Kangaroo mascot aboard the USS Connecticut, 1908, Source: US Naval Historical Society.

In the Fall of 1909 the battleship Wisconsin sat anchored off of Tubby Hook on the Hudson River preparing for a tour at sea.  On-board was the ship’s mascot, a Kangaroo named Jim Jeffries.

In a bizarre event, which certainly captured my imagination, several sailors, or “bluejackets,” took the kangaroo ashore only to have him escape.  The ensuing chaos on Dyckman Street is definitely one of the more colorful events I have ever come across while researching the history of Inwood.

Let’s turn now to an account published in the Syracuse Herald describing Jim Jeffries’ rampage:

The Syracuse Herald, September 28, 1909.

The Syracuse Herald
September 28, 1909
WHO WANTS A MASCOT?
HOW A KANGAROO KICKED HIMSELF INTO TROUBLE
Was Taken Ashore From a Battleship For an Outing and Did All Kinds of Queer Stunts Until He Was Finally Arrested—Bluejackets Settled the Damages.

“Jim Jeffries has got to leave the battleship Wisconsin, so if you know anyone who can give a big gray “old man” kangaroo a good home, please write the bos’n of that man-of-war before the fleet leaves the North River (Hudson River).

Crewman on board USS Wisconsin in 1901. Source: US Naval Historical Center.

Jack Atkins of No. 1 turret is the particular chum of Jim Jeffries, and hates to hear anything said against his queer looking pet; but even Jack said yesterday, when they took Jim ashore for an airing, that never again would he get shore leave until he goes for good.  Jim disgraced the navy.

Jack Atkins and four of his mates gave up a chance of a run around town to give Jim a sniff of the green trees and grass at the foot of Dyckman street, where the cutter landed Jim and his escort.

When they set him down just at the edge of the lawn Jim gave a couple of hops and sniffed at the green grass. Suddenly his great muscular hind legs beat down on the earth with a force that shot him upward as if driven by a huge steel spring.   The sudden jerk threw the man-o’-war jacks off their even keels, and they were sprawling in a hurrah’s nest in a second.  Jim, with the loose lanyard trailing behind him like a necklace, lapped in a series of strong hops into the trees about the old house.

Jim did not know much about the geography of Dyckman street, and therefore did not realize that, while the ascent to the house from the river is an easy slope, the hill is cut away above the street.  Below the lip of the cliff was a frankfurter dealer’s camp, with a dozen tin kettles boiling merrily.  So when Jim got near the edge of the cliff he gave a jump that carried him well over the verge and landed him with a loud crash in the middle of the stands.

USS Wisconsin, photographed circa 1901-1908 USS Wisconsin. Source: US Naval Historical Society.

No kangaroo ever lit on a frankfurter stand before, so far as is known, and natural history should be interested in hearing the results when Jim sat down in a tin kettle full of the canine product and scalding sauerkraut.  In falling Jim managed to smear himself liberally with mustard so that he looked like a three-sheet poster of the burlesque show as he bounded with frightened squawks up Dyckman street with a fringe of sauerkraut spattered with mustard ornamenting his thick tail.

To policeman Marty Sheehan is due the honor of Jim’s capture. He grabbed the line and belayed it to the off hind leg of a peanut stand at the corner of Broadway.  In two hops the peanut stand was a wreck.  But Sheehan kept his hold.  As he was flying under the subway structure he took a double half hitch round a subway pillar, and Jim was a captive once more.  That ended his shore leave, but it cost the bluejackets a dollar a head to settle for his damage.“

Reginald Pelham Bolton (left) and William Calver (right) in undated photo shot in Northern Manhattan.

“I chanced to visit an old inn near Fort George some years ago and I noticed a human skull that the proprietor kept among the bottles above his bar.  The man told me he had unearthed it, together with several swords and cannon balls, in his yard.  I offered to buy it, not caring much to see such a relic condemned to a saloon keeper’s shelf, but he angrily refused.  He growled that he wouldn’t sell a dead man’s remains if he should starve else.  I finally bought the weapons and he gave me the skull.”
-Reginald Pelham Bolton, 1904.

Much of what we know today about the history and pre-history of Inwood and Washington Heights is due largely to the turn of the century work of amateur historians, self taught archaeologists and close friends William Calver and Reginald Bolton.

Starting in the 1880′s Bolton and Calver began exploring northern Manhattan with picks and shovels, chronicling their discoveries along the way.

William Calver digging in shell midden.

Together, the two Victorian gentlemen, dressed in starched collars and neckties, followed subway digs, street grading projects and apartment building construction.  They were keenly interested in the relics often uncovered by the earth moving equipment and followed the work crews and elevated subway tracks that snaked ever northward through Washington Heights and Inwood.

Throughout the region they uncovered the remains of Native Americans, early Dutch settlers, Revolutionary soldiers and even slaves.  They also discovered ancient pottery, cannonballs and sometimes jewelry from another era.

Along the way, these two ordinary men, Calver worked for the IRT and Bolton was an engineer, became pioneers in the science of urban archeology.

On weekends, Botlon, Calver and a great cast of like-minded friends and amateur sleuths combed the hills, caves and construction projects of northern Manhattan before they were forever sealed under a vast carpet of brick and concrete.

Reginald Bolton seated in pit and William Calver to far right.

Families and children, picnic baskets in hand, often joined the diggers—sometimes witnessing gruesome discoveries.

While some criticized these amateur archeologists for their lack of formal training, their finds might have remained buried forever if not for their absolute devotion to the history of the region.

A blur of activity on Seaman Avenue.

Their love of the hunt is evident in the below poem found in the personal effects of William Calver, now housed in the archives of the New York Historical Society.

Poem discovered in the personal effects of the late William Calver.

The below article, published in 1904, describes the intrepid adventures of these “Godfathers” of Inwood history as they race to beat the developers.

New York Herald, August 4, 1904.

Relic Hunting in Northern Manhattan
New York Herald
August 4, 1904
RELIC HUNTING IN UPPER MANHATTAN
RECENT EXCAVATIONS IN WASHINGTON HEIGHS SECTION HAVE DISCLOSED FINE INDIAN—COLONIAL AND REVOLUTIONARY CURIOSITIES

New York Herald, August 4, 1904.

Pick and shovel within the boundaries of the city of New York suggest to you, the metropolitan resident of today, only commonplace apartment construction or the search for a refractory gas main; but it is entirely probable that the burrowing laborer is some antiquarian in search of the buried wealth of old New York.  A halo of romance and historic possibility surrounds the wielding of a spade and attends the removal of each handful of soil in certain parts of this wholly modernized Island of Manhattan.

Side by side with the plebeian digger of trenches the amateur investigator is at work.  Just ahead of the urban advance toward the northern limit of Harlem prowls the relic hunter.  He knows the ground to be rich in curious and valuable objects of historic interest, and he seeks to snatch them from their hiding places before the trampling foot of the gigantic city shall have made their recovery impossible.

Persons interested in historic research have come to regard the Washington Heights and Inwood district of New York as one of the most prolific sources of Indian, Colonial and Revolutionary relics in the country.

Affording excellent camping and fishing facilities for the aborigine tribes, the upper end of the island was long occupied by them.  Layers of shells, interspersed with weapons and implements, comparable to the “kitchen midden” heaps left by primeval European peoples, have been found, indicating the presence of large villages during many centuries.   Skeletons, pottery, pipes and ceremonial stones have been uncovered as well as hundreds of objects appertaining to domestic life and tribal customs that are of the greatest value to the historian.

During the Dutch occupation several houses were erected by squatters in this section, which were burned or destroyed before or at the time of the Revolutionary struggle.  Among the ruins of these homes have been found ornaments and utensils of iron, bone, brass, copper, pewter and gold, with parts of rare old china, glassware and handsome tiles.

New York Herald, August 4, 1904. (click on photo to enlarge)

Buttons, Bayonets and Skeletons

Most rich in diversity and in number are the discoveries belonging to the Revolutionary era, consisting chiefly of military paraphernalia and accoutrements. These include cannon, musket and pistol balls, swords, bayonets, camp debris, buttons, buckles, pipes, knives and the skeletons of British, Hessian and American troops.

Bolton and Calver at work in sketch from the New York Herald, August 4, 1904. (click on photo to enlarge)

Reginald P. Bolton, of No. 638 West 158^th street, and W.L. Calver, of No. 1,188 Hewitt place, the Bronx, are the leaders of the day excavators.  During the last ten years these gentlemen have patiently, if amateurishly, raked the soil, and the result is a collection that would amply stock a large museum.

Mr. Bolton tells an interesting story of the way in which his attention was first directed to the possibilities of excavation in his neighborhood.

“I chanced to visit an old inn near Fort George some years ago,” he said, “and I noticed a human skull that the proprietor kept among the bottles above his bar.  The man told me he had unearthed it, together with several swords and cannon balls, in his yard.  I offered to buy it, not caring much to see such a relic condemned to a saloon keeper’s shelf, but he angrily refused.  He growled that he wouldn’t sell a dead man’s remains if he should starve else.  I finally bought the weapons and he gave me the skull.”

Awake to the significance of this incident, Mr. Bolton began a systematic search for buried historic treasure through the section from 150^th street to Spuyten Duyvil Creek and between the Hudson and Harlem rivers.

Under the slope of Inwood Hill, which rises near the head of Manhattan, lies a plot of ground that has yielded a wealth of Indian material.  The cutting through of Seaman avenue some months ago brought to light a deep stratum of relics imbedded among the ashes of a thousand campfires.  Polished tomahawks of granite lay among delicately chipped arrowheads of flint and quartz.  A soapstone pipe, beautifully carved with the design of a human face, was found among wooden hoes and corn planters.  Near the skeleton of a dog lay several pieces of pottery, an amulet and a sacrificial stone, buried with solemn thanksgiving at the conclusion of some successful hunting expedition, when, it is entirely probable, a fat buck had been run down in the grove that is now Central Park.  Near this was found a banner stone, carried as an ensign in religious processions and regarded as a great rarity by modern collectors.  Scattered through the stratum were thousands of oyster shells.

In regard to the shells there arises an interesting point.  Among the piles of Colonial debris oyster shells are always found to be much larger than those of the Indian heaps.   This curious difference is laid to the superior fishing outfits of the Dutch, which enabled them to fish further from shore and capture the larger bivalves. Again, the site of Hessian camps is invariably marked by numbers of mussel shells, the Germans being the only ones who would eat those mollusks.  These details, seemingly trivial, have been of value in identifying localities.

Best of all the Indian discoveries was one made a short time ago by Mr. Calver.  In 181^st street, just below the level of the soil and partly protruding from the bank of a cutting, was an earthenware jar, more than a foot in height, the largest and most perfectly preserved object of the kind ever found on the Atlantic coast.  Its graceful contour marks it a fine example of the potter’s art.

Relics of New Amsterdam, with their intimate suggestions of our civic predecessors, take a deeper and more personal hold on the imagination of the discoverer.  From among the ruins of dwellings once occupied by the Dyckman and Nagle families have come picturesque hand forged kettles and the hooks and chains from which they hung above the hearth.  Well-preserved knives and forks have been brought to light and fishhooks and farming implements that have lain in the ground these two centuries.

