Cold Spring

Inwood’s Indian Life Reservation

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

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Kate and Arabella Visit Inwood in 1910

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In the summer of 1910 two young girls, Arabella and Kate, boarded a subway car with their mother, and made the passage uptown to Manhattan’s northern rim.  Inwood, at the time, was little more than a wilderness of trees, cattle and working farms connected by meandering country roads. Upon returning home, Kate penned the following [...]

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Inwood’s Forgotten Houseboat Colonies

Ship Wheel

During the 1920’s and 30’s an intrepid group of amphibious New Yorkers thumbed their noses at urban living, and high city rents, and took to dwelling in houseboat colonies along the perimeter of the Island of Manhattan. Two of those colonies, consisting of a ragtag group of artists, electricians and even police officers, were right [...]

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“Pop” Seeley: The Old Man of the River

Pop Seeley cabin, Inwood, NYC

Sometime before the turn of the twentieth century, on the northernmost tip of Manhattan, a folksy, business savvy and somewhat mischievous fellow named “Pop” Seeley set up shop in a quaint little cabin in the shade of a mighty tulip tree on the shores of a then meandering and muddy creek called the Spuyten Duyvil. [...]

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Pat Dunn’s Goat

Goat

In October of 1870 a young Catholic priest named Henry Brann was named Rector to a massive, though sparsely populated, parish that included the whole upper northwest portion of Manhattan and part of Westchester County. In a 1911 memoir, the then Monsignor Brann wrote that his parish included the “Spuyten Duyvil, Kingsbridge, Mosholu, and Riverdale, [...]

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