in the previous history of the Dyckman Oval.

But as Ruth faded into the stuff of legend, the Dyckman Oval was entering its heyday…

When the Dyckman Oval first appeared in the sports pages in January of 1920 it was a homely affair located at 204th Street and Nagle Avenue. That first year the Oval was used primarily for ice skating competitions.

By 1921, the Oval was drawing baseball fans, including Mayor John F. Hylan, from all five boroughs and beyond.

That spring Hylan made an impromptu visit to the Oval to see Jeff Tesreau’s team battle the Cuban Stars. Not recognizing the Mayor as he approached, a later shame-faced gateman demanded to see a ticket. “I haven’t any,” responded the mayor. Gateman, “Well, you’d better get one if you want to see this game.”

Luckily for both parties a manager spotted the Mayor and escorted him into the Oval where he immediately took to the mound.

The mayor threw four pitches against the opposing team—three of them strikes.

Soon boxing was added to the roster. Pugilism would become a staple of the Oval for years to come, but at the time, many doubted the Dyckman Oval could survive the 1920’s.

By 1929 the Dyckman Oval played host to mainly soccer games. Lawsuits and years of poor management had left the once thriving facility on life support.

Dyckman Oval shown just to the right of elevated tracks in undated photo.

It was not until 1935, the same year Ruth played his exhibition game that things turned around for the Dyckman Oval, but first a deal with the devil had to be made.

Enter Harlem numbers broker Alejandro Pompez  who gave the ailing Dyckman Oval a sixty-thousand dollar shot in the arm to use as a showcase for his prized baseball team, The New York Cubans.

A 2003 Sports Illustrated article written by Daniel Coyle provides a wonderful description of Pompez.

“Pompez was a criminal in the eyes of the police and a crown prince in the eyes of Harlemites. From his cigar store, the soft spoken Cuban ran a numbers bank—a lottery that filled his pockets to the tune of $8,000 a day—which he used to fund his Negro league baseball team, the New York Cubans. Courtly, suave and scrupulously honest with his clients, Pompez was beloved in Harlem for his civic generosity.

All went swimmingly for him until an evening in 1931 when the Bronx-based gangster Arthur Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz, employed his .45 revolver to persuade Pompez to hand over control of the numbers game. Needing another source of income, Pompez turned to sports enterprises. In 1935 he leased a vacant field at Dyckman Oval from the city and transformed it into one of the finest sports palaces in Manhattan.”

Pompez put his money to good use. Under his renovations the Dyckman Oval was transformed into shining new 10,000 seat arena with modern conveniences like floodlights for playing well into the night.

A master showman, Pompez knew how to fill the house. If Babe Ruth didn’t dazzle them then perhaps a boxing exhibition with Joe Louis, a new car raffle—whatever it took.

New York Cubans in 1940

The Oval, often called “Harlem’s Own,” was also a melting pot where all New Yorkers could gather and simply enjoy a ball game—and Pompez’s New York Cubans knew how to delight.

Player-manager Martin Dihigo was clearly a house favorite. Dubbed “El Maestro”  by fans and sportswriters alike, Dihigo could play all nine positions with equal skill. His lightening speed fastballs remain the stuff of legend. Often called the most versatile player in the history of baseball, the six-foot-three, 210 pound, right-handed Cuban would eventually be elected to the Mexican, Cuban and American Halls of Fame.

The entire team, comprised of Cuban, African-American, Puerto Rican and Dominican players proved a force to be reckoned with—even when playing against legendary teams like Satchel Paige and his Pittsburgh Crawfords.

But the days of wine and roses couldn’t last forever—the team’s owner, Alex Pompez, was, after all, a career criminal. When rival gangsters gunned down Dutch Schultz in October of 1935, Pompez went back into the numbers rackets.

The move would prove a serious miscalculation.

In 1936 New York County District Attorney Thomas Dewey was preparing an indictment against Pompez for his involvement in the policy rackets. Receiving a tip, Pompez fled the country.

When Mexican authorities arrested Pompez on March 28, 1937 he was traveling under the name Antonio Moreno. Federales in Mexico City nabbed baseball’s greatest fugitive as he stepped into a bulletproof car with Chicago license plates.

Pompez’ legal difficulties would prove disastrous for his beloved franchise. While the Dyckman Oval would continue to host sporting events, the New York Cubans stopped playing altogether.

On May 16, 1939, after providing lengthy testimony for the prosecution, Pompez pleaded guilty to conspiracy in return for a two year suspended sentence.

When the Cubans were readmitted to the Negro National League in 1939 they would find themselves without a home.

In 1938, perhaps to spite the admitted gangster, the City of New York demolished the Dyckman Oval and turned the grand old field into a parking lot.

1951 photo of newly constructed Dyckman Houses. Once the site of the Dyckman Oval.

Today the Dyckman Houses sit on this once hallowed sporting ground.

As for Pompez—he swore to stay on the straight and narrow after his trial. By all accounts he did just that.

In 1943 Pompez found a new home for the Cubans inside New York’s famed Polo Grounds.

Lacking fan support, the New York Cubans folded in 1950.

Pompez went on to become a respected talent scout who once played a role in signing Willie Mays.

Credited with opening baseball’s “Dominican Pipeline,”

Pompez died in 1974. He was 83-years-old. Pompez was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.

Click here for more Inwood history.

In 1895, on the same spot where George Washington and his band of Revolutionaries defended a British assault after the Battle of Brooklyn, a glorious and magnificent amusement park rivaling Coney Island opened near the northeastern end of Manhattan. The Fort George Amusement park was located in what is now Highbridge Park between 190th and 192nd Streets and Amsterdam Avenue.

Fort George Amusement Park in 1909

During its heyday this Gotham wonderland would boast two Ferris wheels, three roller coasters, nine saloons, a pony track, several hotels, a casino, five shooting galleries, a tunnel boat ride, two music halls called the Star and the Trocadero, fortune tellers and more frankfurters, peanuts and pretzels than you can imagine. Located at the end of the Third Avenue Trolley line, the park was a natural and popular destination for locals and residents throughout the city. While the children rode the massive Ferris wheel or took to the Toboggan slide adults could gamble the night away before renting a room in the Fort George Hotel and Casino to celebrate their winnings, or more likely, mourn their losses. There were even areas in the park where, for a fee, Mom and Dad could drop the kids off in a supervised playground setting, while they went off to enjoy “The Human Ostrich” or “The Cave of Winds.” Initially a loose and disorganized strip of sideshows the park became something truly spectacular under the leadership of Joseph Schenck (left) and his brother Nicholas. The brothers, Russian Jews who immigrated to New York from the ancient Slavic settlement of Rybinsk in 1893, first came to the park as curious visitors. Realizing the fortunes to be made they quickly invested in a beer hall called The Old Barrel. It was in the Old Barrel that the Schnecks likely met another entrepreneur named Marcus Loew (right) , a park regular who had already amassed a small fortune with a string of theaters and penny arcades. (Loew would later become a Hollywood power-broker heading a theater chain that still bears his name.) Borrowing money from Loew, the brothers Schneck were soon able to open several thrill rides in an area of the park known as Paradise Park.

Fort George Amusement Park in 1911 postcard

Some New Yorkers had such fond feelings for the park that it became a popular spot for wedding proposals. In fact, in June of 1907 nineteen-year-old Susan Pierce and Raymond Barrett went so far as to tie the knot on the skating rink where they met. The bride, bridegroom and minister all donned roller skates for the nuptials.

It was a first for the park and likely a first for New York. After exchanging vows some 500 couples joined Susan and Raymond on the rink to skate to the popular “Love Me and the World is Mine,” before the happy couple skated off to Atlantic City for their honeymoon.

But as the years passed, neighborhood sentiment towards the park soured.

Initially a boon for the local economy, local residents and real estate developers grew tired of the noise, the drunken crowds and the crime that came to be associated with the park.

