New York Herald, August 29, 1869.

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 remains virtually the same.

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.

New York Times, September 16, 1904.

Shortly after the turn of the century a small group of investors, led by real estate “wheeler-dealer” Andrew J. Cobe, made a land grab in northern Manhattan.  Their vision—a sprawling thirty-one acre amusement park to be built on the current site of Columbia University’s Baker Field.

Cobe was a shameless self-promoter who had been kicked out of  Cuba in the late 1890’s for his role in a souvenir peso scheme. Now, surveying the open pastures, rail access and nearby waterways of Inwood, the P.T. Barnum side of Cobe instinctively kicked in.

The self appointed president of the newly formed Corporation Liquidating Company had recently made  a major acquisition.  In a move that likely caused Jan Dyckman to spin furiously in his  grave, Cobe, and his newly formed syndicate of private investors, bought all the property alongside the Spuyten Duyvil they could get their hands on.  The purchase included one of the Dyckman family’s ancestral homes.

Artists rendering of "Wonderland," New York Tribune September 13, 1904.

Now, as the chilly autumn winds bore down on shoreline, Cobe knew he could actually sell this idea.  A few plugs from the press couldn’t hurt either.

Coney Island's "Dreamland", 1905 designed by Kirby Petit and Green.

In an article published in the New York Tribune on September 13, 1904, one of  Cobe’s representatives first described the future Wonderland, “Kirby , Pettit & Green, who designed Dreamland (on Coney Island), are the architects.  Their preliminary drawings show a massive entrance, opening on a main concourse, which will stretch diagonally from end to end of the property.

New York Tribune detail of Wonderland.

This concourse will be 180 feet wide and 1,800 feet in length.  In the center of this boulevard will be a lagoon, bridged at convenient points. No two buildings will be alike, and every possible order of architecture will be introduced.  A variegated color scheme, introducing some brand new effects, is promised.

There will be a large open air amphitheatre for the production of a new fire fighting show on lines larger than have yet been attempted.  Then there will be a theatre for spectacles after the type of ‘The Storming of Port Arthur.’  A famous magician is to have his own theatre, with a stage which will make possible a new line of magic.  There will be gardens typical of different parts of the world, and several foreign villages.  An English tea garden on the banks of a miniature Thames, an old Italian town and an Alpine pass and village are among the features arranged.

1904 New York Tribune sketch of Wonderland.

An enormous swimming pool will be erected near the river front.  Part of it will be enclosed and the water kept at even temperatures, making bathing possible from May until the end of September, in water of the same temperature found in August.  Outside there will be a large pool in the open for use in the warmer months.  It is possible that the famous Sutro baths in San Francisco will be reproduced.”

Cobe expected to have the two million dollar project up and running by March of 1905, he explained in a November, 1904 New York Times article.  He also provided Times readers with more spectacular details on the park, which was, at the time, really just a just a cow pasture.

Cows grazing along the Spuyten Duyvil near turn of the century.

According to the Times, the park’s designers “have striven to make Wonderland a place very different from all other recreation parks, although the familiar ‘chutes’ will not be left out”.

Cobe’s description included not only rides, but enchanting foreign micro-cities so popular at world expositions.  “There are to be a German village, a Japanese village, a sixteenth century German castle and gaily colored pagodas.”

The old Dyckman mansion which Wonderland promoters planned on turning into a casino.

The article went on: “Within Wonderland’s boundaries is the old Dyckman mansion, which will be turned into a mammoth ballroom and casino. Between the mansion and the esplanade walk, where now is a thick grove of trees, will be gardens laid out with curving paths and rustic benches.  The natural characteristics of the grove will be interfered with as little as possible.”

In just a few short years the subway would reach Inwood and the park would become a goldmine.  That was the pitch anyway.  In the meantime workers would have all winter to build Wonderland from the ground up.

Winter wasn’t the ideal season to embark on a major construction project, but no one seemed to question Cobe’s judgment.

By the spring of 1905 Wonderland was still relatively undeveloped, but Cobe and new park director Thomas Riego Hart assured New Yorkers of a July 1^st opening.

Hart provided more tantalizing details on the layout of the park to a New York Herald reporter on April 2^nd.

“Wonderland”, the Herald scribe told readers, “will strive to be what its name implies.  It will embrace some of the leading features of Earls Court, in London; Willow Grove Park, in Philadelphia, and several of the successes which have made Luna Park and Dreamland, at Coney Island, famous.  In addition, it will have Italian gardens, lakes, Venetian canals and deep shaded rambles.”

The park would also now include, thirty-two different amusements, including “a reproduction of the storming and taking of 203 Metre Hill, at Port Arthur” to be directed by Bolossy Kiralfy.

1883 Kiralfy Brothers expo poster.

Beginning the 1880’s, the Hungarian born Brother’s Kiralfy dazzled world audiences with their theatrical extravaganzas involving a then primitive form of electricity.  They were especially renowned for their riverfront spectaculars—the bright lights dancing on the water’s surface.  Wonderland offered just such a backdrop.

Composer Walter Damroach was to be a headliner at the opening of Wonderland.

If the promoter’s claims were to be believed, the venue would also attract some of the most popular musicians of 1905.   “Wonderland”, the Herald reported,  “is scheduled to have Walter Damroach, if possible, open the season and to engage Sousa and Victor Herbert for some time in the summer.”

Six days after the Herald article, the real estate section of the New York Times announced: “Wonderland Sold for $1,000,000.”

1904 New York Tribune sketch of Wonderland.

According to the article, “The tract, which consists of nearly all the land included between Broadway, Two Hundred and Eighteenth Street and the Harlem Ship Canal, was bought last fall by Andrew J. Cobe from the Dyckman estate and has since been headed by Thomas Reigo Hart as the site for an amusement park. It is said that the purchase means that the amusement enterprise will be carried out.”