Panes of leaded glass have turned up from the investigator’s spade.  Made in far Holland they were, and through them used to peer the sturdy faces of the burgher colonists. Hinges and braces of heavy shutters that swung before windows lay near by, reminders of the days when a man looked well to his residential defenses.

Near the banks of the Harlem a cresset was discovered, an iron frame that the pioneer was wont to fill with blazing tow when he bethought him of the joys of midnight fishing.

Idly watching a relic seeker near one of these ruined foundations of New Amsterdam some months ago, a young woman was moved to emulate his more laborious manipulation of a hoe with the point of her umbrella.  In a few minutes she has uncovered a finely painted Delft brooch.  Its preservation was perfect save for the setting and she is wearing it today.

New York Herald, August 4, 1904.

Fort Washington and the desperate all-day battle on October 27, 1776, that ended in its surrender to the British were rescued from oblivion by the discoveries and painstaking researches of these relic hunters.  The very existence of the fort had been forgotten and American chroniclers had either omitted the engagement altogether or confused it with the battle of Harlem Heights until several of the amateur pick swingers became interested and rewrote a chapter of our local history.  The movement they set on foot culminated in the erection of a magnificent tablet to the gallant 3,000 who held Fort Washington against 17,000 British and Hessians, with sea and land forces, for many hours before they were forced to yield.

Mapping minutely as they went, these investigators have reconstructed not only this campaign but also a considerable part of the British military movements during their occupation of Manhattan.  Examination of the regimental buttons and buckles found among the debris of camps showed them the disposition of the divisions of the forces.  Skeletons and scattered arms indicated skirmishes.  Fortifications, redoubts, batteries, sentry lines, camps and outposts have been traced and recorded.

Bullets for Dice

Connected with the life of the redcoats and Hessians in the camps and improvised barracks a number of rare relics have come to light.  Among the strewn litter of broken case bottles lay several sets of leaden bullets pounded square and marked for dice—to be set rattling against men’s pocketbooks instead of their ribs. Other bullets laboriously roughened and furrowed with a nail for the purpose of inflicting a more dangerous wound serve as a sharp contrast to the foregoing.

Clay pipes, scissors, pocket knives, Hessian pikes, bayonets that had been used for pokers and wood splinters, hand made pins, gun flints and musket locks were unearthed wherever the soldiers camped.

One of the commonest finds in these localities is the rusted frame of a jew’s-harp, giving rise to alluring if obvious reflections anent the tunes that once twanged from its mouldering jaws.  Perhaps, by the roaring fire some winter night, a violent partisan of the Georges entertained his mates with “The Vicar of Bray” through this bit of iron; or a stalwart Scot rendered “Auld King Coul” to the shouting accompaniment of the grenadiers. Yet again it may have sounded a song still sung by the hearths of Hesse Cassel.  It is no far-fetched conceit to say that some musical patriot made it voice “Yankee Doodle” after its owner discarded it on his final hasty flight to the Battery.

Regimental buttons form perhaps the most fascinating part of the military discoveries.  Diversity of size and design admit of the enthusiastic study of the hobbyist, and without descending below the class of an extreme rarity that they are found in quantities large enough to warrant several collections and the development of a button connoisseur.

One interesting result of the assemblage and identification of these buttons has been the revival of a point that is generally overlooked—the presence of many famous British regiments in Manhattan during the war.  Few persons know that the Forty-second, or Royal Highland regiment, world famous as the Black Watch, was encamped within the present city limits; but buttons they lost or discarded have shown such to have been a fact.   Here were also the Twenty-seventh Light Dragoons, now the Prince of Wales’ Hussars, better known as the “Death or Glory Boys,” the Thirty-third Infantry, The Royal Welsh Fusileers, and the Royal Artillery.  The Coldstream Guards and the Seventy-first Highlanders are other well-known regiments that were found to have camped in Harlem during part of the seven years’ occupation. Compilers of the history of British uniforms have received indispensable aid from the Washington Heights excavators.  Many of these buttons cannot be found outside of the local collections.

Victim of a Bar Shot

Military Relics Found Near Fort Washington, New York Herald, August 4, 1904.

Bar shot fired from British frigates during the battle of Fort Washington are occasionally unearthed on the banks of the Hudson.  It was customary to fill the space between the heads of the shot with long, heavy spikes, loosely tied with marlin (twine).  When the savage missile was discharged the spikes broke free and were set whirling in all directions.  A grim relic has recently come to light that strikingly illustrates the effectiveness of the loaded bar shot.

In a field under the bold rise of the forest was found a thigh bone, presumably that of a Continental soldier, one of the valiant three thousand.  Projecting from the bone and thoroughly imbedded in it was one of these iron spikes.  Although the impact that drove it there must have been terrific, the spike had not shattered the bone and the edges of the hole were smooth and level.  Marks of a saw showed that the leg had been amputated.

From time to time questions as to the final disposition of their valuable collection have been asked of the Washington Heights discoverers.  So far they have given nothing to the State Historical Society, although they frequently exhibit, a fine collection being now on view at the Jumel Mansion, Edgecombe road and 163^rd street.

There is a final detail in regard to the excavations that is worthy of note. Quantities of skeletons and parts of skeletons have come into the possession of the collectors.  These belong to every era of the American history and include even the bones dug from a long forgotten slave cemetery.  All of these remains are being carefully preserved. It is planned to inter them all beneath a suitable memorial, mingled as they are, friend and foe, freeman and thrall (slave).   The stone is to be dedicated to Indian, Hollander, Britisher, Hessian, Continental and negro—all who had a hand, however feeble, in shaping the destinies of the city of New York.

Generations of Inwood residents have trudged up and down the familiar stairs which connect Broadway with Park Terrace East. The steps themselves have stood frozen in time as the surrounding neighborhood reached maturity.

The stairs are a familiar sight to anyone who has ever passed through Inwood. The ancient passageway was built in an era when the automobile was still a relatively new contraption and getting up or down a hill required nothing more than a decent pair of shoes. There are a total of 94 step-streets in the City of New York.

215th Street Stairs in 2010.

Below are several photos of the 215th Street stairs, as they would have been seen during the Inwood’s modern infancy.

These photos provide a remarkable glimpse back in time to an era when Broadway was covered in cobblestones and white picket fences, like the one seen topping the stairs in the first photo, still dotted the neighborhood.

I hope you enjoy these early photos of Inwood’s beloved, and sometimes reviled, step-street. What the future holds for the 215th Street stairs seems to be anyone’s guess.

If you have any stories you’d like to share about the stairs, I encourage you to write in and share your memories.

215th Street Stairs August 29.1915

215th Street Steps in 1916.

In 1904 Inwood’s first modern apartment building appeared on the corner of Dyckman and Broadway (then still referred to by many as the Kingsbridge road). The erection of the Solano and Monida Apartments should have have served as warning that the agrarian lifestyle residents had known for so many generations was  nearing an end.  So too should the serpentine-like framework of the elevated subway which appeared, almost overnight, through the quiet, daisy strewn meadows of the Inwood valley.

The Solano and Monida Apartments stand alone in the distance on Dyckman Street in 1904, Source: Museum of the City of New York

But most in the lush pastures were too busy tending to wheat fields and livestock to realize the significance of the changes already taking place all around them.

The below article captures Inwood in those last,  precious and innocent moments before the sleepy fields and roadhouses were engulfed by the greater City of New York.  A city which had once seemed so far away.

New York Herald, October 9, 1904

New York Herald, October 9, 1904
An Exploration of Northern Manhattan
The Wild Country On Manhattan Island Which New Yorkers Will Discover When The Subway Trains Are Running: Historic Sites

New York Herald, October 9, 1904

“Waiting for the rumble of the first train to awake it to urban ways is a region not far away which is soon to be transformed from woodland and meadow into a part of the teeming city.  Nearly three hundred years have passed since Henry Hudson landed on Manhattan Island, yet in its northern reaches the cold springs still murmur over the living rock, remains of Indian villages are visible and the sward still bears traces of forts which bore the attack of Hessian mercenaries.

Other parts of the island have been crowned by the habitations of men, and busy factories and giant stores have risen to the skies, yet this spot is still largely given to the pursuits of agriculture. There the estates of country gentlemen may still be seen; and the houses of a century ago are nestled amid the trees or grace the mountain heights.

New York Herald, October 9, 1904.

Bells on Sunday morn call good men to church, and the echo of chimes may be heard over miles of green fields and amid forest clad hills. The principal fruit of the trees is signs of real estate dealers, for often as many as ten of these indices which point the way to a new era may be seen upon one oak.  Inwood is a restful spot, and Marble Hill has just begun to come out o the apple orchard.  There has been little activity in real estate there for half a century.  Generations have come and gone, following the primitive pursuits of man on an island which bears a large part of a world city.  The inhabitants in the region still speak of going down to New York, all unmindful of the fact that the city has stretched far beyond them and at the Bronx side has grown almost to the Yonkers line.  There are those who wander among woodland paths who have not seen the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan and know the city only by occasional newspaper articles.

An Unknown Land

This until recently undiscovered country may be described as extending from 180^th street to 221^st street, and as bounded on the east by the Harlem River and on the west by the Hudson.  It is now penetrated by a trolley line, which takes on passengers at Eighth avenue and 125^th street and conveys them past the meadows and the forests to old Kingsbridge.   On the right of the tracks are miles of flat lands, on the left the wooded heights and the green hills over which now graze kine.

Upper Manhattan Island was once spoken of as a summer resort, and it is still for that matter. A generation ago men who had business in the city went by steamboat through Spuyten Duyvil Creek and landed at the Battery or at the middle of the island.

Others who owned horses preferred to drive to Kingsbridge, there to proceed by train to the Grand Central Station, and in more recent days those who dwell there drive down to the elevated 155^th street, and go to their places of business in the “city.”  Its inaccessibility has retarded the growth and development of that end of the island, and the stimulus which it will soon receive from the opening of the subway will make it an integral part of the municipality.  The tunnel which pierces the Dyckman hill will be an artery through which will flow a new tide of population.  The subway trains will emerge upon the elevated structure which is completed as far as Marble Hill and is waiting the construction of a new bridge to be carried on through Kingsbridge.

New York Herald, October 9, 1904

The iron way stands out as though it were the backbone of the skeleton of a new body, for it will be hidden before long by the sinews of a new settlement which may be the home of a population of one million souls.

Were it not for that long spur of steel which stretches out along the Harlem, the power house of the subway, which rises at the base of Dyckman Hill. And the ever present real estate signs, the casual observer might get little idea of the sun of a new order of which the first rays are to be seen.

New York Herald, October 9, 1904

Broadway at that point is an ordinary country road and only recently has paving been begun.  West of Broadway, concealed by trees, runs the Boulevard Lafayette, now connected by viaduct with Riverside Drive and the Speedway, which terminates at Dyckman street.