Then, on December 10th, 1911, an arsonist took public sentiment into his own hands and attempted to burn the park to the ground. According to news accounts high winds fanned the firebug’s torch destroying the Star Music Hall, the old Fort George Hotel, the dance hall of Paradise Park, a popular tavern and several smaller buildings. The damage, estimated at $25,000, could have been much worse if not for the daughter of truck farmer Nicholas Ceramer whose cries of “Papa, look at the fire,” allowed her father to sound the alarm. Ceramer emerged from his cottage across from the park just in time to “see a Man about 5 feet 9 inches tall, of stocky build, wearing a black hat and overcoat, run out of the lower floor of the music hall to the south. He gave chase, but failed to overtake the man.” Two years later, still healing from the scars of the arson attack the park suffered a fatal blow at the hands of another suspicious fire. On June 9th, 1913, a fire described as “the most spectacular ever seen,” engulfed the Fort George Amusement Park. At around two in the morning, Dominick Barnot, the night watchmen for Paradise Park saw that the dance hall was on fire. Barnot ran for help, but within ten minutes the fire, fueled by a strong westerly wind, had become an inferno. One-hundred foot flames seen as far south as 42nd Street were reported that night. Firemen and concerned volunteers descended on Fort George, but “the firemen quickly saw that it was their duty to save the property near by and let the park burn…One by one the play places were consumed. The roller coaster was quick to go, and then the Ferris wheel. And after the wheel the merry-go-rounds, the roller skating rink, and all the other things the Schneck Brothers had installed for the entertainment of the public.”

And, while the Park was never rebuilt, a generation would remember the glory days and smile knowing they had witnessed a now forgotten piece of New York history. Click here to read more Inwood history.

Happy Holidays Inwood.  It is chilly outside, so bundle up as you make your way to your various festivities.

And what would the season be without a few memories of yesteryear?

The following photos were taken on Broadway near Academy Street in December of 1925. The city was entering its fifth year of Prohibition and the Great Depression was just around the corner.

Sure the times were a bit different, but the tradition of a Christmas tree stand on Broadway has changed very little since these photos were taken some eighty-five years ago.

Christmas tree stand on Broadway near Academy in 1925

Of course I imagine the prices have gone up just a wee bit since 1925.

Broadway south of 207th Street this holiday season.

Still worried about Prohibition?   No P.J.’s Wine and Liquors you say?

In September of 1922 Federal prohibition agents raided the Arras Inn on 4928 Broadway where they found 120 bottles of beer. Summonses were issued for owner Paul Boehn and waiter John Cronan.

1920’s Christmas tree shoppers and sellers alike could drop into the Arras Inn on 207th and Broadway, or any number of speakeasy clubs in the neighborhood, to share a discreet pint of holiday cheer.

An infamous speakeasy: The Arras Inn on 207th and Broadway

So hoist a glass of whatever suits you.  Here’s  wishing you and  yours a happy holiday.

When one thinks of Inwood, the word “cotton” does not likely spring to mind. Of course folks rarely speak anymore of Frederick “The Cotton King” Talcott, who, in the mid-1800’s, made Inwood Hill his home.

Frederick Talcott was born into a founding New England family that traced its aristocratic roots in Warwickshire, England to 1558.

His father, Noah Talcott,  was born in 1768 in Durham, Connecticut. As early as 1803 the elder Talcott set up shop on Manhattan’s Murray’s wharf where he acted as a commission merchant for the supply-laden ships arriving from the far points of the globe.

According to a Talcott family history written in 1876, “Whenever the old ship ‘Joseph’ arrived from London, she had a valuable invoice for Noah Talcott. The schooner ‘Peggy’ traded between this port and Martinique, and belonged to Mr. Talcott. The schooner ‘Ann Margaret’ and the ‘Robert Martha’ also were owned by him. In 1810, there was no merchant in New York who was doing as large a business as Mr. Talcott.”

Described as mild mannered and gentle as a lamb in his later years, this envied merchant of an earlier age was also considered the finest judge of cotton in all of New York. When he opened his cotton broker’s office at 58 Wall Street in 1831, he immediately took his son Frederick under his wing.

Frederick could not have had a better teacher.

According to an 1885 account, “He had a gentle way with him, that commanded deep esteem. His samplers went to every merchant who had cotton to sell, and they were glad to have it from the hands of Noah Talcott. His office, where the tables were covered with hundreds of samples of large lots of white cotton in blue paper, will never be forgotten by the old school merchants.”

Trading pit on Wall Street in 1800's

The two operated under the name Noah Talcott & Son until Noah Talcott’s death in 1840.

Picking up where his father left off, Frederick Talcott took to the cotton trade like a trout takes to water.

Born in New York City on February 22, 1813, Frederick Talcott graduated from Columbia College in 1832. He married Harriet Newell Burnham in 1842. The couple would have seven children.

A doting father at home, Frederick Talcott cut a larger than life figure on the exchange floor, becoming the first individual in American history to corner the cotton market. In the 1850’s he became president of the organization that would later become the Cotton Exchange. He also served as president of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company.

In 1858, Talcott let his sons assume control of the family business, but he did not remain idle. Instead he founded the stock brokerage firm Frederick Talcott & Co. located in the Mills Building.

Described by the New York Times as a “man of quiet tastes” who “preferred his home life to going into society,” Talcott would make Inwood Hill his home.

What follows is a description of the Talcott estate, located north of the Tubby Hook marina towards the western end of the present Dyckman Street.

Frederick Talcott Home
“The Cotton King”
New York Herald
August 29, 1869

The Mansion of Frederick L. Talcott

“The mansion and grounds of Mr. F. L. Talcott, a rich and retired cotton merchant, who has made his mark in the great cotton transactions of his time, an old Knickerbocker and a genial and accomplished gentleman are the first that are seen on entering the mountain road. Mr. Talcott has four acres with a front of 1,000 feet on the mountain road extending back to the Dyckman estate in the rear.

The ground, though not unusually large, is usually treated in its relations to landscape gardening. The area is terraced from the road and curves away to the highest point in an elevated mound planted with flowers. Aviaries, rookeries, glens, grounds for all kinds of sport , make up a part of the design, and the old preserved trees, such as the pine, the Norwegian maple , the dogwood and the lofty chestnut, all grow to admirable heights.

But the main feature of Mr. Talcott’s place is undoubtedly his house, now nearly completed, a model English baronial hall, built by an English architect. The structure is composed entirely of brick and stone, there being no lath or plaster or stucco work used at all. The foundations are solid, the walls eighteen inches thick and the house three stories high, with cellars and observatory. The parlors are very commodious, with sixteen feet ceilings, and all the rooms in the house are elegantly painted in colors, the blue room, the red room and others being finished regardless of cost.

Solid and substantial outside, the house inside presents a picture of luxuriance which our retired merchants gather about them when they give up business cares. Mr. Talcott is a connoisseur in sculpture and painting and has many valuable works illustrating both. His most noticeable pieces are two figures in marble, cut by the celebrated Welsh sculptor, Mr. Richard, a self taught artist some twenty years ago. The first is titled the “Boy and Butterfly,” a very successful attempt of the artist to represent the figure in the act of clutching the insect. The posture is natural, the lines graceful and the tout ensemble almost beyond criticism. The second piece is the “Girl and the Soap Bubbles,” representing a nicely molded figure performing her innocent exploit. Besides these works Mr. Talcott has others of note and value that were described in the HERALD over twenty years ago.

The lookout from this place is a broken prospect of water, meadows, lawns and forest, and opposite are the red and gray walls of the Palisades, where

Aloft the ash and warrior oak
Cast anchor in the rifted rock.

Gigantic rocks, tufted knolls declining in a circular descent into the woods of tall pines and spreading elms, the purpled peaks away towards New York in the hazy distance, are some of the picturesque scenes that can be enjoyed from this elevated plot.”

On November 1, 1884 The Cotton King of Inwood died after a long battle with cancer. According to his New York Times obituary, “It was nearly 15 years ago that a cancer appeared on one of the lips of Mr. Talcott. It was operated upon, as he thought at the time, successfully, but a few years afterward it appeared and was again cut out.” When a larger lump appeared on his neck the summer before his death, doctors told him there was nothing that could be done. His final weeks were marked by delirium and intense pain. Slipping into unconsciousness he “passed away peacefully at 5 o’clock.”

In 1913, the Talcott estate was sold for some three-hundred-thousand dollars.

In the years following the Civil War the Bloomingdale Road, now called Broadway, was an impoverished and often treacherous stretch of dirt and mud where many inhabitants just barely scraped by.