Despite such promising reports, the grand July 1^st opening never took place. Cows continued to graze where Venetian canals and Japanese gardens had been so excitedly promised just months before.

Amusement Park Abandoned, New York Times, Nov. 23, 1905.

In November of 1905, the death knell sounded on Wonderland.  Wrote the New York Times, “Andrew J. Cobe has sold, through David Stewart, a one half interest in the ‘Wonderland’ property at Broadway and the Harlem Ship Canal.  It was said yesterday that all projects had been abandoned for converting this property into an amusement park, and that it would be developed for resale.”

Wonderland had been but an illusion.

Columbia University Baker Field at 218th and Broadway, 1927.

In 1921, Columbia University, using money donated by Park Avenue banker George Fisher Baker, Jr., purchased the abandoned Wonderland site.  Today Columbia’s athletic center, including Baker Field, occupies what could have been the Coney Island of Northern Manhattan.

When Wonderland’s “wheeler dealer” promoter died in December of 1924, the Times noted his passing with two simple sentences, “Andrew J. Cobe, real estate and theatrical broker, with offices at 233 West Forty-second Street, died yesterday of heart disease at his residence, 76 West Eighty-sixth Street, age 59.  His wife, two sons, a daughter and two brothers survive.”

A bit of Inwood trivia: Jason, the owner of the Indian Road Cafe considered naming his establishment “Wonderland.”

Click here for more Inwood history.

“Dum vivimus vivamus”
-Motto of the Hoboken Turtle Club

According to legend, as the history of most social clubs is so often based, the Hoboken Turtle Club was founded in 1796. It is reputed to have been the oldest social club in the United States.

The club was the brainchild of John Stevens, a former Captain in George Washington’s Continental army. An inventor, lawyer and treasurer for the State of New Jersey, Stevens amassed a fortune through shrewd real estate investments, the invention of a screw-driven steamboat capable of ocean navigation and marriage into an extremely wealthy family. Among Stevens’ holdings was the Stevens Castle, currently the home to the Stevens Institute of Technology.

But, despite all of Stevens’ accomplishments, he had a problem. Turtles.

According to an 1878 New York Times article, Stevens’ riverfront Hoboken, New Jersey estate was plagued by conniving cold-blooded reptiles, which often poached his prized European chickens.

One day Stevens hired a local shepherd boy to go down to the riverbank to investigate. As the chickens dug for clams on the muddy shore, the boy sprawled out on the ground nearby engrossed in a romance novel.

Suddenly, according to the Times “a huge turtle, with an arched back completely covered with moss, crept out of the river, seized an unsuspecting hen by the leg and dragged her off to his felonious retreat on the river bottom.”

Ever the soldier, Stevens declared war on his hard-shelled nemesis in a most ingenious manner. He summoned a group of wealthy Manhattan businessmen to cross the Hudson to dine on turtle soup. “He was remarkable in his selection of great eaters.”

Hoboken Turtle Club medal.

The Times described the members of the newfound Hoboken Turtle Club as “one of the weightiest assemblages of solid men to be found between Wall Street and the Treasury Department.”

Their motto: “Dum vivimus vivamus,” Latin for, “As we journey through life, let us live by the way.”

The feasts often went on for days and, after several years, the Hoboken Turtle Club had devoured the local supply of turtles.

Soon these powerful men who had been duped into pitching tents on the Jersey side of the Hudson numbered several hundred. Before long they would move their annual feast into the city. By 1878 Tammany Hall was hosting the event. A giant turtle shell emblazoned with the letters “H.T.C “ hung from the balcony.

As the years passed, entrance to the club became one of the most coveted memberships in town. In an 1896 speech marking the 100th anniversary of the Turtle Club, the organization’s president, William Sulzer, noted that Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Burr and Clay had all been Turtle Club members.

By the 1890’s, the Turtle Club had fallen on hard times. Membership was down. Still the party went on. Manning the soup kettle for the latter half of the 19th century was a man named John Tarbell; described by many as stout, clean-shaven and secretive. Tarbell’s talents were renowned among turtle aficionados. His turtle soup recipe, a “state secret,” was shared only with the president of the organization. Two days before the guests arrived Tarbell would enter the cookhouse with his turtle, “its flippers tied and its eyes abulge with apprehension.” Forty-eight hours later the turtle would “emerge in a soup that is fragrant, palatable and nutritious.”

In June of 1893 the Turtle Club found a new home in the old Kingsbridge Hotel, once the site of Hyatt’s Tavern; an important drinking establishment dating to the days of the Revolution. William Sperb, a veteran member and turtle enthusiast purchased the old hotel to ensure the club’s survival.

There, on the Spuyten Duyvil, members achieved truly remarkable levels of excess unheard of even in the Club’s early days. It was not uncommon for a man to drink ten cocktails before breakfast, but the amount of alcohol consumed was hard to measure, because, as a bartender at the King’s Bridge Hotel told one reporter, “the veterans drink their cocktails from pitchers.”

Breakfast was served at 8:00 a.m., and, according to a Times article published that year, “consisted of cocktails, stewed eels, fried eels, baked and fried bluefish, porterhouse steak and turtle steak.”

Members of the Turtle Club were not simply there to dine; they were expected to participate in the preparation of the feast. Famous members, including “such men as John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr adopted the rule that no one could partake of turtle unless he had taken some part in its preparation.” Dinner was served at 4:00 in the afternoon and consisted of boiled eggs, brandy and, of course, turtle soup.

Frank Leslie's Illustrated September 7,1889.

Surprisingly, the secret to a good turtle soup is not turtle. In 1878 Tarbell confided to a reporter that, “You see, this is turtle soup of the best kind, but there’s not much turtle in it. It wouldn’t do you know. Too much turtle spoils turtle soup…If 1,500 turtles made any better soup than six; we’d have the 1,500. But they wouldn’t; they’d spoil it. It would be so rich, nobody could eat a cupful of it.”