Hills Still Uncleared

To the left, as the explorer goes by trolley car, may be seen the pastures and the meadows, half concealed by hedges and straggling trees. Here are cliffs overgrown with pine and scrub oak, and long stretches of sandy soil.  Far back from the road are manors where the old families lived—the Dyckmans and the Seamans and scores of others whose names are kept green in the titles of rudimentary streets.  Many of the younger generation are traveling or are living in apartment houses and gilded hotels on the lower part of the island, for they do not care for the homes of their ancestors in fall and winter. The roads were too muddy and they were so far away from the city, although pocketed within it, that they grew tired of country life.

Holyrood Church, New York Herald, October 9, 1904

Here is Holyrood Church, built of stone, a long, rambling structure which rises from a land once the battleground of the armies of the Revolution.  Within it is a mantel built of bowlders (sic) and of muskets and swords and cannon balls gathered in the fields over which the British drove the Continental army from its last stand on Manhattan Island.

Nestled at the base of Dyckman Hill is Mount Washington Presbyterian Church, which looks as though it were carved from wood and set as a landmark of another time.

Changes have taken place in recent years in the conformation of the land about the venerable edifice, so that it is now in a hollow.  The congregations are not large these days, but every Sunday finds a line of carriages before the door and in the yard.  The parishioners are wealthy and the church is well supported.

Churches and road houses are signs of a well regulated and attractive country, and upper Manhattan has many houses of entertainment near its driveways.  There is the Abbey, which lifts its walls of gray stone and its parapets above the high cliffs which overlook the Hudson, and not far from the old Kingsbridge road, now called Broadway, are houses which resemble old English inns.  At the foot of Marble Hill stands the old yellow tavern which generations ago was a stopping place for those who traveled north.

Many Local Improvements

Modern improvements were not neglected here, and that is why the residents of Inwood once had their own gas company.  The tank stands not far from Broadway, rusted and idle, for a giant corporation has absorbed the company which once purveyed illumination to Inwood.  The office where the superintendent once directed operations is now almost hidden by weeping willow trees.

Perkins Academy, at which the sons of the residents of that neighborhood were educated, is being changed into a public school for the city.  John B. McDonald, the contractor for the subway, formerly Corporation Counsel, were among those who drank at this font of learning.

Old Dyckman Homestead, New York Herald, October 9, 1904.

Dyckman is a name well known in the upper part of Manhattan, and the old estate stretches for many a furlong along Broadway.  Isaac Dyckman lived in what was known as the Old Homestead, at Marble Hill, built in 1812, which has been torn down to make room for the cut being made by the New York Central Railroad.  The other Dyckman house, which later took the title of the Old Homestead, stands well back from Broadway, surrounded by green lawn and flower beds. Near it are the houses of retainers who were attached to the Dyckman family. 

Seaman-Drake Arch and horses grazing in the Inwood valley, New York Herald, October 9, 1904.

Over the entrance to the Seaman estate is a high marble archway erected to the memory of a dog.  Here there was once a club house of the Riding and Driving Club, but it was found that the roads were often too muddy to make equestrian sports enjoyable, and other quarters were found for the organization.

New York Herald, October 9, 1904.

On the heights are several public institutions which were driven years ago by the growth of the lower city to the country.  The trustees believed that the time would never come when they would be disturbed by the march of progress.  It is likely that before many years these institutions will again be on the move, forced by that gentle compulsion so well known in the world of real estate.  When the value of their property rises so that the trustees may sell for enough to build new structures further up the country and gain a substantial bank account besides, there will be an exodus of the various institutions from the neighborhood.

Once a Tide Mill

Marble Hill, where once an apple orchard stood, is the tip of Manhattan Island, and indeed it may now be called an island, too, for the cutting through of the ship canal has surrounded it entirely by water. The swift flow of the current through there has wrought two changes greatly deplored by the inhabitants, for the tide mill in Spuyten Duyvil Creek is now out of commission because the water is not swift enough and eels may no longer be caught by the village blacksmith, Patrick Malone.  On many a day he sat on his back porch and drew the wriggling prizes from the depths below.

The old general store may one day become a great department emporium, and they who casually drop in to clip a bit from the convenient cheese and to speak of the latest gossip over the cannon stove in winter will be seen no more.

For the old inhabitants of the upper end of the island new conditions of life are shortly to come.  Landscape gardening, the raising of vegetables, the tending of herds are occupations which will not be required in the economy of the settlement which is to follow the subway.  The stands for the sale of sandwiches and soda water and cigars which have sprung up about the sylvan places will give way to the drug store with its onyx fountain, and the restaurant and hotel will follow the trend of population.

It is hard to predict what the years will bring, yet it is likely that another decade will see the low tract along the Harlem filed with flat houses, while piers and warehouses will appear at the water front.  Two parks will grace the city which is to take its place within a city.  The heights of Inwood will be covered, no doubt, by the homes of the wealthy until they resemble the present Riverside Drive.  The institutions will withdraw in the natural course of events, and about the parks, as about Morningside Park, will be thousands of dwelling houses and hundreds of stores.  The country house will not be known in that region in the days which are not far distant, and from the Battery to Yonkers will stretch one continuous and mighty city.” 

Inwood Chatter Cover, June 1943.

Not long ago I posted the contents of a June, 1943 issue of the “Inwood Chatter,” essentially a scrapbook put together by local schoolchildren and sponsored by local businesses.

While the topic of children living under the cloud of war is a fascinating topic, my attention eventually turned to the advertisement section at the back of the booklet.

What type of stores and businesses existed in the Inwood of 1943 AND what had taken their place when I revisited their former locations in the spring of 2012?

I hope these ads conjure up some memories from the old-timers out there.  Please feel free to share your own experiences in the area directly below this post.

12►

Union recruiting poster.

Imagine yourself a soldier returning from the Civil War. Disoriented. Jobless.

Before that bloody War Between the States you had been a farmer.  A New York City farmer at that!

But Manhattan had changed much in your absence. You simply couldn’t plant a potato patch wherever you pleased anymore.

Gone were the wide-open farms and boweries where sunburned field hands had raised livestock and sold or bartered homegrown vegetables as they had for generations.  For centuries, the presence of farmers was of great benefit to the entire community; especially uptown where store-bought goods were hard to come by.

But change was inevitable…

Downtown, which had always been a gritty, crowded place, sprawled ever northward.

Farming now required a certain amount of ingenuity and the willingness to be constantly on the move. To be successful, an individual had to be one, if not two, steps ahead of development.  Special deals had to be worked out with property owners whose land sat fallow, awaiting the next surge of building—Perhaps a bushel of peas for the lady of the house? Or the promise of keeping the lot clean and well maintained.

After the War, jobs were scarce, and a plucky few stuck with the only occupation they had ever known—agriculture.

This is the true story one such man.  A former farmer and battle hardened veteran who, after returning from the Civil War, managed a patchwork quilt of tiny farms, moving from spot to spot, maintaining a rapidly fading way of life well into the early 1900’s.

His northern migration would end in Inwood, the last speck of rural Manhattan.

Union General Phil Sheridan.

In 1865, that man, one Adolph Zerrenner, the color bearer for Union General Phil Sheridan, returned to New York to discover that he was unemployable.

Sheridan, his former commander, remains famous for the scorched earth tactics he employed in his relentless pursuit of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.  In the Shenandoah Valley Sheridan’s total destruction of Southern infrastructure is still referred to as “The Burning.”   Ultimately, Sheridan’s cavalry, and their unforgiving chase, were credited with forcing Lee’s surrender Appomattox.

Battle of Five Forks, Va.--Charge of General Phil Sheridan April 1st 1865. (Source: Library of Congress)

And through it all, Adolph Zerrenner, once decorated for saving the Stars and Stripes at the battle of Five Forks, had been at his General’s side.

Adolph Zerrenner's Civil War Pension Card.

But, heroes and medals were a common sight in the year following the war, so Zerrenner picked up where he had left off before being rudely interrupted by the savagery of war—He melted his sword into a ploughshare and returned to tilling the land.  The only job he had ever known.

Zerrenner himself was a well-liked and respected farmer, but his was truly a family operation.

New York Tribune, July 12, 1914.

His wife, according to the New York Tribune, was a Brooklyn girl who “became a typical farmer’s wife, and his thirteen youngsters learned all about potatoes and sweet corn and horses and cows.  Always on the edge of advancing bricks they clung, renting little farms, working hard and selling their produce to city dwellers.”

Zerrenner had taken on his first farm on Nagle Avenue in the days of the Spanish American War.  During those early years his plough constantly uncovered interesting artifacts:  Flint and arrowheads from the days of Indian habitation—Cannonballs, bar-shot and rusty bayonets from the Revolutionary War and sometimes even stone hatchets and bones.

Curious archeologists often stopped by his farm to inspect his homegrown collection.  More often than not the history sleuths would walk away with a basket of produce. A man had to be paid for his time after all.

Relics of the Revolution by Reginald Pelham Bolton.

In his book, Relics of the Revolution, published in 1916, historian Reginald Pelham Bolton wrote: “Just north of the intersection of Broadway and Nagel Avenue, occupying the space between the two, is a large patch of truck garden, long cultivated by that picturesque Civil War veteran Zerrenner, a one-time despatch rider of the New York Cavalry in the Civil War.

Zerrenner’s military knowledge led him to discern the nature of many of the odd objects which his deep tillage of the black soil brought to his hands, a knowledge fortunately communicated to his sons, who have farmed for many years similar ground on Laurel Hill, whence many of the relics of its forts and camps have been secured.

In digging at the north side of his little cottage on the line of 196th Street, Zerrenner disturbed human remains, which have some appearance of being those of military burial. Over the cultivated space, quite a number of military buttons have been found, including those of the 54th, 57th and of the 71st British regiments. It is interesting also to note that various stone artifacts disclose the occupancy of this area by the aborigines.”

During hard times, Zerrenner would sell a precious artifact or two to help his family get through the winter.

Not surprisingly, Zerrenner never surrendered to the encroaching city.  The wily old farmer passed away in the spring of 1913 at the age of seventy-four.

For the next several years, his widow, and at least a handful of his many children, took up the family business.  But, inevitably, the City won out.

The following article, written in March of 1914, picks up a year after Adolph Zerrenner’s death.

Farming in Inwood, Toledo News-Bee March 19, 1914.

The Toledo News-Bee
March 19, 1914
NEW YORK WOMAN FARMS LAND ON BROADWAY WORTH $50,000 AN ACRE

Farming in Inwood, Toledo News-Bee March 19, 1914.

“Broadway has a real farm.  It is near enough to the center of the city to make the five-acre parcel worth, according to the appraiser’s assessment, $278,000, the most valuable piece of farmland in the world!

It is located on the ground where Washington’s army made its first stand against the British on Manhattan Island, at the junction of Broadway and Nagle Avenue.  Broadway cars pass the door.

Mrs. Adolph Zerrenner, born in Brooklyn 69 years ago, mother of a family of 13 and widow of a Civil War veteran, runs this farm.

Two grown sons and one grandson, typical farmer boys, are on the job.

HAVE READY MARKET

 There is no middleman in their business.  They do not go to market.  There is quite enough business for them in their immediate neighborhood.  The neighboring grocers come to the farm every morning.

The owners do not keep any books and can only guess at the relative profits on their crops. These are cultivated to the limit.

