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HISTORY

Inwood Hill Park: 1948

Bicyclists and in-line skaters have long been a familiar sight in Inwood Hill Park, but that wasn’t always the case. Until 1948 bicycles and even roller skates were banned from the park. The photos below, ripped from the pages of the New York Post, show the spring day more than sixty years ago when cyclists and [...]

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Inwood’s Mount Olympus: The Seaman Mansion in 1869

Old Seaman Mansion in Inwood New York City

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. The following description from 1869 finds the home occupied by its original [...]

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Ballads of Olde Inwood

Our suburbs are under the plow, Our scaffolds are raw in the sun; We’re drunk and disorderly now, BUT— ‘Twill be a great place when it’s done -Arthur Guiterman, “New York,” “Ballads of Old New York”, 1920 To say that Arthur Guiterman was one of the most prolific and talented poets of his generation would [...]

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The Old Seaman Mansion

For nearly a century, the huge Seaman-Drake estate, constructed in 1855 by John T. Seaman, stood on the grounds now occupied by Park Terrace Gardens. Famous for its fanciful gate at the bottom of the hill, actually a scale model of the Arc de Triomphe, the home quickly earned the nickname “Seaman’s Folly.” The Seamans [...]

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Inwood Pottery Studio

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 [...]

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The Dyckman Oval

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 [...]

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Tornado on the Hudson

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. For a solid week New Yorkers cursed, collapsed, threw themselves into wells, leaped to their deaths [...]

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The Old Nagle Cemetery

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 [...]

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