Tarbell’s hearty concoction was so famous it was reportedly served to French General Lafayette when he visited America.

The main ingredients, Tarbell told the reporter in a hushed tone, were vegetables including: potatoes, turnips, cabbage, radishes, peas, beets, tomatoes, cucumbers and cauliflower. Of course there were other ingredients Tarbell refused to divulge.

So what does turtle soup taste like?

Dr. I. I. Hayes, a polar explorer and Club member, compared the taste of turtle to fried seal’s liver and walrus bacon. It was said the soup was so rich that no man could eat more than two plates, but of course, members had consumed a huge breakfast. Not to mention a superhuman number of cocktails.

While many had never tasted seal’s liver and walrus bacon, the 1887 Times article provided this description:

“To receive a turtle soup you must first chop a hard boiled egg very fine in the bottom of your plate. Then you squeeze into the egg the juice of half a lemon, and pour into it, also, a teaspoon full of mellow old Otard brandy from a bottle, which furnishes you a drink at the same time. The egg is to prepare the plate, and the drink is to prepare the stomach. Then your plate is filled with soup, and while the egg struggles from the bottom to float on the surface, you lay aside all earthly thoughts, forgive all your enemies, and forget all your creditors and put a teaspoon full of it into your mouth. Then you remove the spoon and shut your eyes, and your soul, on the wings of sensuous thought, passes outward into lotus land, and for a time you are lost in a dream that is so still, so perfect, and so all absorbing that you wish, lazily and sadly, it might never end. But you swallow the soup and open your eyes, discover that the face of nature is unchanged, and then, your intellect having reasserted its sway, you conclude that the turtle, like the swan, yields its only perfect symphony in its death.”

Unfortunately the Hoboken Turtle Club, whose name had been changed in 1892 to the New York Turtle Club, would once again resume its nomadic existence.

Kingsbridge Hotel in turn of the century postcard by Charles Buck.

On October 27th, 1903, the Old Kingsbridge Hotel was destroyed in a fire that swept through the Kingsbridge area. At least twenty other buildings were destroyed in the inferno.

By 1938, the Club was meeting in the Rathskeller of Manhattan’s Terminal Hotel, where inscribed above the door, a sign read, “When you enter this cellar, you meet a good feller.”

Shortly thereafter the former Hoboken Turtle Club faded into memory.

Read more Inwood history here.

As the dog days of summer approached, generations of children in Inwood, and around the City, looked forward to one thing only…The Miramar Saltwater Pool.

Built in the 1920′s, the massive facility was located on 207th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues. Photos, dating as early as 1927, show a large outdoor pool just west of the University Heights Bridge.

Miramar Saltwater Pool, Inwood, 1933

A later, 1937 photo of the Dyckman Street Ferry Terminal at Tubby Hook, shows a billboard advertising the Miramar, presumably for the benefit of sun starved New Jersey tourists.

By the early 1970′s the Miramar was demolished, but the memories live on….

MyInwood.net reader Ken Hollerbach was born in Inwood in 1947. Ken lived on 549 Isham Street, attended Good Shepherd, and spent many a summer day lounging at the Miramar.
Ken kindly shared his memories; keeping them alive for future generations.

“I remember those summer days at Miramar; a whole day of fun in the sun for only a buck. They gave you a locker key attached to an elastic strap that you wore around your ankle. The men’s lockers were in the basement, it was always cold and damp down there on the concrete floor. There were also several showers that you had to use before going up to the pool, and then when you went upstairs there was a passage on the side of the building where more showers, like a giant bidet, would finish the job of rinsing you from above and below.

Miramar Saltwater Pool, Inwood, 1956

I remember there was a wonderful slide and a high diving board (and two smaller ones) that seemed awfully high to a ten year old. At the shallow end of the pool, there was a “boardwalk” of painted plywood where you could stretch out in the sun.

Miramar pool medal

There was a snack bar/lunch room that overlooked the pool where you could take a break from the sun and enjoy a coke (in a bottle). My mom always packed a sandwich for my brother and me, usually PB&J, and we sure needed the energy after playing “Creature from the Black Lagoon” for hours.

It claimed to be ‘the World’s Largest, Outdoor, Saltwater Pool’ though I doubt that it was the largest. It sure was salty too, which made it a lot easier for us to float and swim. The first time I ever swam in fresh water, I nearly drowned because I didn’t have the buoyancy I was used to in Miramar.
At the end of the day we were usually exhausted and dragged ourselves the four blocks back to Isham Street.

Sunburned and red eyed from the salt, we still couldn’t wait to do it all again the next day.”
Thanks again to Ken Hollerbach for bringing the Miramar back to life. I encourage other readers to share their Inwood memories and photos.

To read more Inwood history, click here.

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.

On May 29th, 2010 the children of Inwood gathered in Isham Park to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Glenn “The Birdman” Curtiss’ historic flight from Albany to New York City.    He landed right here in Isham Park.

To read more about the 1910 flight click here

A special thanks to Don Rice for organizing the event.
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On Sunday May 23, 2010 Inwood Hill Park hosted Drums Along The Hudson.  If you’ve never been, the festival is a fun for the whole family annual event that’s been going on since 2002.

There’s food, entertainment, music and all kinds of photo opportunities.

Below are a few photos of the festivities.

Starting in the late 1800′s various institutions serving alcoholics, drug addicts, tuberculosis patients, petty criminals, runaways and “women of ill repute” lined the ridge in what is now Inwood Hill Park. Of these bleak fortresses  of infirmity, born of era  when inebriates were often treated with hypodermic injections of nitrate of strychnine and married women could be sent away under lock and key for up to three years for simply dancing in public, Inwood’s House of Mercy was considered cutting edge.

The original House of Mercy,  established in the 1850’s , was located at the foot of 86th Street near the current Riverside Drive in a building described as “the old Howland mansion.” The home for “abandoned and troubled women” was founded by Mrs. William Richmond, whose husband was the rector of Saint Michaels.