The farmer’s wife is of a family of tillers of the soil who have operated right in the City of New York for nearly a century.  Mrs. Zerrenner remembers when her father, Nicholas Von Glahn, had a farm, only 54 years ago, located in what is now the very heart of Manhattan.

If the annual rental was fixed to cover taxes it would be a fraction over $5,035 annually.  And what farmer could afford such a rent bill?

DOESN’T OWN LAND

Mrs. Zerrenner is able to maintain a farm on these city lots because she only has to pay, in cash, something like $135 a year, which is distributed among some of the various plot owners; to others she gets her rent for keeping the sidewalks free from ice and snow in the winter, and clear of weeds and leaves in the summer.

She has no regular lease, but lives from month to month with the understanding that the property is subject to be taken away from her for building purposes at any time.

TRY IT AGAIN

“The boys and I will try it again this year, but who knows if that will be the last in this locality, and we have been so happy here these many years,” says Mrs. Zerrenner.  “To think that this is the last of the many farms that were formerly located on Manhattan Island!””

Adolph Zerrenner's Military Record.

Adolph Zerrenner's naturalization card.

Here are a few photos I shot at the Inwood Farmer’s Market today, April 15, 2012.  The vendors and customers are out every Saturday morning year-round and today everyone found themselves enjoying the beautiful spring weather.

Below are a collection of real estate advertisements from ages past.  As both a real estate agent and fan of Inwood history, I found the below images fascinating.  If you’ve lived in any of these building and have stories to share, please feel free to comment in the space below the image box.

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Map describing proposed amphitheatre on Inwood Hill, New York Herald, May 17, 1914.

Since the 1880’s various ideas have been floated for how best to use the space we now know as Inwood Hill Park.  From a World’s Fair that never took place to an ambitious plot to build a Coney Island style amusement park called Wonderland, developers, speculators and entertainment promoters long had their eye on the last large parcel of green on Manhattan’s northern tip.

So, why not an amphitheatre capable of seating thousands?

Think the Central Park Summerstage on a much grander scale, with bleachers lining the hill creating a Coliseum-like view.

That was the plan in 1914—A plan that could have provided a venue for Shakespeare in the Park on a scale the likes of which New York had never seen.

Proposed amphitheatre for Inwood Hill, New York Herald, May 17, 1914.

The plan, which would have denuded the forest of many of its trees, was, surprisingly, pitched in the name of preservation.  “Better do something with the space before the developers move in,” seemed to be the rallying cry.

Alas, Bruce Springsteen will likely never play the Inwood Amphitheatre, but it’s probably just as well.

New York Herald
May 17, 1914
Would Dedicate Inwood and Isham Hills to National Pageants

Tablelands at Head of Spuyten Duyvil Creek Is Recommended for Pageants

By Clifford N. Shurman

“Ten years have elapsed since the American Scenic and Historical Society proposed the preservation of the romantic northwest portion of Manhattan Island that posterity might see some part of the present borough in its original state. And yet the proposal has not borne the fruit of which it was so richly deserving.

Some part of Manhattan should be devoted to the fostering of national ideals—to something other than trade and commerce.  And what better spot is there than that which it was proposed, ten years ago, to call “Indian Park”?

No spot seems to answer this purpose better than the twin hills of Inwood and Isham and the valley between.  Even if all Manhattan were available, a more secluded, more historic and more distinguished spot could scarcely be found.

Writer of article, Clifford N. Shurman, sitting in front of the old Isham home, New York Herald, May 17, 1914.

The historic associations of this locality have made Inwood Hill an ideal spot for our Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls, who in the last years have amused themselves there.  Isham Hill, by the generosity of its owners, already has become city property and is being improved.

Not only the two hills, also the small valley between, offers through its situation and formation great opportunities for public use, forming a natural scene and, through its varieties, a romantic background for historical pageants and open air performances.  The two hillsides, bending around this valley, form a natural open-air theatre.

Isham Hill descends on this side in two or three terraces, which can be transformed rapidly into seating accommodations for thousands of spectators.  Facing the west where Inwood Hill rises and Spuyten Duyvil opens itself toward the Hudson, the brightness of the sunlight can never spoil but only enliven the view.  The valley itself is long shaped and somewhat triangular.  Every part of it can be seen, except the deep bed of a little stream hidden behind a rather steep and sudden elevation of the lawn.

The encroachment of the place for exclusive building purposes seems almost to be imminent at the present. Yet this can be averted and the features of the place saved.  The Mayor and Board of Aldermen would confer lasting honor on themselves by conserving to the future this last remaining available parcel of unimproved historic ground.”

A quick note: To read the above article in its entirety, click on the image below. The author covers quite a bit of neighborhood history not mentioned in this short post.

New York Herald, May 17, 1914.

Spring came early this year. In fact, the entire winter was mild. Here are a collection of photos shot around Inwood in March of 2012.

Lorrie Goulet poses in the Inwood Pottery Studios for a newspaper article about the impending closure of the Pottery.

Since launching Myinwood.net I have posted quite a bit on the Inwood Pottery Studios; which once occupied Inwood Hill Park. The pottery, the houseboat community, the idyllic setting of a nearly forgotten era has always fascinated me.

So, I was thrilled when I received an email from a former student of the Pottery named Lorrie Goulet. She wrote: “I was very happy to see this article. I was a student of Mrs. Voorhees from age seven to eleven. This was from 1932 to 1936. It was one of my happiest experiences. I was there when Mrs. Voorhees had to abandon her pottery.

I wrote a letter to Mayor LaGuardia asking him to give Mrs. Voorhees more time to move. He did give her three months more. Because of my time at the pottery, my life in art was very much influenced. I became a sculptor, and have never forgotten Mrs. Voorhees, my first teacher. I am now eighty-five years old, and still working!”

Equally thrilling was the writer’s own history.

After studying ceramics as a child in Inwood Hill Park, Lorrie Goulet went on to become an accomplished sculptor. Her carvings, in both stone and wood, have been exhibited in museums around the world.

She still works out of her West 20th Street studio; a studio she once shared with her late husband, fellow sculptor Jose de Creeft. Her husband’s Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park is still a familiar and popular sight with children an adults alike.

Lorrie Goulet and her late husband Jose de Creeft.

Extending a gracious invitation, Lorrie allowed myself and fellow Inwood history sleuth Don Rice into her workspace to discuss her childhood growing up on 218th Street–just steps away from the pottery works.

Together we recorded this fascinating oral history from an Inwood of long ago.  Many thanks to Lorrie Goulet for sharing her memories with us, and now, with you:

For more information on the old Inwood Pottery Studios, click on the below links:

Inwood Pottery Studio

Inwood Arts Pioneer: Aimee Le Prince Voorhees

A Potter’s Lament

I was awakened by screams in the middle of the night to discover one of the houses on 217th Street was on fire.  I shot this video of the blaze from my roof.  My prayers go out to those who have lost their home.  I am elated to learn that everyone made it out safely.

And still more video…

529 West 217th Street before the fire.

Another shot of the house before the fire

“Today, Isobel and Margaret have only memories, but with ambition undimmed.  They exist in poverty on a discarded and rotting river barge.  It wouldn’t even float were it not jammed in the mud of stagnant Sherman Creek, near the Dyckman Street landing in New York.” (San Jose News, August 8, 1928)

The Spokesman-Review, September 24, 1928.

As the summer of 1928 meandered lazily into autumn, the sensational story of two once fabulously affluent sisters, thrust into poverty, shot through newsrooms coast to coast and filtered its way like caffeine into the American psyche.

Earlier in the season, a reporter, so the tale goes, wandered down to a floating shantytown on the banks of the Harlem River, along Dyckman Street, to verify a rumor that two beautiful young women, well-heeled daughters of a former State Governor, had been discovered living amid the muddy squalor of a ramshackle, but well-established, houseboat colony on the northern end of Manhattan.

Squatters. Barely enough to eat. Destitute.  Forced to work in speakeasies.

Lives gone awry, like Manhattan itself, drowning in an uncontrollable river of bootleg whiskey, gangsters and Jazz.

Appallingly, the story appeared to be true.

William A. Stone campaign button.

Living on a rotting barge, the reporter found Blueblood sisters Isobel and Margaret Stone, daughters of William Alexis Stone, the twenty-second Governor of Pennsylvania, who had died eight years earlier at the age of 73.

Described by the media of his day as the “best Governor Pennsylvania ever had,” Stone made his fortune as a coal operator and once counted himself a confidant of Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester A. Arthur and William McKinley.

The Stone sisters had grown up wandering the polished marble halls of Washington. Thiers’ had been a childhood of luxury and excess. As toddlers, the smiling tots were media darlings affectionately nicknamed “Pets of the White House” by the elite Washington press corps.

When William Stone passed away, his holdings were estimated at $3,000,000. But his daughters were in for a painful surprise.   As the estate entered probate the sisters discovered their father had died nearly bankrupt— his fortunes reduced to practically nothing after a series of ill-advised stock speculations.

By some accounts the girls each inherited a paltry $3,000.

“We were left in the house,” said Isobel. “But we had no food.  We had to go to work and we did not know what work meant, for it had never entered into our lives.  We imagined that money grew on trees.” (The Evening Independent, July 21, 1928)

Isobel was 23 and Margaret, who preferred being called “Peggy,” was 25 when the reporter first encountered the sisters on the riverfront near the eastern base of Dyckman Street.

Their home, if one can call it that, was accessible only by a borrowed rowboat—one of many derelict vessels mired in the putrid river mud.

San Jose Mercury News, August 8,1928.

“At best, the barge is a dismal looking, ramshackle affair, outside as well as in.  The furniture was left behind as not being worth moving.  The kitchen stove was partially concealed and its original purpose blocked by a yellow cover.  Opera scores, musical books and writing pads indicated it now was doubling as a worktable. The only suggestion of beauty was a green Spanish shawl draped over an ugly mission rocker.” (San Jose News, August 8, 1928)

Peggy, a divorcee, once married to Richard R. O’Neil, took a shift at a box factory, and, for the most part, kept to herself.

As news coverage of their quandary grew, Peggy, a bashful and languid creature, afraid of the press, often retreated to a private area of the four-room barge to avoid reporters. An artistic young thing, her sculptures provided her only solace.

She left sister Isobel to do most of the talking.

Isobel, comely and charming, seemed to relish her moment of fame, despite the ugly circumstances that cast her down  to this reduced and humiliating station in life.

Isobel Stone, Nunda Sun, August 3, 1928.

According to one newspaper account, “In appearance, Isobel is what most would call ‘arty’.” Her extraordinary lovely red-gold hair, her best feature, is cut a la Greenwich Village, up one side and down on the other, and she wears one heavy, old silver earring.  Tall, slim and graceful, she doubtless would wear clothes stunningly, though she admits that now her wardrobe is not so dictated so much by her taste as by her finances.” (San Jose News, August 8, 1928)

Isobel said of their unusual abode, “It isn’t because we love the great out-of-doors, or are being eccentric.  It’s because we get this old moss-covered barge rent-free—and when you haven’t anything in your pocketbook, that’s a big consideration.” (San Jose News, August 8, 1928)

She and Peggy, Isobel admitted, were at least partially to blame for their own misfortune.  Perhaps naïve, the two aspired to support themselves as working artists. Had they simply married, or taken some easier path, their fates might have been quite different.