In glaring contrast, just to the west, atop Inwood Hill, the rich and famous built magnificent country homes steps from the squalor of the common man below.

According to an 1869 description, “All along the Bloomingdale Road the country is still in the semi-settled state it that it was a quarter of a century ago. Frame houses supplemented by noxious smelling stables and filthy pig-pens; non-fragrant henneries and foul kitchens extend on each side, and at short intervals respectable looking houses rise from a thicket of tall trees. In the vicinity of Manhattan the Bloomingdale Road is in a disgraceful condition—a condition more the purlieus of the Sixth Ward, than a small suburban settlement of New York.”

And, if a traveler were not overcome by the rotten smells hovering above the narrow highway, he also had to be watchful for drunken men, many of them battle scarred Civil War veterans, barreling through the night on horseback.

“One can scarcely take a moonlight drive over this country without meeting hundreds of vehicles going to the thousand and one taverns on the Kingsbridge and Riverdale road, and accidents, often of a serious nature, occur in the narrow passes, when drivers have been too long pilgrims to the shrine of Bacchus.”

But the rough and tumble world down on post-Civil War Broadway was easily escaped by the elite few with the good fortune and capital to make the gated community atop Inwood Hill their home.

These lucky few included Wall Street power broker William Henry Hays, dry goods magnate James McCreery, Macy’s founder Isador Straus, “Cotton King” Frederick Talcott and for the purpose of this story, Brook’s Brothers founder Elisha Brooks.

Elisha Brooks was one of the original Brooks Brothers whose siblings included Edward, Daniel and John. The Brooks Brothers company, still a favorite of movie stars and presidents alike, was founded by the brother’s father, Henry S. Brooks, in 1818.

First Brooks Brothers store opened on Catherine and Cherry Streets in 1818

Inside his Inwood home Brooks found a peaceful retreat from the chaos that had become downtown. As recently as 1863 Brooks had seen his flagship store sacked in angry draft riots that threatened to consume the metropolis.

Brooks Brothers sacked by an angry mob during 1863 Draft Riots.

In fact, the Brooks Brothers ties to the Civil War ran deep; they not only designed elegant uniforms for Union Generals Grant, Hooker, Sheridan and Sherman; Abraham Lincoln himself was wearing a Brooks Brothers jacket when he was assassinated in Ford’s Theater.

Like his powerful neighbors, whose homes dotted Inwood Hill, Elisha Brooks rarely saw the riff-raff on the main thoroughfare to his east. These wealthy landowners commuted downtown by the newly installed rail-line located near the present Dyckman Street on the Hudson River.

“To visit these mansions so as to obtain their finest views, and be duly impressed with their majesty, one should ascend the slope from the river; for to go in the grounds from the Bloomingdale Road is like entering the back door, or seeking in the kitchen for the elegance of the parlor.

To either hand, as the road points toward the summit, are fine spruces, fir trees, arbor-vitea and masses of tastefully arranged shrubs. Upon reaching the head, coming gracefully northward, through the meager openings can be viewed in admirable perspective the rich and fertile valley pushing through the mountains like a wedge. With a clear sky and an atmosphere uninfluenced by local disturbance, the vista from such points as these as is glorious a sight as the most enthusiastic student of nature would care to behold…this is truly the poet’s spot…and no one can fail to linger in its vicinity. By a uniquely wrought rustic fence the drive is pursued, leaving the splendid valley to the rear. Evergreens and spruces now line the road…”

And, while the flora and fauna of Inwood Hill have changed somewhat since the following description of Elisha Brooks estate was first published in 1869, the current view from Inwood Hill Park remain virtually unspoiled.

The Mansion and Grounds of Mr. Elisha Brooks

Reproduced from the New York Herald

August 29, 1869

Mr. Elisha Brooks, clothier, of the firm of the well-known Brooks Brothers, has a place directly over the road from Mr. Hays. The house stands back from the river about 200 feet, and is a large stuccoed mansion, appearing like brown stone, in fine order, and worthy of occupancy by the first lord of the soil. Mr. Brooks’ place is one of the finest on the Hudson. The structure alone, without the elegant grounds, would be a fit abode for kings.

A road drive from the mountain road branches off at his gate-house into the asphaltum drive entering his grounds by the southern gate. Spruces, pines, hemlocks and all species of the sassafras and maple, abound though the entire area. The drive is lined by flower lots, sylvan glades and verdant lawns. The bedding out plants are especially luxuriant, having all the colors of the spectrum, and all the sweetness of tropical spring.

The Hawthorne Peach trees bore some 1,200 peaches at the earliest part of June, and the strawberry pit was very prolific. The grapery produced a fine crop, and some 500 pounds of large and beautiful clusters still hang on the vines. The flower spots have fine calladims, begonias and camellias, while a pastoral beauty is obtained by the broad lawn, and the weeping willows bowing to the kissing water.

Near the grapery, which is on the southern part of the ground is an artificial pond containing trout and goldfish. About the garden spots a good deal of taste is displayed in arranging the differently tinted flowers so as to heighten the effect, heather roses filling the centres, surrounded by geraniums, balsams, and fuschias, and enclosed by a boxwood hedge of dark green. The ground is terraced to the Hudson, and at the termination of a broad path a Gothic boathouse lies concealed in a rosy dell. A view made up of scenery as in a fairy dream bursts out at this point in wondrous wildness. Alternating elevations and depressions of mixed green stand out against the distant hills, and the Palisades once more form a rugged background for the picture. The Hudson, the small cottages at the foot of the Palisades, the ascending grassed terraces of the lawn, the trees, parterre and thick copses, breathe with animation and wealth.

Mr. Brooks keeps six horses, and has some good ones for the road. Upon this tract of land, lately named Inwood, more euphoniously and historically known as Tubby Hook, or many other places, that we have not the space to mention at length. Those of Mr. Marie and Mr. McCreery, as well as others lying to the northward, are fine places.”

Elisha Brooks died in 1876.  His estate was sold in 1881.

New York Herald, November 11, 1881

Click here for more Inwood history.

When New York Tribune reporter Eleanor Booth Simmons explored the hills of Inwood and Washington Heights in 1921 she discovered a quaint country community rapidly being swallowed by the big city. In this article she gives us a guided tour of the still standing homes of once rich and powerful families including Nathan Straus, James Mcreery and C.K.G. Billings, to name a few.

A quick author’s note: The first sketch accompanied the article as it appeared in 1921. Other photos I have added myself to provide visuals to Simmon’s prose.

Where Cobwebs Thrive on Manhattan Isle, by Eleanor Booth Simmons, New York Tribune, November 6, 1921.

Do you like to dream about old houses? Do you like to investigate neglected mansions of a past age, picturing the life that flowed through the high-ceilinged rooms now so musty and decayed?

If you are a New Yorker it isn’t necessary to travel to New England to indulge in this pastime. Forty minutes by subway from the shopping district, a brief walk, and you are in a region of old houses. Some crown the green hills of Inwood, which downtown excursionists are beginning to discover, and some, stranded on the streets, are rudely shouldered by modern apartment houses of glaring brick. But there they are, and in some of them you will find white-haired men and women whose talk takes you back to a day earlier than that in which the characters of Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” lived.

Inwood Valley, looking north from Fort George near turn of the Century.

Fancy going into a house a few steps from the Dyckman ferry and finding two brothers and a sister who have dwelt there sixty years! These are the Flitners, children of the Maine sea captain, who, landing at the Hudson River dock with barges of lumber from the North, was so charmed with these shores that he brought his family here to live. Get them talking and they tell you of a time when there were but seven buildings above 187th Street east of Kingsbridge Road. In their childhood the winter skating was the social event of the locality.  The lads damned up a brook that ran just north of Inwood Street, now Dyckman Street, and made a wide pond between two small hills. At night they lighted fires of Tar barrels and waste wood on the banks, and the community gathered and sang and shouted and did marvelous things on the ice. Perhaps the winters were colder then, for, as Charles Flitner remembers it, there was always ice from fall to spring.

The Flitner house is well preserved. But just above it, at the first turn of Bolton Road, is a square red house of spacious rooms and staircases of noble lines going to rack and ruin in a way one hates to see, all the more because it is a common story in these parts.

