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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fort Tryon in the early 20th Century.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Straus residence on Bolton Road

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

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

The Inwood Hill home of dry goods magnate James Mcreery

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

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

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

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

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

We are now in Washington Heights.

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

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

Libby Castle, once home to Boss Tweed

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

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

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

Click here for more Inwood history.

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.