“You see,” Isobel remarked, “my sister and I didn’t run true to form.  We both love art and have aspired to artistic careers. We haven’t asked our rich relatives for help.  So we will have to find our own way out of this poverty.” (San Jose News, August 8, 1928)

Isobel spoke of what she called  “the reverse side of success”—of singing in nightclubs under assumed names.  “I’ve had to face all the ugliness that as a rich girl I would have been carefully shielded from.” (San Jose News, August 8, 1928)

The appealing redhead attempted various artistic endeavors to stay afloat.  She wrote poetry, sang ballads on the radio and even wrote a book of verse—which had yet to find a publisher—but all these artistic exercises earned only a pittance.

Poem by Isobel Stone published in The Spokesman-Review on September 24, 1928.

Isobel soon found herself reduced to a lounge act—singing in the same nightclubs and speakeasies that would once have considered her a VIP customer.

How far she had fallen.

“I am a lyric soprano, and my great ambition is to enter an operatic career.  I made my stage debut in ‘Aphrodite’ at the Century Theatre seven years ago.  Later I sang with the San Carlo Opera Company, taking the role of Siebel in ‘Faust.’” (Montreal Gazette, July 24, 1928)

“Of late I have been reduced to singing at some of the nightclubs, which I detest.  If I had lots of money I would never go to a nightclub, but when one is desperate, one has no choice. I don’t drink or smoke, and that makes it more difficult when you are supposed to entertain the men who frequent these clubs.  At each club where I sang, I have used a different name, and I have emptied more glasses of champagne, when no one was looking, than I can reckon.” (Montreal Gazette, July 24, 1928)

Isobel Stone chopping wood, The Spokesman-Review September 24, 1928.

Often, life on the soggy old barge left Isobel too feeble to honor scheduled auditions.

She would sadly recall, “I have an old piano, but it is wrapped up in an old quilt, and stands out there on the barge, too rain soaked to be of any use to me, so I practice when I can at one of the music publishers downtown.  This spring I had an opportunity to appear at an audition of the Philadelphia Civic Opera Company, but I had a very bad cold and was unable to go.” (Montreal Gazette, July 24, 1928)

This was not the usual rags-to-riches story the public had become accustomed to.  No.  This was a different type of story indeed.  This was Cinderella in reverse. And readers were fascinated.

Soon the newswires were zinging with reports of the Stone sisters’ incredible plunge from the splendid ballrooms of the Governor’s mansion to the privations of a dank Harlem River barge.

The very same year Orwell moved to Paris to begin researching his classic tome, Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933, the Stone sisters had descended into almost unfathomable poverty.  The sociological aspects of this modern drama eventually captured the attention of readers around the globe.

For Peggy, her studies at the Julien Academy in Paris seemed but a faraway dream.

Gone too, for Isobel, were the afternoon horseback lessons under the tutelage of Max Oser in Switzerland.  Her exciting years as captain of the basketball team at the Pennsylvania College for Women evaporating like the late morning mist on the Harlem.

Isobel’s outlook on her prospects were bleak, “You can take it from me that the way from the Governor’s mansion to the star’s dressing room is a long, hard road.” (San Jose News, August 8,1928)

Isobel aspired to be a Broadway sensation, or better yet, an Opera star, but she complained to one reporter of, “a run of bad luck—ill health, and that sort of thing.” (San Jose News, August 8,1928)

Texas Guinan in 1929 photo.

As news of the Stone sister’s plight reached near saturation levels, an unlikely patron, by the name of “Tex” Guinan, stepped in with relief in the form of a job offer.

Mary Louise Cecilia “Texas” Guinan was a sometime actress and legendary saloonkeeper who achieved celebrity status during the Prohibition years that followed the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. During those dry years, which would run through December 5, 1933, Guinan ran a string of high-class speakeasies, including the famous 300 Club on West 54^th Street.

Guinan’s venues provided nightly bootleg booze and jazz soaked soirees and catered to wealthy a clientele, including eager out of town business types, for whom she coined the phrase “butter and egg men.”  Scantily clad dancers, trained to sap the cash from the wallets of their moneyed guests, pushed twenty-five dollar bottles of champagne and twenty-dollar quarts of watered down whisky.  In 1926 alone, Guinan was said to have grossed some $700,000.   She often greeted her more famous customers, who included George Gershwin, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino and Al Jolson, with her catchphrase, “Hello Suckers!”

Texas Guinan Salon Royal advertisement, 1928.

Thus, it came to be that Texas Guinan, the sassy, brazen, bottle-blonde, Queen of the Night, who made millions running illegal enterprises, offered the young, shell-shocked Isobel Stone a job in July of 1928.

Soon, Isobel found herself singing in Guinan’s club, the Salon Royal, on 310 West Fifty-eighth Street.

Guinan immediately used the job offer to garner some publicity of her own.

In a press release, Guinan announced that she had made the offer to give Isobel and her sister a chance to get back on their feet.  Guinan apologized for the venue—explaining Isobel was far to great a talent to sing in mere nightclubs—however, “Tex” boasted, she had arranged for various operatic movers and shakers to sit in on the misfortunate young Blueblood’s performances.

In an interview, Guinan insisted that she was interested solely in Isobel’s “ambitions of an operatic career and had engaged her to tide over the emergency period.”  (NYT’s, July 27, 1928)

Guinan also used her pulpit to chastise the Stone sister’s former social circle.

“It seems strange that with all the friends that former Governor Stone must have had that none of them has come forward to assist this gifted girl.” (NYT’s, July 27, 1928)

For while, it appeared Guinan had saved the day.

Texas Guinan print by Gustav Rehberger.

But “Tex” was no doting mother figure.  She was a gangster draped in furs and pearls—her associates included Dutch Schultz, Hymie Weiss and even Al Capone. Her clubs, typically located inside hotels, doubled as brothels.

Matchbook cover featuring Texas Guinan, Al Jolson and Isham Jones performing in a Chicago club (note Al Capone is the club manager).

This was no position for a Governor’s daughter.

The lewd sexual expectations of drunken patrons, constantly groping her, eyes red with whiskey and smoke, pupils wild and dilated—not to mention the ever-present threat of police raids.  If she was collared by the dry squads, or worse yet, arrested by vice cops in a prostitution sting, there would be no coming back.

Isobel’s nightclub experiment would prove short-lived.

Soon, she was back on her rotting hulk of wood, ­­­­41 Dyckman Street, contemplating her next move

Here, at the pinnacle of the media frenzy surrounding the Stone sister’s short lived burst of fame, their future uncertain, the below article was written:

The Spokesman-Review
September 24, 1928
Why the Million-Dollar Beauties Had to Live On a Barge
A Strange Trick of Fate Plunged the Blueblood Stone Sisters, Once the “Pets of the White House,” Into Poverty and—Is Bringing Them Back.

Isobel Stone peeling potatoes on her Dyckman Street barge, The Spokesman Review-September 24, 1928.

Yesterday, the lap of luxury.  Today, dire poverty, and a life on a rotting, half-sunken barge.  Tomorrow—?

Thus concisely might be written the history of two beautiful and talented girls, born with proverbial silver spoons in their mouths, reared with the great and the near-great of the United States, and then tossed by frantic fate into the maelstrom of life.

The girls, Isobel Stone and her sister, Margaret, are the daughters of the late W. A. Stone, millionaire governor of Pennsylvania from 1902 to 1906.  No babies ever started life with more portents for good.  Education, culture, money, social position—they had all of those.

Then the jokesmith who controls the tiny thread of things as they are, gave an extra little twitch, and Isobel and Margaret found themselves penniless, living on a barge, facing a terrible struggle to eke out a mere existence—their classic educations of no value, and their social position and money vanished.

When Isobel and Margaret were children and lived in Washington they were called “the pets of the White House,” because they were the favorites of President McKinley.  Their father, then a Congressman from Pittsburgh, had a fortune estimated at $3,000,000 and every luxury and ingenious humanity could provide was showered into the laps of the Stone sisters.

They were educated in France and Switzerland, at the most exclusive schools, and Isobel completed her education in an American convent.  They traveled, studied music and art, while Isobel cultivated her lyric soprano voice and Margaret studied sculpture.  The two girls are related to Princess Murat, of Paris, and while abroad were entertained lavishly by the nobility. More than one noble suitor, including the Prince Victor von Gerstein, sought one or other of the sisters in marriage.

William Alexis Stone

Then came disaster! Governor Stone died and it was discovered that his $3,000,000 estate was really much less than that.  Poor investments were blamed, and the whole estate was valued at $200,000.  Still this is “important money,” and one might believe the Stone sisters still well off.  But it did not happen that way.

The complicated machine of jurisprudence started grinding and the Stone estate was tied up in litigation.  Each of the sisters received a comparatively small sum in cash.

Isobel and “Peggy” started bravely out.  Their aristocratic background gave them hope and determination.  Isobel was the more fortunate of the two.  She took to the stage, and had limited success with small opera companies and secured parts in several musical shows.  But when her “big chance” came along, she had such a bad cold that she could not sing, so she missed out.

Margaret, meanwhile, had been struggling with her sculpture.  She managed to market a few bookends and small pieces, but the market was hard to find and the work was exacting.  With her theatrical career temporarily shattered, Isobel took to writing verse.  She wrote fragile little things, about star-powdered nights, limpid eyes, and love in the realm of spheres.  Some of these sold and some did not.

Gradually the scanty fortunes of the sisters waned and then, one evening, a wan moon witnessed a singular sight.  The two girls stood at the end of a rotting dock at the foot of Dyckman street, New York City.  Around them was piled a profusion of nautical litter.  The moonlight silhouetted their forms against an oily tide and sifted down into the cracks where water bugs lived out their existence in their own way.

Margaret "Peggy" Stone works on a sculpture, The Spokesman Review September 24, 1928.

The silence of decay hung heavy over the stretch of river before them.  Behind them, tier upon tier, rose the mighty city—the heights they had stormed but not taken.  Broadway shot a burst of iridescent arrows at a luminous sky.  In Greenwich Village life was astir with strange doings of artistic cast.

But all these things the Stone sisters were leaving, and they did not look back.  Instead, they climbed into a little rowboat, cast off, and rowed awkwardly toward a dark hulk which loomed in the middle distance. It was the wreck of the barge Nancy May, fast settling into the soft silt of the river bottom, overgrown with moss—a tangle of rotting planks and rusting iron.  For the Nancy May, which they received rent free from a sympathetic engineer, was to be their home for the next few months.

New York Times, July 22, 1928.

Then came the struggle for existence.  Margaret worked assiduously at her sculpture, and Isobel penned poems to the moon.  But the money did not come in fast enough.  They skimped and saved.  They collected driftwood from the murky river, and were happy to see its leaping flame in an improvised fireplace aboard the barge.  The fire chased the early morning mists which sank into the marrow of the two brave girls, and killed budding inhibition.

At last it became apparent that something must be done.  Both girls were suffering from lack of food.  It was finally decided that Isobel would try for a job.  She rowed ashore and made round after round of the theatrical offices.  But Broadway does not like poverty. One must be chic—smart, to “catch on.” Isobel found that life on the barge and lack of new clothes robbed her of these essentials.