When the Sisters of Saint Mary took charge of the home in September of 1863 they were desperately poor. The nuns themselves were given a per Diem of just eight cents.

Founded by Harriet Starr Cannon (right), the first Mother Superior of the Sisterhood of Saint Mary; the early sisters had lofty notions as how to best care for their wards.

In a biography, Cannon said of those early days,  “As the early spring and summer came we were able to give out-door pleasures to the girls, which helped them very much, for their confinement in the House during the entire winter was a little irksome to them.

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In the early days of the Institution we did not know the best way to manage them. We gave ourselves more trouble and them more care than was really necessary. For instance, if any of the girls got away we would think it our duty to spend our time in search of them: entire days were spent by the Sisters in looking up a girl. Now, of course, it is quite different. We have only to send a description of the missing one to a police station, and she is very soon returned to us.”

The House of Mercy relocated to their uptown location, currently Inwood Hill Park, in May of 1891. Bishop Henry Codman Potter (left)  himself consecrated the massive brick and white trimmed structure before several hundred clergy and lay persons as a vested choir sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.

“This home for women,” according to one description, received “destitute and fallen women upon their own application, or committed by the city magistrates.” The house was run, under the guidance of the Protestant Episcopal Church, by the Sisters of Saint Mary.

According to a New York Times article dated May 27th 1891, “The new House of Mercy has been erected on a plateau, one of the highest points at the northerly end of New York Island, a half mile north of Inwood Station, on the Hudson, and within 400 feet of the river, equal in area to eighty city lots. The building consists of a main structure 204 feet in length, facing the west and the river front, with wings at each end running at right angles to the rear and 104 and 128 feet respectively in depth.

The building is so arranged as to provide for three distinct divisions of the institution work—the House of Mercy proper, St. Agnes’s House, and a division for penitents. Each division has everything necessary for its proper and systematic working, and the inmates of one division are not brought into contact with those of the others. The House of Mercy and St.Agnes’s divisions are similar in arrangement and consist, on the first floor, of reception rooms, laundry and ironing rooms, packing, dining, and bath rooms, sister’s and lady associates’ dining rooms, reception rooms; and the chapel is also on this floor. The third floor contains dormitories and rooms for the sisters and penitents.”

A later Times article offered this description: “The view is beautiful, but the girls in the home do not see it. The windows of the rooms which they occupy command a view of a tangled mass of forest and, in some instances, a fleeting view of the Harlem….In spite of the architectural beauty of the buildings and the natural beauty of the surrounding country, the place is not a cheerful one to see…Iron gratings guard each door and lighter ones are fastened across each window. They are twisted and convoluted and intertwined in an artistic manner, but they are bars nevertheless, and strong ones at that.”

1916 Map of Inwood Hill

Initially the House of Mercy was built to house 154 female “inmates”. While  conditions inside the House of Mercy might be considered inhumane by modern standards, these turn of the century women could have fared worse. The House of Mercy dealt with a “better class of fallen women” and the huge brick structure included such amenities as steam heat, light, ventilation and plumbing.

But despite Sister Cannon’s early idealism and the state of the art design and concept of the facility, the House of Mercy was also a product of its time.

Not long after the consecration reports began to surface claiming that cruel and unusual punishments, isolation cells, and bread and water diets were routine  behind the walls of the House of Mercy.

Court papers accused the institution of “locking inmates in a small room or cell without food or water for periods varying from one to five days…corporal infliction by whipping, the use of a gag, handcuffs and a straight jacket….that inmates are not permitted to communicate with or to see friends for long periods of time.”

And while the report by the New York Department of Social Welfare would vindicate the House of Mercy, the charges would not be the last to be leveled against the home on the hill.

In 1895, twenty-two year old Annie Sigalove, begged Judge Gildersleeve of the New York Superior Court to release her from the House of Mercy. According to a New York Times account, “she said she had been abused and ill treated at the home; that her head had been shaved, and that she had been prevented from seeing her parents for months at a time.” By today’s standards, the offense that led to Sigalove’s incarceration seems minor–the young woman had merely been caught enjoying a night out in a Coney Island dance hall. While Sigalove was eventually released, the Times reporter evidently thought her charges warranted a follow-up . The reporter must have been shocked by the candid answers he received from the Sister who answered the heavy wooden main door of the House of Mercy after ringing a gong whose “echoes would have disturbed the slumbers of Rip Van Winkle.”

House of Mercy, 1932

Standing in the doorway facing “a woman wearing a uniform much like those worn by Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy,” the reporter peppered the indignant nun with questions as he scribbled away on his reporter’s notebook.

Were the charges true? “We make it a rule here to never deny any attack made upon us.”

Had Sigalove been denied visits from her parents? “We find that not allowing them to see their parents is one of the best ways to keep them in order.”

Was her head shaved? “We sometimes shave the girls’ heads.Occasionally it is done for sanitary purposes, sometimes for punishment. We find the girls do not like to lose their hair, and that the fear of having it cut off tends to make them more obedient.”

As the years passed, more and more girls complained, but conditions at the House remained more or less the same.

In August of 1896 nineteen year old Laura Forman brought charges against the House of Mercy. Forman claimed that she had been subjected to a bread and molasses diet and was often forced to wear a gag. The Asbury Park, New Jersey woman told the court said she had come into the city to visit her sister. While in the city, Forman said her father hauled her off to the House of Mercy where she had been held against her will.

Her lawyer argued for her immediate release on the grounds that no court had given the authority to commit her in the first place. Despite desperate pleas from Forman’s father to keep his daughter behind bars the trial judge agreed saying, “It may be right from every point of view excepting the legal one.” A free woman, Forman turned her back on her father’s outstretched hand as her attorney told reporters of a $25,000 lawsuit he planned to file against the House of Mercy for false imprisonment.

