Posts tagged as:

inwood hill

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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Inwood Arts Pioneer: Aimee Le Prince Voorhees

Inwood Pottery Works

  In the early part of the twentieth century a pioneering woman named Aimee Le Prince Voorhees and her husband Harry built a pottery works in the shadow of Inwood hill. In this pastoral setting, lacking any modern conveniences, Voorhees created a world-class pottery studio and inspired a future generation of artists, ceramicists and sculptors. [...]

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A Potter’s Lament

Inwood Pottery

“There were other trees, many decrepit. In the middle was a kiln where an Indian princess taught ceramics under dubious auspices. She had a son who didn’t work. Both were on relief, and the relief checks were delivered to the princess at a mailbox fastened to a tree. The hullabaloo about disturbing the princess, the [...]

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Inwood in 1886

Thumbnail image for Inwood in 1886

The below article originally appeared in the New York World on December 26, 1886. While much in Inwood has changed since this description was first set into type, much has remained the same.  The original clipping is housed the the genealogy room of the New York Public Library. “Few New Yorkers are familiar with the [...]

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Inwood Pottery Studio

Inwood Pottery Studio, New York City

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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Tornado on the Hudson

tornado generic

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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House of Mercy

House of Mercy.  Inwood, New York City. 1932

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 [...]

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Civil War Era Inwood: The Brooks Brothers Connection

Brooks Brothers

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 [...]

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