But at last she interested certain night club proprietors, and obtained one job after another as hostess or singer, or both.

Isobel Stone dancing in a downtown nightclub, The Spokesman Review, September 24, 1928.

Now came one of the most colorful phases in the lives of the two sisters. For Isobel, used to night life as a patron of the swanky, exclusive clubs, started to work as a paid entertainer.  Her singing elicited an immediate response.  Large-sized tips started to flow her way, and life took on a rosier hue. But still things were not quite to the liking of this aristocratic girl, forced by circumstances to exist on the bounty of night life patrons.

Her duties as hostess were particularly irksome.  “I’ve worked in nearly every night club in New York, under one name or another,” she said. “And of the whole bunch I can say a good word for only one.  We girls used to drink ‘downs’ during the evening.”

A “down” is a small glass of flat ginger ale.  When the ginger ale is allowed to go flat it resembles whiskey, and an impenetrable waiter serves it with proper ceremonies.  Isobel frequently was complimented on her ability to drink and remain sober. The fact is that she never touches whiskey, nor does she smoke.  The night club, of course, charges regular prices for “downs” and the profit goes to the proprietor.  It is only one of the many night club “gags” which Isobel learned.

Texas Guinan in fur and pearls.

Nightly the high-strung and dreaming Isobel had to listen to the love-making of those who frequent night clubs. There were college boys, with no money, spending a week’s allowance on a few quarts of gin and ordering ginger ale and ice to go with it.  There were out of town buyers—“butter and egg men,”—looking for companionship and entertainment.  There were “misunderstood” husbands, adventurers, fortune hunters.

“They all wanted one thing,” she said. “And that thing she was unwilling to give.  So I was fired from night club after night club.  But Tex Guinan’s was different. She was a real friend to me, and I appreciate her help.  Tex is real.”

Isobel had many troubles at the night clubs.  Occasionally men would attempt to trail her home.  In several instances they were successful and the situation became so acute that the girl had to seek police protection.

Isobel Stone on rowing home, The Spokesman Review September 24, 1928.

She appealed to the officer on the beat at the foot of Dyckman street, and he met her each morning when she returned from her night’s work, and escorted her to the end of the dock.  Here she essayed the extremely difficult job of paddling the boat out to the barge.  In evening dress, with high-heeled slippers, this presented a distinct problem, especially as she had only one ancient oar for the task.

Then came next to the last, and one of the most serious setbacks.  The long arm of the law stretched out and encircled Miss Guinan’s night club.  Isobel was frightened.  The rendezvous was not closed, but she was afraid of being involved in the toils of the law, and she gave up her job.

Isobel Stone, Brooklyn Eagle, August 4, 1928.

With no income, the girls were faced with a last staggering blow.  Their barge, the Nancy May, started settling slowly into the mud of the river bottom.  There was no mistaking the situation. The Nancy May was sinking.  Daily she was canted more and more over on her side, and daily the stagnant water rose in her hold.

Finally Isobel saw that they must move.  But where could they go?  Neither girl had the slightest idea. Thus the situation stood when a reporter for a New York newspaper wandered down to the foot of Dyckman street and started investigating things aboard the barge.

A few minutes later the story of Isobel and Margaret Stone trickled through an editorial room telephone.  Hardly had the type cooled in the forms of the New York paper before the story went leaping off into space, spread fanwise, and covered the country.  Immediately things started to happen, and they are still happening.  Offers of aid came from theatrical celebrities and from men and women who had known the Stone family in its days of affluence.

What will happen to Isobel and Margaret?  No one can definitely say that.  But again they are on the upgrade, and these girls, who were bounced by a mischievous fate from the lap of luxury into obscure poverty, may yet regain the heights.  But this time it will be through their own talents.”

So what became of the Stone sisters?

Some, including the girls’ own family, accused the sisters of staging a public spectacle to help launch lackluster careers.  A charge Isobel jokingly denied.

“I had no thought of a publicity stunt when we came to live here, but I’ll tell you frankly that if I can get any benefit out of that publicity, I am going to do so.” (The Evening Independent, July 21, 1928)

Half-bother Judge Steven Stone, who lived in Pittsburgh, told reporters that his siblings had only their “strong headedness” in pursuing artistic careers to blame for their impoverished condition.

“Any time they want to break away from this art business we will be tickled pink and will listen to them,” Judge Stone skeptically stated, before letting the reporter in on a family secret.  Steven Stone offered that he had sent money to his half-sisters from time to time and knew for a fact that they had real estate holdings in Manhattan. (The Evening Independent, July 21, 1928)

Isobel, however, denied her half-brother’s charges saying they had received no financial assistance whatsoever, “Our relatives sometimes ask us to lunch at the Ritz when they come to New York, but that’s really little help when you’re starving and can’t pay your rent.” (The Evening Independent, July 21, 1928)

But had the summer on the barge been but a stunt?

Perhaps.

New York Times, September 25,1928.

On September 25, 1928, an announcement appeared in the New York Times—“Poet Who Made Home on Leaky Barge to Wed Henry Harrison, Publisher.”

The article pointedly stated that the young couple planned on making their home in an old Colonial house on Barrow Street—supposedly purchased with the spoils of a bad investment that hadn’t turned out so badly after all.

Others were more direct in voicing their suspicions.

In mid-October of 1928, Allene Summer, in her syndicated column, The Woman’s Day, wrote:

“Romance is dead in this crass workaday world, we sometime say and hear. Have you read the story about Isobel Stone, daughter of former Governor of Pennsylvania William A. Stone?  Just a few weeks ago Isobel and her sister Peggy were discovered living in an abandoned barge anchored in a sedgy creek in upper New York.  They claimed that they were destitute, were trying to get a foothold in their respective arts of opera and sculpting, and that this life was necessary.

The other day Miss Stone’s engagement was announced to a New York publisher, and at the same time she explained that she and her sister had quit life on the leaky barge because some supposed valueless real estate had boomed and she had exchanged it for a $30,000 house in lower New York.

Romantic enough, if true.  That barge stunt did sound like two girls’ idea of a good time.  Who wouldn’t like living on a barge?”

Who indeed?

The Grub Street Book of Verse, edited by Henry Harrison.

Undaunted by skeptics, Isobel told the Times, “Although my art career is still uncertain, I am hopeful now of winning back my friends and the comforts to which I was accustomed.  I first met Mr. Harrison through a mutual friend, a poet, and when I submitted to Mr. Harrison my manuscript of poems under the title ‘Strange Canvases,’ one of which I wrote while living on the barge, he accepted it. Later I accepted him as my future husband.” (New York Times, September 25, 1928)

While the paper trail on Peggy appears to have gone cold, Isobel would indeed go on to marry Henry Harrison, a former editor of the Greenwich Village Quill and editor of The Grub Street Book of Verse.  Together, Isobel and her husband would collaborate on a number of literary projects throughout the 1930′s.

Isobel’s last mention in the newspapers came in 1947, when she was issued a summons for walking her leashed Irish terrier, Honeybear, on the boardwalk near her Coney Island home.  Again living near the water’s edge.

Bad Girl by Vina Delmar

In 1928 pulp fiction author Vina Delmar burst onto the publishing scene with “Bad Girl,” a shocking and scandalous exploration of pre-marital sex and pregnancy. At the time of its publication “Bad Girl” was considered so racy it was banned in parts of the country. The petite 23-year-old with porcelain skin and lustrous black hair worn in a bob, seemed perplexed by the controversy surrounding her first novel. “I spent three years and a half working on the book. I wrote it about people I know because I lived among them and saw them daily,” she would tell one critic.

The controversy however, proved extremely profitable. Before the book hit the shelves the young author was given a $10,000 advance.

Vina Delmar

The following year, Delmar, born Alvina Croter in New York City in 1904, published two more lurid tales of modern women living in the big city. Both “Loose Ladies” and “Kept Woman” explored the sex lives of pent up New York women.

“Kept Woman,” for the most part, was set in Inwood, and its pages included descriptions of familiar streets including Dyckman, Vermilyea, 207th and Broadway. Avon Publishing described “Kept Woman” as “a great novel of the life of the ‘other’ woman.”

Kept Woman by Vina Delmar

According to the book jacket, lead character Lillian Cory “was flattered when well-to-do, good-looking Hubert Scott fell in love with her, but she found herself faced with a painful decision when she learned he was married and could not be divorced. Should she suppress her emotions and turn away from him-or should she give in to their love and become his mistress?”

In one scene two cheating couples are making dinner plans when Lillian, the heroine of the story, suggests, “How about the Arras Inn?”

“Why the Arras Inn?” a member of the party asks.

“Because nobody else seems to have thought of a place and the Arras Inn is in my neighborhood and I can duck right home after I’m fed,” Lillian responded.

The book continues:

“The ride back to Inwood was the same as the one to the roadhouse…Hubert drove at twenty miles an hour and Lillian smoked and thought what she would order at the Arras Inn. Lobster for choice. But suppose they didn’t have lobster? A club sandwich, maybe. Or a chicken salad.

When the couples arrived at the Arras Inn, Delmar continued:

The Arras Inn was on Broadway, a few doors off 207th Street. It was a long, narrow place with latticed walls and colored lampshades. There was music, singing, and once or twice a fire to vary the monotony.

There was lobster. Everybody ordered lobster. Little talking was done as the party chewed small, thin claws and delved hopefully into large, fat claws. Hubert had mayonnaise all over his mouth. Lillian didn’t think it very becoming. She wanted to tell him to use his napkin, but she was afraid it would make him angry. She kept her eyes resolutely turned away from him.

The waiter came and carried away the shells. Lillian ventured a look at Hubert. There was still some mayonnaise down in the corner of his mouth. May came to the rescue.

“Big Boy,” she said, “wipe your mouth and if your nose needs blowing for God’s sake blow it before it starts to show.”

Hubert wiped his mouth.

Everybody lit cigarettes.”

And so ended an imaginary dinner in an imaginary restaurant on the corner of Two Hundred and Seventh and Broadway—as far a most readers unfamiliar with Inwood would assume.

Arras Inn ad NY Evening Telegram July 1913

But the Arras Inn was a very real place indeed. After all, Vina Delmar was an uptown girl and had likely dined at the Arras Inn on a number of occasions.

Arras Inn 1925

For several decades, beginning not long after the turn of the century, The Arras Inn was considered one of the finest dining establishments in northern Manhattan—and Delmar’s description of the restaurant, when compared to old advertisements, news clippings and vintage photographs, seems completely accurate.

Arras Inn interior from vintage postcard

Located at 4928 Broadway, a few doors south of 207th Street, currently a pawnshop, the Arras Inn provided city dwellers with not only fine food, but also music and entertainment. A 1913 advertisement in the New York Evening Telegraph boasted “dollar fish dinners” and a menu that included crab, steamed clams, chicken gumbo, planked sea bass, soft shell crabs, squab, chicken, corn on the cob, grilled sweet potatoes, Virginia ham, hot corn muffins and cantaloupe.

Arras Inn Interior, 207th Street and Broadway.