In 1902, another nineteen year old woman, Harriet Farnham, claimed she too had been kidnapped by her father and, with the help of police, committed to the House of Mercy. “My father looks like a saint,” Farnham told the court, “but he isn’t one; he’s a devil. He has eight children, and all but on of them he has committed to institutions.”

1932 Map of Inwood Hill Park by Reginald Bolton

During a 1910 census, the House of Mercy counted 107 inmates with a capacity of 110. According to the 1910 document, “These come, some of free will, others by commitment…The women are given practical training in domestic service and do the work of the large laundry which is a source of income. Attention is given to recreation, religious training and to the life after leaving the institution.”

The House of Mercy also received prostitutes sentenced by the courts, many of whom were cast off childen and orphans forced into a Dickens-like existance by adult predators who lurked in the shadows.

House of Mercy seen in 1924 aerial photograph.

In 1912 the House received just four adult “women of ill repute”, but the juvenile population was staggering. According to a report published by the now defunct Bureau of Social Hygiene, 1912 also saw 57 girls under 16 sentenced to indeterminate terms in the House of Mercy. “Most, though not all of these cases were strictly related to prostitution.”

By March of 1919, the House of Mercy had fallen on hard times. A public plea for funding was issued, but the times, as Dylan later sang, were a changing.

By 1921, the storied building, ironically, was leased briefly to the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children until a more perminent home was completed on Fifth Avenue between 105th and 106th Streets. (All of the photos that follow were captured by Society members after they took possession of the facility.)

For about a year, life changed dramatically inside the House of Mercy. According to a report published by  the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, “the average daily population in the Society’s shelter for the year was 152; the average stay was eight days. In the years before the Society came into existence, all children taken into custody, including the little victims of abuse and neglect, were kept in station houses and jails pending action by the authorities.”

No longer a dumping ground for New York’s unwanted women and children condemned to indeterminate sentences, if the near century old reports are to be believed, the old House of Mercy became a temporary safe-haven for children caught up in horrific circumstances.

Later a haunted play-ground for a generation of Inwood’s youth, the ruins of the House of Mercy were eventually removed for the creation of Inwood Hill Park.

Click here for more Inwood History.

If some imaginative Gotham scribe were to write a tale about the colorful and often bizarre history of New York in the 1800′s he or she couldn’t find a better backdrop than Libbey Castle.

While northern Manhattan would eventually see other monumental estates including the Seaman Mansion, the Billing’s estate and even another castle owned by the Paterno family, Libbey Castle was the granddaddy of them all.

Our story begins in 1855 when importer August C. Richards purchased land from the estate of Lucius Chittenden, a wealthy merchant who originally hailed from New Orleans. On this property, just north of the Cloisters in today’s Fort Tryon Park, Richards built a magnificent castle he christened “Woodcliff.” The castle, like so many other Gothic revivals that came to line the Hudson, was designed by renowned architect Alexander Jackson Davis. With its turrets and massive stone walls, Richards’ castle would be the most prominent structure on the northern Manhattan skyline for decades to come.

While one might think a modern castle would have limited appeal to even absurdly wealthy buyers, the property did change hands quite a few times. Used primarily as a summer getaway, Woodcliff Castle, or Libbey Castle as it would later come to be known, was first sold to Union Army General Daniel Butterfield in 1869.

Butterfield is credited with composing the bugle call “Taps”. His wartime glory behind him, Butterfield barely had time to make himself comfortable in his castle on the hill when disaster struck. As the ink dried on his deed to the castle, Butterfield found himself the villian at the center of the September 24, 1869 Black Friday gold scandal after being double crossed by the Grant administration. His finances and reputation in tatters, Butterfield owned the castle for less than a month before selling the estate to William Marcy Tweed– known better to history as “Boss” Tweed.

Tweed, the notorious leader of Tammany Hall, was himself descending into a corruption scandal that would eventually change the face of New York politics. Arrested in October of 1871 and held on eight million dollars bail, Tweed relinquished control of the castle he too had inhabited so very briefly. (After escaping to Spain, Tweed was returned to the New York where, in the Ludlow Street Jail, the former Tammany Boss died of pneumonia on April 12, 1878.)

In 1872 the castle changed hands once again–this time to department store titan Alexander Stewart. When Stewart died in 1876 the castle went to his business partner, William Libbey, for whom the castle came to be known.

Under Libbey’s ownership, architect Alexander Davis was summoned once again; this time to expand and renovate the estate he had designed decades earlier. Davis must have been thrilled to have the work. Years earlier he watched helplessly as his customer base dried up at the outset of the Civil War. Those clients never returned. Gothic Revival was no longer in vogue. Renovating the estate of his youth, he must have realized his career had come full circle. He would close his office and retire less than two years later.

Proud of their newly renovated Manhattan home, the Libbeys would keep the castle in the family until around 1905. William Libbey himself was felled by a heart attack after walking home from the polling station on election day in 1895. A servant found his body on the floor of the bathroom.

In 1905, perhaps lured by the castle’s fabled Tammany Hall connection, the estate was bought by another New York politician, former Mayor Hugh J. Grant. The first Catholic mayor of New York City, Grant also still holds the record for the City’s youngest mayor.

While the Libbeys, who invested so much in restoring the castle, may have moved onto greener pastures, their former home did not not fall into disrepair. Quite the contrary…

In 1919, several years after acquiring the estate, John D. Rockefeller made the castle available to a Paulist choir to practice the music with which he was so enamoured. In the medieval-like fortress some fifty boys ranging in age from ten to seventeen took full advantage of the acoustics in the old stone structure. These lucky boys had been chosen and recruited from every state and social class to take part in Rockefeller’s revolutionary program. By 1922 Father Finn and his Paulist Boys Choir would mesmerize a packed house inside Carnegie Hall with a play list which included the Latin hymns of Palestrina, Lotti, Vittoria and Pergolesi and an encore that included the English carol Good King Wenceslas.