Old inhabitants say it was the policy of the New York Central that left Tubby Hook, as Inwood used to be called, in a forgotten pocket between two rivers, unpeopling the beautiful houses and abandoning them to ghosts. In 1871 that railroad diverted its trains, save one or two slow locals, from the Hudson River tracks to the east bank of the Harlem. Not till 1900 did the first trolley cars run to Kingsbridge, and it was five years later when the subway was extended to Dyckman Street. For a good many years this most attractive part of Manhattan Island was rather inaccessible, except for the men who could afford their horses.

In 1844, when Samuel Thomson, wealthy man of affairs, built the little church that still stands at Broadway and Dyckman Street, men were content to be leisurely. Tubby Hookers who went to business by the 7:53 gossiped in agreeable groups on the station platform till the conductor decided that there were no more tardy passengers to arrive. Elegant ones drove to the city over the Bloomingdale Road, a shaded street that ran down Breakneck Hill past the Hamilton Grange, and those who remember it say it was a fine sight to see the elder James McCreery, the merchant prince, coming down from his home at the end of the River Road, “The last house on Manhattan Island,” behind his team of spanking bays. But Tubby Hookers grew tired of depending on horseflesh and the infrequent trains, and one by one they moved away from their mansions and their landscaped gardens.

Fort Tryon in the early 20th Century.

In 1796 Mount Washington was the popular name for the whole range of hills from Manhattanville to Spuyten Duyvil, and traces of the outworks of Fort Washington are to be found from end to end of them now. But as time went on the upper section became known as Tubby Hook, perhaps because the Dutch sailors who went up the Hudson, and who called every point of land a “hook,” saw in the bay of the Spuyten Duyvil a resemblance to a tub, with the steep wooded hills for sides. Isaac M. Dyckman and William B. Isham and the Vermilyea, Nagle and Post families, who among them owned most of the rich lowlands to the eastward, always spoke of their “farms at Tubby Hook.” Then Inwood became the name of this region and the hills to the south Washington Heights. But it is all one chain of beauty, and for years men like Reginald Pelham Bolton, its staunch defender and preserver, and George Barnard, whose studio stands high on “God’s Thumb” above the Hudson, have been saying to City Hall:

“See here! In the wooded hills and slopes that line the water from Jeffrey’s Hook, at 177th Street, to Spuyten Duyvil, New York has the most wonderful potential pleasure ground that city ever had. Purchase it, improve it, preserve it for all time to come.”

And first the Board of Estimate and Apportionment would say: “We will.” And then it would say: “We can’t. Out constituents would not let us spend so much money.” It has pursued, in short, a policy that has kept wonderful residential possibilities from becoming anything more. Who wants to spend money restoring old houses or building new ones when or where Father Knickerbocker may lay out his parks and roads?

However, the slow development has had one advantage. It left sleeping below the surface of the Dyckman Valley evidences of Indian life—native tools and weapons and remains of the dog burials of the redmen of 300 years ago, that Mr. Bolton and W.L. Calver and other ardent excavators might find them for museums of today.

Half a block east of the ferry Prescott Avenue, a narrow unpaved way, runs from Dyckman Street over Inwood Hill. Upper Bolton Road starts from Prescott Avenue just above Dyckman and goes windingly first west, then north, then east. Here is where bankers, lawyers and editors of past generations had their country seats. On the slope between upper Bolton Road and Prescott Avenue and lower Bolton Road, or the River Road, which starts at the ferry, was the estate of Samuel Thomson, who came to tubby Hook in 1835 and who was so ardent a republican that he quarreled with his wife’s titled relatives because he would not say “my lord.” A son-in-law, Walter Carter, publisher, has left this description of his first drive up Bloomingdale Road to the Thomson grounds and of seeingMr. Thomson reading the Bible of a morning “with a beaming face.” He was a good churchman and built Mount Washington Presbyterian Church on his own grounds because he was so sorry to see his neighbors working in the fields on Sunday. But he was also a keen businessman, as was shown by his buying 100 acres of land for $27,500 and shortly afterward selling one acre to J.B. West for $25,000. Three of his ten children became bank presidents, and the eldest, William A. Thomson, was for sixty years an officer of the Merchant’s Exchange Bank. Not a trace of the Thomson mansion remains, and on its site, where the House of Mercy stands, the new Jewish hospital is to be built.

But if the Thomson house is razed, many others remain, some of them seeming to shrink back from the steep cut of Dyckman Street and to look down disapprovingly on the noisy traffic the ferry has brought. The old home of Captain William H. Flitner is at 17 Bolton Road. The Rev. Dr. George S. Payson, pastor of the Mount Washington Church for forty years and more, records that the Captain was away much of the time “sailing the seven seas,” but his wife, Louisa, made his house “the abode of peace and gentleness.”

On its door today on sees the words “Dyckman Library.” It seems that Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, who was Elisabeth Schuyler, at her death left some money to establish a free school in the upper end of Manhattan Island. Before the request could be carried out the city inaugurated its public school system, and the money was invested in Broadway real estate. By an act of the Legislature the land was presently sold and the proceeds used to found a library, of which the three remaining members of the Flitner family—Charles, Clara and the Counselor—were given charge. Charles and Clara long taught in the school on Academy Street, which is now George Washington High School, but now they take turns serving in the library, which seems surprisingly modern, with its new books and magazines, in the quaint old house.

House of Mercy on Inwood Hill (later the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children).

Passing the falling-to-pieces red house on the hill, the home of the Talcott family a half century ago, and passing the modern House of Rest for consumptives, one comes to two large frame houses in the bend of the road across from the large brick buildings where the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children now has its shelter, and the Chapel of St. Mary’s crowning the hill. Once there were three frame houses, but one of them was burned.

1884 self portrait of Puck magazine founder and Inwood Hill Resident Joseph Keppler.

In the beautiful one still standing in the corner Joseph Keppler, one of the founders of “Puck” once lived. For a long time it was vacant, and peering in at the windows one could see fragments of old furniture, and imagine, at twilight, no end of ghosts. In the night you could hear howling, most gruesome—howling of masterless dogs that had taken refuge in the caves of the valley below. Now the Keppler house is inhabited by a family named Friedauf and numerous children romp under the great apple trees and copper beeches on the lawn, and behind the lattices where straggling roses grow. But the paint is scaling, the glass of the great bow windows is breaking and the hand of decay is everywhere.

Straus residence on Bolton Road

The old Nathan Straus homestead is further along, on a noble slope overlooking the Hudson. It must have been a charming place in its prime, but it is in a melancholy state of dilapidation now. Still, there is a policeman living in it, very happily apparently. He is a fresh air enthusiast, and, not satisfied with the ozone that must enter through the cracks of the old house, he parked his two infant sons day and night for many months on the roof of the wide veranda. Stern signs, “Beware of the Dogs,” surround the Nathan Straus home, but if you are brave enough to pass the signs find the dogs that are playing with the apple cheeked youngsters are most amiable and waggy of tail.

Across the road from the big house, if you penetrate the thicket of sumac, you will find the stone foundations of the Straus stables. The stables are gone and their foundations are grassy terraces held up by lichened stone. There are traces of an ancient kitchen garden and grape arbor, and it is a delightful place to picnic, with great trees lifting their heads from the steep slope below, and the Ship canal beyond, thick with rowboats and motorboats and darting canoes.

The Inwood Hill home of dry goods magnate James Mcreey

To reach the McCreery house you retrace your steps to the House of Rest and then, if you don’t care to plod to Dyckman Street, scramble down a narrow path to the River Road. Walk north, past overgrown terraces and box hedges, and quaint houses with cupolas and pillars, with the river and the railroad tracks below, and at the end of the path—it is hardly more than a path, though an automobile might negotiate it—is the home of the founder of the dry goods house where our mothers shopped. It is not a beautiful building. High and square shouldered, it looks like a boarding house. But it commands a splendid view, and it has a generous air, as if it had tales to tell of the hospitality that once made it a social center.

In the parsonage, built in 1883—it is 10 Seaman Avenue now, then it was an apple orchard—lives the Rev. George Shipman Payson, who for long, lean decades kept the faith as the head of the little church that Samuel Thomson built. During his first thirty years there were but sixty-seven Protestant families within reach of the church; often he had to wade through mud knee high to the railroad station at Dyckman Street, and he was, he pathetically says, “ten miles from a beefsteak.”