Arras Inn New York Evening Telegraph, July 1916

Arras Inn ad in the New York Evening Telegram, July 29 1922

New York Times, 1922 Prohibition raids

After the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 the management of the Arras Inn thumbed their noses at Prohibition and became one of the better-known speakeasies in the developing young neighborhood.

With a wink and a nod, stealthy bartenders would pour real beer into twelve ounce ceramic mugs emblazoned with the phrase “I’m on the water wagon now.”  To the casual observer it would appear that these lawbreakers were sipping cups of coffee.

In late September 1922, according to the New York Times, a team of Federal and local agents known as “The Dry Squad” raided the Arras Inn where “they said they found 120 bottles of real beer.” Before the team departed they issued summonses to owner Paul Boehn and a waiter named John Cronan who resided at 537 East Thirteenth Street.

New York Times, 1928

On February 11, 1928, after closing for the evening, a fire broke out in the kitchen of the Arras Inn. As smoke billowed from the building a man named Joseph Klein, his wife and two young children were in a deep slumber in their apartment on the second floor.

On Broadway, patrolman Louis Schwartz  reacted without a thought for his own safety and sounded the alarm before running into the smoke filled building to rescue Klein and his family.

Firemen responding to the inferno raised ladders to the window and were able to lower Klein, his wife and two young daughters to safety before the flames engulfed the entire block. Seven other storefronts, including a vegetable store, a tailor and a grocery were completely destroyed in the blaze.

And while the file closed the book on the Arras Inn, Vina Delmar went on to a long and distinguished career as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Arras Inn in 1926

While her books were banned in Boston, her work titillated Tinsletown producers. Even in the late 1920’s, the studios well knew that “sex sells” and treated Delmar like visiting royalty.

Loose Ladies by Vina Delmar

While Delmar would achieve critical acclaim in Hollywood, she was nominated for an Academy Award in 1937 for her screen adaptation of “The Awful Truth,” she found life on the west coast dull and tedious. ‘It’s not a fertile field for a novelist,’ she would once say of her work in California. Like a character in her romance novels, Delmar was a New Yorker through and through and longed for her former haunts in the Bronx and northern Manhattan.

Delmar would later explain that the real life inspirations for her characters were found on the streets, barstools and subways of the only place she had truly felt comfortable—the New York City of her youth.

Women Live Too Long by Vina Delmar

“‘I came to know, first hand, the girls who go to Coney Island, who pack the medium-sized movie theaters and write fan mail, who chew gum, work for a living, put on lipstick in crowded subways, and try to live on $1.60 a day. Some of them are tough and some of them are not. I grew up with these people, and when I decided to write, I wrote about them. It seems to me that if you’re going to write, that’s what you have to do. Don’t wander into strange lands, but write.’”

While pockets of the nation were horrified by Delmar’s graphic depictions of the sexual proclivities of fictitious big city women, no offence was taken in Inwood where the raven-haired enchantress of urban pulp became an unlikely local hero.

In the fall of 1929 O.O. McIntyre wrote in his syndicated New York by Day:

“Inwood, which is the uptown Dyckman Street section glorified in Vina Delmar’s “Kept Woman,” evidently does not resent the chiffon chimera of the ladies in love with love which the novel created. A drug store heralds the Vina Delmar sundae and a little gown shop is to be called The Vina Delmar. Inwood, it might be added, is chiefly a community of self-respecting people with a neighborly flair, and is not hard boiled.”

Vina Del Mar passed away in Los Angeles on January 19, 1990.  She was 86 years old.

Arras Inn, undated photo.

Location of the former Arras Inn, currently a pawn shop.

New York Herald, July 14, 1895.

A GRAIN FIELD IN CITY LIMITS
NEW YORK HERALD
July 14, 1895
It Waves at 211^th Street Awaiting the Reaper and Is Manhattan’s Last
IS ON HISTORICAL GROUND
That Part of the Island Was Devastated by Two Armies in the Time of Washington
POINTS OF INTEREST NEAR BY

“RIPE and awaiting the scythe of the reaper, what may be Manhattan Island’s last field of grain is waving at 211^th street, Inwood, and what an incentive to retrospection there is in that golden expanse on the hillside which seems to be casting a look of sad reproof at that fast approaching town!

What recollections of ancient windmill scenes on tile or canvass come back, what visions of corpulent burghers with enormous buckles on belt and hat present themselves, and what pity arises for that conspicuous emblem on the municipal arms which will be deprived of all excuse for further existence there. Yet, if the truth be told, as history gives it, a bunch of “weed” might more properly have served to represent the leading industry of the colonists.

New York Herald, July 14th, 1895.

It will be news to many that a great part of this island was once given up to the culture of tobacco.  Such was the case, however, and the product was said to equal that of Virginia.  The windmill had many other offices to perform than the grinding of grain.  It sawed wood for the shipbuilder, and incidentally it served to frighten Indians.  Much of the tobacco raised upon the island probably found its way up the river, as a medium of exchange for beaver and other skins.  One of the early Governors stated in his report that it was impossible to trade with the Indians when no tobacco was at hand.

Century House in 1898, Source: NY Public Library.

Adjoining the grain patch on the northerly side is the “Nagle burying ground,” where rest the ancient proprietors of upper Manhattan, while about fifty paces to the westward and just in view above the green sward are several rows of rude, uninscribed stones, which are said to mark the graves of blacks, who tilled the soil for their wealthy masters.  To the eastward is the “Nagle House,” better known as the “Century House,” built in 1736, as the stone recently taken from its front attests.

Isham Park Entrance in 1918. Source: NYHS

Directly to the west of the grain, and set in the wall near the Isham entrance, is the old slab of brown stone which for generations informed the traveler that the now encircling city was twelve miles away. Four city blocks to the south and on the Kingsbridge road is the “old Dyckman house,” the residence of Jacobus Dyckman who owned much of the land on the northern extremity of the island and built the bridge, which bears his name.

General Sir William Henry Clinton (1769–1846). Painting attributed to Andrea Soldi.

Scarcely two months ago there came to light the foundation of an ancient house uncovered at 210^th street two old scythes which had probably had been buried above one hundred years, as among the refuse found in company with them were the trappings of officers of the Sixty-fourth regiment of foot and the Eighteenth Light Dragoons—two corps of the British army in the Revolution. Oft had the harvest yielded, no doubt, to these two old blades previous to the coming invaders.  For the seven years following “76” there was little use for agricultural implements in that vicinity.  The meadows of Inwood were one large parade ground for the many regiments assembled at various times near this, Sir Henry Clinton’s headquarters.  No small space was required for the exercise and pasturage of the 984 horses of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Light Dragoons, once stationed at Fort George and Inwood.

Stirring scenes there were in view from this little eminence at 211^th street on that eventful day in November when Fort Washington fell.  Posted across this grain field for a while was that same body of Americans who resisted the landing of three hundred Hessians from the English ship Pearl at Tubby Hook.

“Washington’s Parade Ground” the level strip is called.  Possibly the Continentals encamped there for a short space during the retreat from the island, or on their victorious return in 1783.

216th and Broadway in 1895 (Source-Harper's Bazaar)

Owing to its isolated position, shut in as it is by the Hudson and Harlem, and deprived of any means of communication with the city proper, Inwood has changed little in a generation.  A few new houses have been built: some old ones have been torn down.  The Kingsbridge road, which was probably at first an Indian trail leading down to the valley and then a highway of early Dutch and English colonists, has of late been graded, curbed and sewered, and now awaits the macadam for which the contract has been given.  Ere the final touch is added the road will probably be in the hands of one or other of the cable companies, and then “farewell, a long farewell, to rural Inwood. The time will not be long before the city has made good its claim to the locality, which the aristocratic sponsors so fittingly named.”

Since launching MyInwood.net I’ve read thousands of century-old news accounts regarding all things Inwood, but the following article, written in 1916, is one of my favorites.

Isham Hill article, New York Herald, September 26, 1913

The account contains so many elements from my little corner of the neighborhood—The Seaman Estate, Isham Park, the still-standing Hurst house on Park Terrace East and 215^th and the 215^th Street stairs—all frozen in a unique turning point in Inwood’s history.

The article, published in the New York Herald, captures the Park Terrace area as Broadway developers ascend the 215^th Street stairs to discover a lush and unspoiled paradise they knew was ripe for urbanization.

New York Herald
Sunday, September 26, 1913
ISHAM HILL, A BEAUTY SPOT, OPENED TO PUBLIC TRAFFIC
Gift of Park Site and 215^th Street Station Stairway Encourage Further Developments

Is Isham Park and its environs at the threshold of a new era in the development of this noble and long neglected area of the westerly heights section of Manhattan?

Three years have elapsed since when, in September 28, 1912, there was held a civic celebration of the gift of Isham Park to the city of New York by Mrs. Julia Isham Taylor and Miss Flora E. Isham.

215th Street stairs, New York Herald, Sunday, September 26, 1913.

In the interim the park has grown into a place of quiet rest and beauty, a somewhat long double flight of steps has been erected from 215^th street and Broadway to the crest of the hill at Park Terrace East, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Fort Washington chapter, have been placed in possession of a quiet nook in the old Isham family mansion, an additional gift of land has added to the area of the park, Seaman avenue has been opened, regulated, graded and curbed, with sewers now being set and to be completed in about six week’s time, the work of opening Park Terrace East, 215^th street and a section of Cold Spring road (Indian road) along the banks of the Ship Canal is progressing toward completion.

Isham Mansion, New York Herald, Sunday, September 26, 1913.

Also, afternoon tea, toast and crackers are being served by Mrs. Frank Glynn in the stately old dining hall of the Isham homestead, and John Connolly, faithful park keeper the last four years, continues to watch over his bit of grass, flowers and “darlint” trees in the constant fear that ere long a few of these, his friends and boon companions, will be pulled up by their roots by the giant “Progress” to provide an uninterrupted way for still another lateral leading westerly from Park Terrace East, thence connecting with Broadway by steps, or some form of circuitous hillside route yet to be constructed.

Isham street on the south, 218^th street on the north, Broadway on the east and the Ship Canal on the west mark the physical boundaries of the small area of the delightfully located and overlooked Isham Hill and Park, the key to the future of which is the 215^th street subway station, a few hundred feet east of the staircase continuation of 215^th street.  Another factor of the future that, however, is to be reckoned with is the inevitable trend of automobile traffic from Broadway north from Isham street ad south from 218^th street, into Seaman avenue and along the Isham hill ridge the instant these improvements are fully completed.

There cannot be even the shadow of a doubt that the natural attractions of this and the Inwood-Hudson region then will prove sufficiently strong in their appeal to effect a division of at least a goodly percentage of the more leisurely automobile traffic that now clings to Broadway.  The advent of this traffic will mark the day when the builder of the higher grades of apartment houses will discover Isham Hill and its advantages.

Home of

Rich in romance and historical data, Isham Hill is the location of the Isham, Dyckman, Seaman (Dwyer) and other homesteads of the earlier years.  At the top of the 215^th street stairway, however, are two modern dwellings of high cost and attractive appearance.  One is the home of William H. Hurst, president of the Stock Quotation Telegraph Company, vice president of the New York News Bureau Association, and prominent in other corporations the other, the home of Gerald S. Griffin, a civil engineer.