Sadly, in 1939, “Taps”, the mournful military tribute marking the end of the day played one final time for the old soldier on the Hudson as the castle, along with many other fantastic estates, was demolished during the creation of Fort Tryon Park.

Click here for more northern Manhattan history.

Inwood Hill Park has seen its share of activity through the centuries, but little has been written of the pottery studio that spawned generations of world class artists.

The Inwood Pottery Studio was founded in 1923 by Harry Voorhees and his wife, Aimee LePrince Voorhees.

While Harry was a former railroad and elevator engineer from Rocky Hill, North Carolina, his wife, Aimee, came from an entirely different stock.

Born in Leeds, England Aimee arrived in New York with her parents in the 1890′s. Aimee’s father, a Frenchman named Augustin Le Prince, was a pioneer in the development of early motion picture cameras. Together her parents founded the Technical School of Art in Leeds, before moving the family to the Big Apple. Shortly after arriving on these shores, Aimee’s mother set up the New York Society of Ceramic Arts and held regular meetings in Manhattan’s Jumel Mansion.

Needless to say, Aimee was the creative and driving force in the couple’s Inwood Hill studio.

Their timing could not have been more opportune.

Subway construction and other earth moving projects in the 1920′s led to the unearthing and discovery of many priceless Native American artifacts; including shards and fully intact aboriginal pottery. The Voorhees were particularly interested in incorporating Indian pottery designs into their own work.

Past and present melded beautifully and the “Inwood School” of ceramic design was born.
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In a pamphlet titled, “Inwood Hill Park on the Island of Manhattan,” published in 1932, local historian and archeologist Reginald Pelham Bolton writes:

Bolton's 1932 Map of Inwood Hill Park. Note location of Pottery Studio.

“The work is carried on by these artists in a group of simple buildings, contiguous to a fisherman’s little cottage, which is an attractive feature of the shore line.
The attention of Aimee Voorhees has been particularly directed to the art of the American Indian, and her reproduction of the pottery of our local natives derived from fragments in the vicinity, and her development of Indian designs, are affording the means of appreciating the beauty of form, and the skillful simplicity of the aboriginal artists.

Classes are held in the Pottery, to which many students are attracted, who carry thence knowledge of our real American art. Groups of children gather to learn the pleasant work of plastic art. The products of the Pottery include some delightful and original forms.”

In fact, Bolton, in decades of digging though Inwood’s past, would discover many of the artifacts, including a fully intact Algonquin vase, that so inspired the Inwood Pottery School.

Another description of the Pottery Studio comes from “Round Manhattan’s Rim” published in 1934:

“They (The Voorhees) live in a small white frame house more than a
century old. It was built for a retired sea captain seeking a snug harbor.

“We have never been able to find but his name, ‘Mr.
Voorhees said, “but Pop Seeley told us stories about him.
Pop lived here until he died. We got the house from
him.’

It is a quaint, cheery little place with latticed windows
and a snug quality. Oil lamps, coal stoves and open
fires lend rural atmosphere. Back of it are the studios
where the Inwood pottery is made. The clay used for
the Indian bowls comes from the hills round-about.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Voorhees mold the pottery and
give instruction in the making of it. The public-school
teachers often come to the Inwood Studios for class work.
It is a romantic spot and a unique one in which to study.”

Harry Voorhees died of pneumonia in March of 1934 at age 65. It would have broken his heart had he lived to see what was to become of his beloved Pottery.

In 1936 the City condemned the Inwood Pottery Studio and many other structures in Inwood Hill for the creation of the present Inwood Hill Park.

Despite loud local protest, the widow Voorhees and her studio were moved to 503 West 168th Street where new kilns were constructed and classes resumed once again.

But things would never be the same again.

In May of 1951, Aimee Voorhees passed away in New York Presbyterian Hospital at the age of 76.

Think you might have a piece of Inwood Pottery? Flip it over and look for the distinctive “Inwood Pottery NYC” stamp on bottom.

It’s hard to say what these beautiful pieces are worth today, but a 1929 letter to the Newark Museum describes ceramic plates, vases, jars and bowls ranging in price from $1.50 to fifty dollars.

Click here to read 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.

Today, around 2:15,  I stepped out  into the fine spring air for a quick stroll. Noticing smoke rising from Cooper Street, I dashed back to the New Heights Realty office and borrowed Rob Kleinbardt’s camera.

Firemen were already on the scene as I approached–smashing windows, dousing flames and helping residents escape the smoke billowing from their apartment building.

According the Manhattan Times, the source of the fire was a dropped candle.

Thank you Ladder 36.  Seeing you in action was nothing short of amazing.

NY Tribune July 3, 1901

In the summer of 1901 Gotham suffered the deadliest heat wave in New York City history. From June 29-July 6th  at least 989 individuals perished in weather so hot it melted asphalt and drove scores of New Yorkers insane. (NYT’s, July 9, 1901)

For a solid week New Yorkers cursed, collapsed, threw themselves into wells, leaped to their deaths from bridges, overwhelmed morgues and stretched police and hospital workloads beyond their limit.

NY Tribune- June 30, 1901.

Some fell to their deaths while sleeping on rooftops while seeking relief from their stifling, windowless tenements—dizzy, confused, dehydrated–trying to escape the suffocating air inside.

New York Tribune July 1, 1901.

As the death count mounted newspapers began keeping daily tallies of the dead. Grim articles with headlines like ‘Morgue Crowded with Bodies” and “New York Holocaust” spelled out gruesome details of the ongoing catastrophe.

Newspaper readers absorbed the calamity with morbid fascination.

Hundreds of horses lay dead and bloated in the street, preventing ambulance service and removal of the dead. The young and the elderly were particularly vulnerable. Special boats were commissioned to take infants out to sea in hopes the ocean breezes would better sustain life than the oven-like atmosphere in the sweltering metropolis.