The old Dyckman home, slant-roofed and brick-chimneyed, is in an excellent state of preservation, maintained by the city as a museum.  It is on Broadway, at 204th Street. There were two Dyckman brothers, Isaac and Michael, who came to Tubby Hook in 1825 and lived their lives there, active farmers and elders in the Presbyterian Church. The house where the second brother lived is standing too, a frame building at Broadway and Dyckman Street. The McDonald family has lived there a long time and can tell you of the days when there was not an apartment house between them and Harlem. A little further down Broadway, where Fort Washington Avenue starts to wind up the hill, is a quaint wooden residence, with smooth lawns and climbing roses, and a funny old barn almost toppling over, that was part of the William Henry Hayes estate.

The former William Henry Hayes estate after its conversion into the Abbey Inn.

But the Hayes home, up on the hill, is now the Abbey Inn and the resort of motorists.

We are now in Washington Heights.

C.K.G. Billings' luxurious estate, "Fort Tryon Hall"

Fort Tryon Hall, which C.K.G. Billings, the racing man, erected above the Hudson, south of the Abbey Inn, is new from its soaring towers to its pergola, though the ground on which it stands is rich in relics of the Revolutionary War. Right here, as a tablet in the rock says, Margaret Corbin, in the battle of November 16, 1776, took her dying husband’s place at the cannon he had served and served till she was wounded too.

Libby Castle, once home to Boss Tweed

Across the road from the Billings place is the Norman structure, with its narrow windows and stone towers, that is called Libby Castle, though Mr. Bolton says it shouldn’t be, for Mr. Libby was inconspicuous and lived there but a short time. Its claim to notice is that William M. Tweed, the Tammany boss, had it for his home when he was arrested for crooked practices and fled from there to Spain. The land on which it stands was purchased in 1846 by Lucius Chittendon, a New Orleans merchant, who got ninety-seven acres for $10,000. The only road there was a driveway along the line of 187th Street from Kingsbridge Road, but he built a house and lived there in it. Angus C. Richards bought a piece of the ground in 1855 and erected the castle, which in 1869 he sold to General Daniel Butterfield, who was acting for Tweed.

Old residents say that “Bill Tweed put through Fort Washington Avenue and the Boulevard.” Lafayette Boulevard is now part of Riverside Drive. It is true. Mr. Bolton says, that we owe those streets to the fact that Tweed wanted easy access to his home. But he didn’t long enjoy his home. It was made over to his son, who lost it by foreclosure to Alexander T. Stewart, the merchant, whom Tweed owed for the furnishings of the Metropolitan Hotel, which he tried too finance. And now Father Finn, of the Paulist fathers, has it for a school for his choirboys, who may be seen almost any day playing ball in the wide grounds.

Almost the most remarkable house now left is the one built by a Dr. William Sweetser in 1860 just a little north of the Bennett estate. In shape it is a Greek cross, with four wings jutting out to the four points of the compass. It is a satisfactory old house, not dilapidated, but sufficiently shabby and ancient to allow one ample food for dreams.

Click here for more Inwood history.

Tucked away in a section of the stone wall near the 212th Street and Broadway entrance to Isham Park is an often overlooked survivor of Inwood’s past. The old Albany Post Road mile marker blends into its surroundings, but is hard to miss when you know what to look for.

Curved at the top, this rectangular stone stands upright in the shadow of the giant ginkgo tree, just below the spot where the Isham Park caretaker’s house once stood. (Shown in 1925 photo below.)

This anonymous mile marker, its number wiped clean by the ravages of time, once told travelers they were 12 miles from City Hall in downtown Manhattan. Similar markers ticked off the miles to Albany in a path now followed by Route 9.

This neighborhood treasure might have been forgotten completely; if not for Inwood historian William Calver, who put these words to paper in 1932:

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

The “modern” Post Road opened for business in 1672 under orders of England’s Charles II, but, it must be remembered that the Post Road had been used long before European discovery by Native Americans.

Initially, the road was no more than a dirt path later widened and marked for stagecoach travel. As early as 1673, riders often carrying royal dispatches through a dangerous northern wilderness, carried axes to mark the trees and thus the route for future riders. In 1753, after abandoning the old postal system, wagonloads of heavy stone markers were planted at one mile intervals along the length of the route. The work was supervised by none other than Benjamin Franklin who measured every inch with the help of an experimental coach rigged with an odometer of his own design.

The old Post Road would prove an innovation in early communication between the colonies, but was also used for more nefarious purposes. In his history of Inwood, Calver writes of the dangers of highway travel near the turn of the century: (below 1892 photo taken near present 213th Street)

“In contrast with its rustic beauty and apparently pastoral innocence by day, the Inwood district was in the 1880’s, and early 90’s, far from safe after the evening shades had fallen. The pedestrians one would meet then along the Kingsbridge Road might be a resident who was abroad on legitimate business, but the chances always were that travelers northward bound were desperados fleeing from justice, while other travelers southward bound were culprits of one sort or the another bent on hiding their identity in the big city; or were crooks journeying in from the provinces with their spoil. Frequently, perhaps, they were of the latter sort…”

And while today’s mile marker is easy to miss, its location would have been seared into the minds of early New Yorkers. In an era before grids and urban planning the markers would have been local landmarks, serving as addresses in property deeds, calling cards and wedding announcements.

Click here to read more Inwood history

There is a turn of the century photo of a small boathouse on the water’s edge in what is now Inwood Hill Park.  The boathouse, run by “Pop” Seeley, supported a houseboat colony far from the noise and bustle of downtown.  It would be many years before these house-boaters, artists and assorted eccentrics were given the boot by the Parks Department.

What follows is a 1921 account of life inside that community written by New York Tribune reporter Eleanor Booth Simmons.

I have just been to Inwood, looking for a ghost I heard about.

The Pedestrian gave me the tip. The Pedestrian is fond of legging it around Manhattan Island, and in one of his rambles last summer he came across this house that was reputed to be haunted.

The ghost itself he never saw, but he told me about the house the other day, and I went there, but I was not successful in running down the ghost. Consequently this is not a ghost story, but it is, however, the story of something I found there that is worth many spooks, and is almost as remarkable. When, in this year 1921, a group of people can form a colony that is in New York and not yet of it—can beat the high cost of living, twiddle their fingers at landlords, and within fifty minutes of the theater district dwell in perfect simplicity amid surroundings that many a summer resort can’t touch, isn’t it a miracle? That is what I found on the old ghost’s stomping ground.

Of course, it is too bad that the specter apparently is no longer there. A ghost always lends distinction. But somebody has leased the haunted house and installed modern plumbing, and no spook is going to stand for that sort of thing. Or it may have taken umbrage at some Greenwich Village artists who have been coming around the place, and maidens who have been seen posing in barefoot dances in the greenery. If this ghost is the shade of one of the Indians who owned the region three centuries ago, it has seen some interpretive dances in its time that ought to render it quite indifferent to anything paleface maidens draped in tinted veils could do, but if it is a stern revolutionary-patriot ghost its views would naturally be conservative.

The Pedestrian could not tell me what form the apparition took.

“There are a dozen interesting things, it might be, for the place,” he said, “is packed with history and tradition. The haunted house is on the northern tip of Manhattan Island, on the edge of what used to be Spuyten Duyvil Creek, but it is now widened and deepened to make the ship canal. Long ago it was an inn with a beer garden, with a fat German for mine host, and rowing parties would come from Jersey across the Hudson and make the forests of Inwood Hill ring with their revels. So the ghost might be a thirsty Jerseyite, haunting the scenes of happier times. Again, it might be the shade of Peter Stuyvesant’s trumpeter, old Anthony Van Corlear, who, according to Washington Irving, was drowned in the creek while crossing to warn the burghers of a British invasion. Or it might be a repentant Hessian, doomed to linger around the spot where he killed some patriot. Or it might be one of Henry Hudson’s party, who touched those shores in 1609, in the good ship Half Moon, and had a sharp fight with the Indians. Look it up, anyway, if you’re collecting ghosts. Take the Broadway subway to 207th Street, walk west to Seaman Avenue, follow the winding cinder road to the boat landing, and a little way ‘round the cove is the haunted house, right in the shadow of New York’s famous 123-feet-high tulip tree that first saw the light in the year 1690.”