The World- July 3, 1901.

New York commerce stood still. The stock exchange shut down. Employers were encouraged to close up shop until the heat wave, or “Warm Wave” to use turn of the century parlance, had passed.

On July 3rd, 1901 Professor Willis Luther Moore, head of the newly formed U.S. Weather Bureau warned New Yorkers that July 4th would be the hottest in recorded history.

Willis Luther Moore- Head of U.S. Weather Bureau in 1901.

“You may say,” said Professor Moore,” that this will be a record breaker, nothing like it ever having been recorded in the annals of the United States Weather Bureau for intensity of heat and the number of deaths it causes. The two days that are to come will be something extremely bad. The death rate will mount rapidly, prostrations from sunstroke being numerous. The coming Fourth of July will be the hottest on record, and this will add much to the average casualties of the day.” (The Evening World, July 3, 1901.)

While the casualty list would skyrocket as the days progressed, three separate thunderstorms on the Fourth of July would prove a brief respite from the heat. Still a balmy 86 degrees, the heat killed only 57 people on the Fourth compared with 317 the day before.

The following day, July 5th, 1901, weary New Yorkers prayed for more rain—if only to cool things off for a short while.

In Inwood, on the northern tip of Manhattan, they received more than they bargained for.

The below article from the New York Illustrated Tribune describes a once in a lifetime meteorological event that played out right here in our own backyard.

New York Tribune Illustrated - July 14, 1901.

“There may have been tornadoes in Manhattan Island before meteorological records were kept, but old inhabitants say that the one which cut a swath of nearly an eighth of a mile wide on the bluff of Inwood on Friday, July 5th, was the first of which they had ever heard. The nearest previous visitation of this character, and the only one remembered within the present limits of New York City, occurred at Woodhaven Junction, in the present borough of Queens, a short time before consolidation.

New York Tribune Illustrated - July 14, 1901

There appears to be little doubt that the Inwood storm of a week ago was a genuine tornado. It was a black funnel shaped cloud, and came with a humming like a swarm of bees, which almost instantly rose to a deafening roar; and before those in its tracks had time to think had done its work of destruction and passed out of sight. It swooped down on the bluff with terrific force, snapping off like matchsticks hundreds of large trees and uprooting others which had withstood the tempests of a century, bounded entirely by the high ground at Fort George and the Harlem River, and then touched down the earth again at Featherbed Lane, across the Harlem, where it mowed another swath through the woods for a short distance, then lifted and disappeared. That no dwelling houses were razed and no lives lost seems miraculous. The burst of wind was followed by a downpour od rain which flooded the stricken district and extended far beyond it in all directions. The water, which descended more rapidly than the sewers could carry it away, rose above the floors in many houses in the valley between Inwood and Fort George, and almost to the ceilings in some houses in the Borough of the Bronx. Hail fell after the tornado had swept by, and broke many windows and skylights, killed poultry and frightened women and children.

New York Tribune Illustrated - July 14, 1901

The tornado first touched the earth on the summit of the bluff between One-hundred-and-ninety-fourth and Two Hundredth streets. Many trees were prostrated on the high ground, and two hundred linear feet of the sheds of Durando’s Abbey Hotel were blown down, much of the wreckage being carried over the steep bluff into the valley below. The cloud rushed down the declivity as if impelled by a resistless weight, wrecking the stately forest trees which had long been the pride of the neighborhood by breaking them off at distances varying from two to twenty feet from the ground, denuding great trunks of their branches and tearing others from the ground by their roots. The destruction on the William H. Hayes estate, where the Abbey hotel is situated was perhaps greater than at any other place. Charles H. Aitken, a game fowl breeder, who livees at the foot of the bluff, was the worst sufferer, except one. His little barn was demolished by the tempest and falling trees, and his two horses were imprisoned beneath the wreckage. They had not been taken out at 4 o’clock last Monday afternoon, although enough of the debris had been removed to enable their owner to know they were unharmed and to permit the animals to be fed and watered.

Two greenhouses belonging to H.L. Battleman, the florist, about three hundred yards out in the valley from Mr. Aitken’s place, were in the track of the whirlwind, and were demolished. Three others were just outside the path of the storm, and escaped.

New York Tribune Illustrated - July 14, 1901

The Kingsbridge Road down the hillside from the Boulevard and Eleventh Avenue was rendered impassable by the rush of water. The Muschenheim place, on the top of the bluff, suffered severely. Many of the trees cherished by A.T. Stewart while he owned the property were uprooted, and nearly all the others were denuded of their branches, or their trunks were broken in two. The L.H. Libby place, once the property of William H. Tweed, was also greatly damaged by the tornado. Among the roadways, besides the Kingsbridge Road, which were badly washed by the flood were the Bridge road, between Tryon Terrace and the Abbey; the winding road from the Abbey to the Kingsbridge Road; Lafayette Boulevard and French Boulevard. All the unpaved streets and paths leading down the hills in the vicinity were converted into brooks by the rush of water”.

Click here to read more Inwood history.

If you haven’t been outside, or are in some far away land such as Argentina, I thought you might like to see some of the splendor of Spring 2010…Inwood style.  Hope you enjoy the slideshow.

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.

Nagle homestead, "Century House," Spuyten Duyvil, 1861.

In mid-17th century Jan Nagle and Jan Dyckman traveled to the New World and settled in northern Manhattan. For more than two centuries the families farmed the land, raised cattle, planted orchards, built bridges and homes and even intermarried.

And while Dyckman is a familiar Inwood name, largely thanks to the preservation of the post-Revolutionary War farmhouse on 204th and Broadway, the Nagle’s history seems to have been reduced to a street sign.

Of course the ghosts of Inwood’s past can never truly be silenced. The next time you catch the one train at 215th street, take a look southeast to the train yards and shops below the elevated track. Just underfoot are the remains of a once important cemetery wiped clean by modern development.

Nagle Cemetery on 1911 map. (Click on photo to enlarge.)

What follows is a 1909 description of the site.

New York Tribune, March 3, 1909.

“The city is anxious to find the owners of the Nagle Cemetery, occupying about half of the block, bounded by 212th and 213th streets and Ninth and Tenth avenues. Every real estate record which might furnish a new clue to possible claimants of the property has been carefully examined by experts of the Tax Department and the Controller’s office, with the result that the ownership is as much of a mystery as it was when the search was begun.

Nagle Cemetery 212th Street, 1925.

The parcel of land is in a rapidly growing section of the city. Many sites there are being improved with large apartment houses. The cemetery is valued between $50,000 and $60,000, and the person who is able to prove his title to the premises will not be called upon to preserve it, but will have the right to remove the tombstones and also disinter the bodies and place them in a plot of ground within the boundaries of the state.

It is said that there are over two thousand bodies buried in this cemetery, the history of which has apparently been forgotten. The cemetery has a frontage of about 165 feet on both 212th and 213th streets, and a depth of about 132 feet.

Nagel Cemetary 212 Street looking northwest to 10th Avenue, 1925.

Originally, it was considerably larger, its southerly end extending some distance beyond the south side of 212th street. Some months ago the city cut through 212th street and this work involved taking up 212 bodies and replacing them in a plot in another part of the old cemetery. The contractor, Walter R. White, of 213th street and Tenth avenue, placed all the bodies taken from each family plot in one large coffin, so that claimants to the property might be able to later identify the bodies of relatives which years ago were buried in the cemetery.

Nagel Cemetery, 1925.

In taking the southerly end of the cemetery for street purposes the city awarded $1,950 to the cemetery owners for depriving them of their rights on the property. That money is now held by the Chamberlain, and will be turned over to the person or persons who can prove to the satisfaction of the city officials that they are heirs of the original owners.

According to some real estate records, the property was bought about 1736 by John Nagil, who set aside the land for burial purposes. In 1829 Isaac Michael Dyckman acquired control of the greater part of the tracts forming this section of the city, and one of his purchases was the Nagel Cemetery property. Mr. Dyckman was a farmer, and most of his land was cultivated. This section of the city is called after him.

Nagle home, also called "Century House," in ruins in 1904.

It is said that many soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War are buried in the cemetery, but the tombstones marking their resting places are so weatherworn that the inscriptions are no longer legible. The name of the original owner of the property is spelled Nagil in some realty records and in others Nagel. It is known on the city maps as the Nagel property.”

Workers clear site for 207th street subway yard and shops in 1929.

By 1926, the bones that had not been carried away by souvenir hunters were relocated to lot 16150 of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

10th Avenue between 212th and 213th streets today.

In 1932, after the old cemetery had been wiped clean and replaced with the 207th street rail yards, pangs of guilt began to emerge in the neighborhood.

Monument marking the relocated remains of the Nagle Cemetery in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Working with the Department of Transportation, local historian Reginald Pehlam Bolton, whose family had once owned a large portion of today’s Inwood Hill Park, solicited bids for a proper monument in Woodlawn Cemetery. Bolton had, in fact, long supported the removal of the human remains from their original site.

Bolton had a personal stake in the old cemetery. One of his ancestors, who died in 1819, was buried alongside both neighbors and unknown numbers of Hessians and Patriots killed during the Revolution. An amateur archeologist, Bolton had once uncovered a mass grave in the largely neglected graveyard. He concluded the unmarked grave likely contained the bodies of soldiers felled in some unrecorded epidemic.

According to a July 15, 1932 article in the Lewiston Daily Sun, “ The monument, which will mark the graves of families whose names are still represented in the streets, avenues, schools and parks of Washington Heights, will stand in the middle of a plot measuring 1,590 feet.”

Detail from Monument marking the relocated remains of the Nagle Cemetery in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

“It will be nine feet high and six feet wide at the base, octagonal in shape, of granite, and will contain a groove for filling records and other data concerning its erection. Of the 417 persons re-interred, 67 have been identified by name.”

“The old headstones, some of them with sentimental verses and aphorisms, were taken up and placed in the new plot. They bear names such as Berrian, Beaumont, Bogardus, Bolton, Childs, Dyckman, Garrison, Grout, Hadley, Hale, Montgomery, Nagel, Oakley, Post, Ryer, Sage, Sherman, Townsend, Vail, Vermilya, Wagner, Warner and Williams.”

Detail from Monument marking the relocated remains of the Nagle Cemetery in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Delving deeper into Inwood lore, Bolton discovered another connection of amazing historic significance. Likely buried on the Nagel grounds, if not the cemetery itself,  was Tobias Teunissen, the first European to settle northern Manhattan. In the early days of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam Teunissen lived a seemingly peaceful co-existence with the local Native Indian population until he acted as a scout on a Dutch military raid. For this betrayal he was killed by his former Indian neighbors in 1655. His wife and daughter were kidnapped in the raid. The women were released after a ransom was paid to the local Weckquasgeek Indians.

1917 Reginald Bolton Map showing Nagle Cemetery and home (From the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries).

For years after the attack, the entire region was a no-mans land, considered unsafe for Indians and settlers a like. It was not until an uneasy peace was declared that the Dyckmans and Nagles settled the property in 1677.

Of course, this story likely begins thousands of years earlier. Mixed in with the remains of settlers, patriots and more recent graves, Bolton found evidence of previous Indian occupation on the site.

These original inhabitants are not included on the Woodlawn Cemetery marker which today reads, “About this stone rest the remains of 417, among them early settlers and soldiers in the Colonial and National Wars, interred 1664-1908, in Nagel Cemetery, West 212th Street, Manhattan, the site of which was covered by vast public improvement. Reinterred here 1926-1927 by the City of New York.”

Click here for more Inwood history.

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.