I’ll say that that cinder road is a wise precaution on the part of a colony desiring to be quiet and free from the maddening crowd of holiday picnickers. Any lady intending to explore along there is advised not to waste her open-work silk stockings on the trip, for at the end it will be just the same as if she had worn solid black lisle. But mighty trees lean down above the road from the rise to the west, and when you reach the boat landing you forget all about the dust, for there before you is the peacefulist little paradise in the world, a veritable cove of content. When I saw it I instantly began to calculate how long it would take to save up enough dollars to acquire a dog and buy a houseboat or run up a shack, so as to settle down there for the rest of my life.

You cannot live there without a dog. It simply isn’t done. They all have them. You are met at the boat landing by deputations of dogs, a big black Newfoundland, a brown setter, a white bulldog, but the charm of the place is on them, and they come suavely, waggingly, interested, but polite. I counted one on every houseboat, and several enjoying pleasant cruises in small craft on the bay.

The houseboats lie on the right hand, hugging the half-moon shore, and beyond one sees little yachts and power boats whose owners have been drawn by the beauty and tranquility of the place. Spreading out to the west and north are the waters of the ship canal, leading from the narrow, winding Harlem River to the Hudson. On the other side of the canal, further north, rises Marble Hill, where fine homes stand on the ground over which Knyphausen’s Hessian troops pushed in 1776 to build their earthworks on the rocky summit of Isham Park, in the Dyckman Valley. It was right off Tubby Hook, now known as Inwood Hill, in the curve of which lies the houseboat colony, that the British frigate “Pearl” tacked to a fro in the Hudson, throwing shells across the wooded ridge that Mayor Hylan can have for a public park any minute the Board of Estimate decides to buy the property from the man who owns it.

There is a horrible rumor that when the city does this it will fell those magnificent trees and make neat little grassy terraces all the way down the hill to the water on the canal side. But it doesn’t seem as if even a politician could commit a crime like that.

Turning from the houseboats I saw a gate to the left which said “Private” in large letters, so I passed through. Inside was a house very old and picturesque in shape, very new and fresh as to the white and green paint. A man with a hammer was putting up curtains, and a woman in a fetching artist’s cretonne apron was assisting. A large white gentlemanly bulldog appeared to be bossing the job. I inquired if they had dispossessed the ghost, but they said no; the haunted house was further along, around the bend of the shore. But it occurred to me that it was too light to hunt ghosts, and I liked the looks of these people, so I lingered, and not being able to get rid of me they gave me tea and told me about the colony.

They had, it seemed, just happened on the place when cruising about in their powerboat last summer. They are Mr. and Mrs. Harry Voorhees and Crew. Crew, the dog, was named that because, Mr. Voorhees being captain and Mrs. Voorhees mate, he couldn’t be anything else. They saw the old house, fell in love with it, rented it, and resolved to start an artist’s colony. Mrs. Voorhees’ proper work is magazine illustrating and pottery making, consequently she is never so happy as when transforming a hut into a studio or making a bout-house into a sleeping lodge. This house, which was falling to pieces, was material that appealed to them both, so they moved right in and had a lovely time remodeling it over their heads. They were so fascinated that they couldn’t leave when winter came, but gave up their city flat and remained, heating the house with kerosene and toting water from the spring. Next winter they will have a fireplace. What they’ve done already would fill pages in an architectural magazine. A crumbling porch has become an open air dining room, and the once ugly kitchen is charming with a gate door, white shelves and picturesque lattices.

‘What do you do for a telephone?”

“The Reliance Motor Boat Company, which leases this land from the rich man who owns it, has a ‘phone line in its office down the road, and the watchman is always there to take messages. We could have one here but we haven’t cared to.”

“What about a bathroom?”

“We’re going to pipe water from the spring and put in a bathroom. The hill is full of springs, the best water in the world.”

It is. I had a drink from the tin cup that’s chained at the main spring, farther along the path, and if all the water is as clear and sparkling as that, one could almost excuse William H. Anderson.

“Marketing,” Mrs. Voorhees went on, “is easy, the 207th Street shops are such a short walk away, and the fruit and vegetables are so fresh there. And when we get back we have these woods, and the lights on the water, and the heavenly quiet.”

Warm Sundays are the only time when the quiet is disturbed. Then the bourgeoisie finds its way hither from the teeming city, and, bursting through the gate marked “Private,” trails with its numerous offspring along the path to litter the ground under the big tree with pop bottles and banana skins and wiener-wurst ends an picture supplements and burst balloons. Then is the quiet rent by the nasal conversation of Mamies and Freddies, and there is no solitude in the primeval wood because they are reclining everywhere with their arms around each other’s waists.

About the nicest house in the colony is the Roanoke. Mrs. May Waldis is its mistress, and she belongs to the water, for she holds any number of medals she’s won in swimming feats. Her husband, an electrician, built the boat. Inside it’s like a commodious four-room flat, with hot and cold water, a bath room, electric lights from their own battery, a piano, a gramophone, all the luxuries of home. Copper screening encloses the roofed verandas, and Chesapeake, the curly brown dog, guards the place. They had a dance on the boat every week last winter and were as comfortable and gay, Mrs. Walldis says, as if they’d been living at the Waldorf-Astoria, and they were much more free and they put money in the bank!

I left the Roanoke by the narrow curving gangway that connects it with the shore and rambled along the path, stopping to inspect one or two artist’s shacks, and presently I came to the Big Tree with its protecting fence, and then to the haunted house.

It didn’t look haunted. Carpenters were at work on it. The weather-beaten clapboards were being replaced by new lumber. Out of the back door looked a woman’s rosy face.

“You don’t look like the ghost I was told I would find here,” I said. She stared, and then laughed.

“I did hear there used to be a ghost in this house,” she answered. “But I guess it didn’t like our improvements. I’m Mrs. Carl Freitchie, and my husband and I are fixing up the place to live in. See the large windows we’re putting in and the partitions being knocked out to make a nice dining room. We only lease it, for they won’t sell, but we don’t think we’ll be disturbed and we’ll get, in the pleasure of living here and the differences between apartment house rents and this, everything we spend on the alterations many times over.

‘We’re going to have a garden, though the ground is so full of oyster shells, left, it’s said, by the Indians who held their feasts and powwows here, that it’s not always easy to plant things. “If that ghost comes around here,” I’ll let you know. But I think it’s left for good.”

Near by a man was working on the frame of a houseboat that he is building in odd hours.

“You ought to’ve come around in Pop Seeley’s time,” he said to me. “I’ve heard that Pop and the ghost were on real good terms. Pop was a boatman and a great character, and he always had charge of things in these parts before that motorboat company came. I’m told it was Pop who rowed Boss Tweed, the Tammany ringster, out to the ship by which he escaped to Spain when he was sentenced to imprisonment for embezzlement in 1875. Pop lived in that old house alone, for he couldn’t get along with his family. Maybe he had the ghost for company. But Pop is dead now, and everything is changed.

And that was all I could find out. I gave up the ghost and mounted the trail to a point from which I could watch the evening descend over the colony. Dinner-time was coming; on the little yachts and power-boats men and women brought out folding tables and spread them on the tiny decks. Inviting odors rose from the cook’s galleys. Bright-colored canoes came skimming home, with sun-burned boys and girls in bathing suits at the paddles. No, the Inlet was no place for a ghost. It was altogether too happy.

Inwood Hill Boat Basin seen in a 1935 photo.

Seaman Avenue & Park Terrace West

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

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

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

The consummate salesman, Glaser began a relentless advertising campaign where he espoused the clean air and vacation-like qualities of Isham Gardens.
A 1924 advertisement published in the New York Times promised a doctor, dentist, valet, barber, beauty salon and taxi stand all on premises.

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

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

Isham Gardens today

Library books and old newspaper articles provide wonderful glimpses into the history of any neighborhood. That said, those who grew up and lived in Inwood can provide a much more intimate portrait of what life was really like.

In this latestest installment of My Inwood Memories, former Inwood resident Herb Maruska takes us into the old neighborhood in the days and years following World War II. His memories and photos of growing up on Vermilyea Avenue provide a rare snap-shot of Inwood in the 1940’s and early 50’s.

Take it from here Herb…

“I was born on July 17, 1944 in Seagoville, Texas, in an internment camp for German-Americans rounded up by the United States Government as potential threats to democracy, just as Japanese-Americans were confined to prison camps.

I was just a little new born baby, and in my opinion hardly a threat to society, but here is picture of me in the camp, apparently ready to cause mischief.

Herb Maruska's Seagoville, Texas Internment Camp birth certificate.

A U.S. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service list of Civilian Alien Enemies in Custody on December 31, 1944 at the Seagoville Internment Camp, included little me, my father and my mother (who was a United States citizen). Oh well.

After the war we were sent back to New York City.

Here I am in my high chair in 1945.

My parents, Paul Maximilian  and Emma Maruska, soon found themselves in apartment 2-C at 157-159 Vermilyea Avenue in the Inwood Section of Manhattan.

Inwood was pretty much divided east and west by Broadway. On the west side were generally more affluent people who lived in nicer apartment houses. Most of these people were Jewish. On the east side of Broadway the apartment houses were older and more run down. Here most of the residents were Irish.

It was certainly difficult to find an apartment in New York City in 1946 when all of the victorious American soldiers came home and married their sweethearts, and to make matters worse, my parents did not have good references, having just arrived from the internment camp in Texas. So they could not afford to be very choosy.

Herb Maruska's building, 157-159 Vermilyea Ave, in 1964

157-159 Vermilyea Avenue was squarely in the Irish part of town, but it was owned by Mrs. Lichtenstein, who was Jewish. Because both my parents were Bohemian-style intellectuals, they fit in more easily with Jews than with simple working-class Catholics.

So my father lived in a house owned by a Jewish lady and worked as a salesman for a dairy business owned by a Jewish man named Charles Schreiber. I think that these facts show that despite having been interned by the U.S. government on suspicion of being an “enemy alien,” Jewish people did not consider him to have been a Nazi, which of course he never was. Otherwise we would not have had so many Jewish friends.

It is impossible for me to remember the details of the first few years of my life. As best as I can figure, my father went off to work every day as a dairy food salesman and my mother stayed home with me.

The front of the apartment house faced west, and when you entered our main door from the hall, you were facing north. All of the windows of apartment 2-C were facing north. We lived on the second floor overlooking a courtyard. We never got any sunshine in this little apartment. Our building had running water, bathrooms with toilets and steam heat. They clearly represented state-of-the-art construction in 1910.

Initially, the adults shared a standard double bed in the bedroom, while I slept in a crib in the same room. I figure that the bedroom was about 9 ft by 11 ft. You entered the bedroom through a glass panel door which had a semi-transparent curtain on it. My parent’s bed had a wooden headboard which was set up against the right (east) wall. This wall was the rear wall of the apartment, with another unit behind it. The far (north) wall was solid brick, the exterior wall of the building. The left wall had a window in the center which looked out into the courtyard. To the left of the window were stacked a trunk, and then two suitcases, filled with clothing and other possessions. To the right of the window was a chest of drawers, with five drawers. My father had the top drawer. He was very neat, and all of his under-clothes were carefully arranged in his drawer. He also kept his wallet and other papers in this drawer. My mother was totally messy. Her drawer looked like a rat’s nest! The bottom drawer was for sheets and towels. There were two other drawers: one for myself, and eventually one for my younger brother Rolly.

My parents never made any good friends in the neighborhood. They talked with the Polish people in the basement (Harry Konopka, the Super, and his wife Julia). And they said “hello” to some people with whom they crossed paths in the Park. But my mother’s only real friends seemed to be her three sisters. My father had several German friends. Most of these friends he met in the internment camp. His best friend was Otto Burkhardt, who, like my father, was a pastry chef.

Otto had a wife named Elfriede, but they never had any children. Somehow the Burkhardts were able to scrape together enough money to set up a bakery shop in Queens, at the intersection of Broadway and 31st Street. The Burkhardts worked exceedingly hard and made a great success out of their bakeshop. Since my father was a pastry chef by trade, Otto invited him to join the business. However, my father could not see himself toiling in front of a hot oven. He suffered from “big shot” tendencies, which in the end did him no good whatsoever. During Christmas season the bakery was extremely busy, and my father would make himself a little extra money by moonlighting there.

Paul Maximilian Maruska (center) with Otto Burckhardt (right) & the Schillers on McCreery Meadow in 1950.

Working in the bakeshop was no joke. My father would travel to the shop on Friday evening and sleep over in the Burkhardt’s apartment. They lived in the building over the bakery. The bakers had to be up and at it by 4 AM. They had to get the oven going, and then start making the cakes. Elfriede minded the store and dealt with the customers. By 2:00 pm all of the baking was complete and the bakers went to sleep. In later years as the business prospered, Otto employed several other bakers, always Germans, to help him on a regular basis. The Burkhardts did so well that they bought the entire apartment building. Then they bought themselves a house in New Jersey, and a house back in Germany

In the early years in Inwood, my father also knew people called Schiller and people called Rohner, camp buddies. However, as the years away from the camp grew longer, these friends drifted away.

He had one other important German friend, a woman named Martha Culkin. Culkin was her married name, but her husband was long gone. She was originally from Alsace-Lorraine, on the border between France and Germany, but she spoke German. She had no children, and lived in one of those single-room-occupancy hotels on the West Side around 90th Street. She visited our apartment frequently, and so she became “Aunt Martha.” Through the years, my mother and Martha became good friends.

Martha was a watchmaker by trade. She worked in the Bulova Watch Factory by Queens Plaza. She smoked endless cigarettes. Martha brought lots of presents for my birthday and Christmas, so she was a dear “Aunt.” She never learned how to cook, and ate all of her meals at a diner on Columbus Avenue. She would remain friends with the family until she died many years later.

My father pictured himself as a great political leader. Now that Hitler and his gang had been exterminated, Paul Maximilian felt that he would be especially useful back in Germany, to help the country re-establish itself after the devastation from the Second World War. He was extremely anti-Russian, and in fact referred to the cockroaches, which infested his apartment as “Russians.” Whenever he would step on a roach, he would curse and mutter, “Another Russian is dead!” He and Martha argued endlessly about the political situation in the world. My mother did not bother to listen to their ravings, and instead buried herself in the reading of history books. She was especially interested in books which confirmed her suspicion that Jesus was not really the Son of God.

Needless to say, I grew up without any positive religious convictions. Although both of my parents had been originally baptized as Catholics back in Europe, we never went to mass in Good Shepherd Church.

From December 26th-27th, 1947, there fell 26.4″ of snow in New York City. This would hold up as the largest recorded snowfall total in New York City until 2006. I believe that I can remember being taken over to Inwood Park that weekend and to my glee, the park benches were buried under the snow, and little Herbie was able to walk along the seats of the benches without having to climb up onto them.

My brother Roland was born on February 21, 1948. There was hardly enough money in the house to support three people, and now there were four! When little Rolly was brought home from the hospital, I had a cold and had to wear a handkerchief over my face to look at the new baby. We wound up with two cribs in the apartment, one in the bedroom, and one in the living room. You would have thought that at 3½, I would have been too big to fit in a crib, but somehow we survived.

As the years went by, both Rolly and me got bigger and bigger. Obviously at some age I could no longer fit into a crib. As far as I can tell, a steel folding bed was acquired and placed in the living room along the east wall. This is where I slept, while little Rolly had his crib in the bedroom along with mom and dad. However, Rolly also got bigger, and finally he also outgrew a crib.Somewhere along the way, the whole bedroom was re-arranged. My parents threw out the old double bed and bought two new single beds. Rolly and I each got one of these new beds, which were placed in the bedroom. Rolly got the inner bed, along the north wall, while I got the outer bed, by the door.

Where did my parents sleep? This is difficult to figure out. There was a steel folding bed in the living room. There was also a standard sofa. So apparently one of them (probably my mother) slept on the sofa, and the other one slept on the bed. It seems a little strange, but I certainly remember a sofa in the living room placed along the south wall. There was also a large stuffed chair, known as the Green Chair, which sat along the west wall, next to the radiator.

The building had steam heat. The furnace in the basement had a boiler attached to it to generate hot water and steam. The steam went up through the building in pipes to provide heat in the winter. There were three pipes in the apartment, each pipe being maybe three inches in diameter, and a radiator in the living room. It got very hot, and if you touched it, you got badly burned. After many years, the heat given off by the radiator caused the Green Chair to dry up and fall apart. Then we got a new chair.

One day I was sitting upon the right arm of the sofa, making believe that it was a “horse,” and trying to get the “horse” to “gallop,” when the arm broke away from the sofa. Good grief, I’m sure that I got severely punished for that maneuver!

Look at the Christmastime picture below. We are sitting in the corner of the living room. My father’s bookcase is set against the wall which has the bedroom behind it. Notice the cloth stuck to the corner of the bookcase to prevent Little Rolly from slamming his head while running around the room. The Christmas tree is set up on a table which later was used as the meal table in the kitchen. The kitchen was very small, and this table was a little bit too large for the space it needed to set in.

Maruska Family December 25, 1949

Rosendo and Fe Palafox came to America from the Phillipines. They lived in Apartment 1-C. They looked Oriental.  During the Second World War, the Palafoxes had to walk down the streets of Inwood wearing signs around their necks stating “We are not Japanese” so that they would not be hauled off to a Japanese Internment Camp. This sort of behavior in America makes me very uncomfortable. What a shame. I don’t know what sort of business Mr. Palafox was in, but he liked to take pictures. He took all of the nice color photographs which I have. He did well for himself, and around 1950 or so the family bought a house and moved to Queens. We never saw them again.

Inwood Park Meadow Fe Palafox, Emma, Eddie, Rolly, Herbie 1949

The Palafoxes had relatives in Apartment 1-E named Garcia. The Garcia family members also wore signs around their necks disclaiming Japanese origins.   Pino Garcia and his family moved away around 1952.

They were not the only victims of misplaced hostility.

Years later, I attended PS 98, and all of my friends were Jewish. Our family name sounds Jewish (it is a Czech name). Because we never attended mass at Good Shepherd, the neighbors assumed we were Jewish. On several occasions I was over on the meadow in Inwood park with my little Jewish friends, when we were attacked by a bunch of Catholic guys. They beat us up, and I remember getting my face pushed into the mud, and all of that stuff. Also, there were times when Catholic kids chased me down the street, yelling, “Let’s get the Jew!” Ugh.

Finally, when I grew up, I joined the Catholic Church. I married a Catholic girl in a beautiful church wedding. We had our kids baptised. One day as an adult in my 20’s, I was sitting on the benches in the park, overlooking the salt marsh. The same old group of Catholic guys, who used to beat us up, came over and sat down by me. They said, “Oh, here is the Jew.” I said, “Actually, I am not a Jew, I am a Catholic just like you. Just because my parents chose not to attend mass, does not mean that you should attack me nor should you beat up my other Jewish friends. “Gosh,” said one of the guys, “We beat him up for nothing!” Then they all offered me their apologies, which I accepted.

The 157-159 Vermilyea Avenue building always had a janitor living in the basement. This person was known as the “Super,” which indicated he was the superintendent of the building. But the Super never supervised anything. The Super lived on the ground floor at the back of the building. This basement was built on the surface of the ground, which is why there were so many stairs in front up to the first floor, where rent-paying tenants lived. The basement contained all of the rooms which existed on the upper floors, but only a few of the rooms were livable. The rooms at the front of the building, by the street, were used for storage, including the storage of coal. Coal was delivered in a coal truck which pulled up on the sidewalk and dumped the chunks through a basement window. In the center of the basement there was located the furnace, which provided heat in the winter, and hot water all year around. The furnace burned the coal, which needed to be hauled back to the furnace in a wheelbarrow. Ugh! The furnace was located in the region of the basement directly below the living room of Apartment 2-C.

The two rear apartments were joined together. These formed a large apartment where the Super lived. When I was a little boy, the Super was an old man from Poland called Harry Konopka. He had a wife named Julia Konopka. They had a daughter named Olga. Harry was a tall lean man with a thin white mustache, while Julia was short and round. They looked like your typical image of old time Polish peasants. My parents were friendly with the Konopka’s because they also came from north-central Europe. I called Mr. Konopka “Wujeku” (pronounce oo-yuh-koo) and I called Mrs. Konopka “Ciotka” (pronounced set-ka). These words mean uncle and aunt in Polish.

A word here about the “dumbwaiters” in the building. Apparently back in 1910 when the buildings were constructed, people felt that it was too much trouble to carry their garbage down to the basement. So each apartment was outfitted with a dumbwaiter. The dumbwaiter was a box located in a shaft which ran from the basement up to the roof. There was a pulley system for each dumbwaiter located in the portion of the shaft that protruded out of the roof. Our dumbwaiter shaft was located in the kitchen, but it was no longer in use. It had been nailed shut. The dumbwaiter shaft was 2 feet, 5 inches wide, and about 2 feet deep. But the dumbwaiter in the back hallway was still in operation. It was a public dumbwaiter. When you wanted to dispose of a bag of trash, you went down the hallway to the dumbwaiter and opened the door. Typically a foul stench exuded from the shaft. You pulled on a thick rope, and with a groan, the dumbwaiter would start its squeaky ascent from the basement. The box would arrive at the door, and you put your garbage inside. Then you sent the box back down to the basement.

In the basement, the dumbwaiter box arrived in the central utility area. Wujeku had to unload each bag of garbage. Being a man from Europe who lived by the code, “Waste not, want not,” he sifted through each bag of trash. Any scraps of food were thrown to Butchy and Jacky, the basement guard dogs. I would guess that their real names were Polish, but that’s what they sounded like to me as a young boy. Butchy was dark black, with long thick fur. Butchy barked at you and seemed to be threatening. Jacky was kind of orange-brown and just slunk around in the background. Jacky was probably much more dangerous. Anyway, these ugly dogs were not allowed inside the Konopka’s apartment.

Harry Konopka gathered and collected any and all useful items that were thrown out by tenants. He maintained shelves on the side of the utility room where he stored all of these treasures. When my father’s wind-up alarm clock failed, my mother went down to the basement and selected a replacement from the Konopka treasure trove. Little Herbie wanted a fish tank? A bird cage? These things were all available in the basement. Since I was just a little boy, I don’t know what Wujeku charged my mother for these items.

In their kitchen, the Konopka’s had a huge cage with a large parrot. The parrot was very beautiful, and it spoke fluent Polish, which I could not understand. I was warned never to put my fingers near the wires of the cage or the parrot would just bite them off. The outside door to the utility room was never locked. You could just walk right in. Of course, the sight of Butchy and Jacky snarling viciously in the utility room was enough to frighten unwelcome guests away. Once inside, we would ring the bell of the Konopka’s apartment. They were always home. Harry Konopka enjoyed drinking alcohol, but somehow he managed to keep the building in order.

There were 46 feet of open space behind our building. Up against the structure there was concrete paving, maybe 16 feet wide, but then there was a lovely garden. I would say that the garden was 50 feet wide, and 30 feet deep. There was stone wall separating the garden from the concrete walkway. In the center of the garden was a huge cherry tree which Wujeku had planted many years before. He also had a lovely white birch tree. There was a shed along the inside of the stone wall where Ciotka kept all of her gardening supplies. She filled the back yard with flowers and vegetables when springtime arrived. She had a raft of morning-glory vines growing on clotheslines which stretched from the stone wall back to her four rear windows of the apartment. What a lovely site. You can see the garden wall and the morning-glory vines in the photo below. Ciotka even created a small flower garden for me. When my mother needed to go somewhere in daytime when my father was at work, she would leave me in the garden where she knew that I was safe. I amused myself by digging little holes in the ground. Oh what a life! But then I got to be six years old, and I had to go to school…”

A special thanks to Herb Maruska for making this post possible. If you are reading this and have stories or photos you’d like to contribute, please drop me a line.

Click here for more Inwood History.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss and his Albany Flyer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then disaster struck.

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

The Albany Flyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glenn Curtiss' Inwood landing site. (From "Riverdale, Kinsgbridge and Spuyten Duyvil" history by William Tieck)

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

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

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

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

Glenn Curtiss' legendary Inwood takeoff.

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

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

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

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

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

Curtiss Landing at Governor's Island

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here for more Inwood history.