Old Seaman Mansion, New York Herald, Sunday, September 26, 1913.

To the north of these rises the stately home of Thomas Dwyer, known formerly and for many years as “Seaman’s Folly.” This has direct entrance to Broadway, and commands superb views of all the surrounding country.  In the same neighborhood is the residence of John Mara, and the old Dyckman mansion, now occupied as St. Phillip’s Home, lies just beyond. The next lateral north of 218^th street is 225^th street, which emphasizes the seclusiveness of the Isham Park neighborhood.

New York Herald, Sunday, September 26, 1913.

Isham Park, the original deed of which—the gift of Miss Julia Isham Taylor—was dated July 17,1911, extends from Broadway to the Ship Canal, parking the centre of the hill, east to west, between 213^th and 214^th streets and park frontage for the greater number of all the remaining Isham Estate lots.  The park also has a most advantageous strip of additional frontage along the entire westerly side of Cooper street, the southerly extension of Park Terrace East, to Isham street.  On April 15, 1912, the area of the park was considerably enlarged by a gift of land from Miss Flora E. Isham.  The estate of William B. Isham controls the remaining lots.  Some easy and adequate means of reaching the crest of Isham hill, except by climbing the long flight of steps provided at 215^th street, where an escalator would have solved the problem, is all the region needs to bring it well within the scope of the demand of just such builders as have improved the better parts of the Fort Washington avenue and other Washington Heights sections.

Mute evidence of the correctness of this forecast is the trend of apartment builders along the lower and less attractive level of Broadway.  Here, at No. 5,000 Broadway (212^th street), Grenville Hall, an elevator apartment house, has been a distinct success.  Further north, in Broadway, at the southeast corner of 215^th street, and comprising the southwest corner of Tenth avenue (the route of the elevated-subway line) two new five story non-elevator apartment houses are being completed by Charles Flaum, a builder who sold them several weeks ago to Thomas E. Loughlin, an investor.  These houses contain fifty apartments of three, four and five rooms, at $8 average monthly rent a room, and are fifty per cent rented, although unfinished.

Of the eight stores (seven in Tenth avenue and one at the Broadway corner), six have been rented at $600 to $2,000 each for those in Tenth avenue.  Knap & Wasson, the agents, say they are not making concessions.

In the opposite (west) side of Broadway the Reville-Siesel Company is completing a fifty foot non-elevator house, containing twenty-four apartments of three rooms and bath in the rear and four rooms and a bath in the front, and four stores.  Eighteen of the apartments are stated to have been rented at $7 to $8 a room average monthly rental, and three of the stores.  McDowell & McMahon are the agents.

These rentals are in no way indicative of the prices builders might expect to obtain for higher grade elevator apartments atop Isham Hill, but serve merely to indicate the trend of the demand to districts north of Isham street.

Seaman Arch on Broadway and 216th.

On the west side of Broadway, formerly known as the Kingsbridge Road, at 216^th Street, stands a neglected and nearly forgotten monument to Inwood’s past.  The great marble arch, constructed in the 1850’s, once led visitors to the glorious Seaman mansion, which, until the 1930’s, stood on the current site of Park Terrace Gardens on Park Terrace East and 217^th Street.

Just before the turn of the twentieth century the old mansion and surrounding property, built by the descendants of Dr. Valentine Seaman, who introduced the small pox vaccine to the United States, were rented to a group of wealthy equestrians.

What follows is an 1896 description of the new riding club that includes a spectacular sketch of the arch as it was seen before the encroachment the modern infrastructure and apartment buildings, which would soon wipe the mansion, but not the arch, off the face of a once rural little fiefdom.

Harper’s Bazaar
November, 1896

SUBURBAN RIDING AND DRIVING CLUB

The rapid improvement of the annexed district of New York for business purposes has been steadily despoiling the rural drives, which for many years have been one of the chief charms of the metropolis for horsemen.  The closing of Jerome Park two years ago for a public reservoir, and the temporary disuse of Jerome Avenue, due to the building of the new Central bridge over the Harlem River, forced the riders and drivers to seek other roads for reaching the suburbs.  Or many years the Jerome Park clubhouse was, by common consent, the rendezvous for gentlemen who owned and drove fast horses for pleasure, and its abandonment left them without a stopping-place on the east side of the city, save the many road-houses which line Jerome Avenue.

The rapid improvement of the drives on the west side of Manhattan Island, on the other hand, has attracted most of the riders and drivers to that side of the city. And Kingsbridge Road is gradually taking the place of Jerome Avenue.  That it will be the driving centre of the city in years to come is shown by the number of fine drives recently finished, in course of completion, and planned for that section of the city. What better place, therefore, could be selected for the new home of the lovers of horses than this thoroughfare?

A number of the leading spirits in the old management of the Jerome Park clubhouse got together two years ago and formed the nucleus of what is now the most promising organization of its kind within many miles of the metropolis.  The Suburban Riding and Driving Club has met with unusual success and already numbers among its members most of the better class of horsemen in the city.  Its clubhouse at 217^th Street and the Kingsbridge Road is a convenient stopping place for gentlemen driving in or out of the city on the west side, and its comfortable reading-rooms and smoking-rooms, café and restaurant attract a goodly attendance of members almost every bright day.

The Old Seaman Mansion (Source- Harper's Bazaar, 1896)

The Harlem River Speedway, now building and destined for use within a year or two, the new French Boulevard overlooking the Hudson River, and now almost completed, with Dyckman Street, already open for public use, to connect the two great boulevards with Kingsbridge Road, will offer to New York horsemen a circuit of fine drives not to be equaled by those of any other city in the country.  The upper end of the Speedway turns into Dyckman Street just under Fort George Heights, and will pour its steady stream of fast horses into that thoroughfare to seek other avenues of return to the Park and other drives of the lower part of the city.  Dyckman Street, a mile of fine level drive, intersects the Kingsbridge Road at 204^th Street, and connects the new French Boulevard with that and the Speedway, at Inwood, just west of the Kingsbridge Road.  Thus is completed a network of fine public drives, combining opportunity for fast driving, fine views of both the Hudson and Harlem rivers, and complete isolation from the thickly settled parts of the town.

216th and Broadway in 1895 (Source-Harper's Bazaar)

Only half a mile above the junction of Dyckman Street, and standing on a hill a few hundred feet back of the highroad, stands the new home of the horsemen in what for many years was known as the “Seaman Castle.”  The Suburban Riding and Driving Club is as thoroughly secluded as any other spot on Manhattan Island.  The massive arched stone entrance attracts much attention from the passers-by, but the road up to the clubhouse winds around the side of the hill, and thus isolates the building.  Once inside the grounds, the picturesqueness (sic) of the place is perhaps its most noticeable feature.  The property has been laid out with an eye for the landscape effect, and with much success.  Facing the entrance is a small pool with a fountain in its centre, which is supplied from a stream falling over the rocks from the hill above, where stands the clubhouse.   The road bends around through a grove of trees, and finally emerges at the crest of the hill facing the old homestead of the Seaman family.

The building, which is of white marble, faces west, and from its porch and front windows can be seen the silvery line of Spuyten Duyvil Creek, a mile or so above, winding its snakelike course toward the cleft in the hills which overlook the Hudson.  Through this opening the “Rhine of America,” with the Palisades beyond it, can also be seen.  From the back and north end of the building the valley of the Harlem, with the river itself winding through it, is also spread out before the eye as in a panorama.

Southwest of the clubhouse are the stables and sheds for the accommodations, both temporary and permanent, of the members’ horses.  A large white marble stable was found on the property when the Suburban club took possession, but additional sheds have been added.  Near the stables, too, is the great quarry from which was taken the marble for the buildings on the place. The great archway entrance, the “Castle” itself, the stable, and even the walls that surround the property, are built of the fine quality of marble that was found on the land.  On the side of the hill just below the clubhouse are extensive greenhouses, which furnish flowers for the decoration of the rooms, while vegetable gardens on the property supply many of the necessaries of the kitchen.

Main Hall of the old Seaman mansion (Source-Harper's Bazaar, Nov., 1896)

Within, the building has been altered somewhat for its new tenants.  The bedrooms have become private dining rooms; the great dining-hall and parlors are used as a café, public dining room, and reception-room; while an old conservatory at the southeast corner of the “Castle” has been altered for a smoking and “sun” room.  Over $10,000 has been spent in alterations and repairs on the clubhouse and grounds by the members of the Suburban club.

During the winter the wives and sisters of the members make the place attractive by a series of receptions at the clubhouse, while sleighing and driving parties frequently stop there.  A number of other attractive features have been added.  Golf links have been laid out on the big meadow west of the “Castle,” and twenty-six acres of land afford ample opportunity for the sport.

Interior of Seaman Mansion (Source-Harper's Bazaar, Nov. 1896)

Over two hundred members have been enrolled already, and the list is growing rapidly.  The men who headed the movement for the new club, and who have since been elected to the principal offices, are representative horsemen of the better class, and their names guarantee the permanency of the organization.  The initiation fee is set at $25, and the annual dues are the same figure.

Today-Inside the arch looking out.

For another description of the Suburban Riding and Driving Club, click here.

"Pop' Seeley's cabin at the foot of Cold Spring Road in 1893 photograph by Ed Wenzel. (Source: New York Historical Society)

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.

Today the location of the tulip tree, allegedly the spot where Peter Minuit swapped the island of Manhattan for a handful of trinkets, is marked by a boulder with a plaque proclaiming: “According to legend, on this site of the principal Manhattan Indian Village (Shorakkopoh), Peter Minuit in 1626 purchased Manhattan Island for trinkets and bead then worth about 60 guilders. This boulder also marks the spot where a tulip tree (Liriodendron Tulipera) grew to a height of 165 feet. It was, until its death in 1938 at the age of 280 years, the last living link between the Reckgawawanc Indians who lived here.”

Seeley cabin in 1906 photo.

A stone’s throw west of the tulip would have been Seeley’s cabin…

Former resident Aimee Voorhees, who would later construct a pottery works a short distance from the Seeley cottage, described “Pop’s” home as 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…but Pop Seeley told us stories about him. Pop lived here until he died.” (Helen Worden, Round Manhattan’s Rim)

Inwood Hill Park, as we know it today, wasn’t even a spark of an idea when “Pop” Seeley moved into the peaceful cove now buried under a soccer field made up of landfill from later subway digs—at the time, Inwood Hill was referred to locally as Cold Spring Mountain.

So who was “Pop” Seeley?  That is truly is a question for the ages.

How or even when “Pop” Seeley arrived on the banks of the Spuyten Duyvil remains a bit of a mystery.  A popular fellow with fisherman and reporters alike, the details of his early life remain somewhat murky.  “Pop,” it would seem, had a different story for nearly every person he encountered. He told some writers his name was Abraham, others Lynch, but his real name, most likely, was Andrew Jackson Seeley.

According to a New York Times article dated July 3, 1910,  “If you are lucky you may run across ‘Pop’ Andrew Jackson Seeley working at his boats along the creek front.  ‘Pop,’ as he is affectionately and familiarly called by most everybody in that neighborhood, is sort of a self-constituted ‘guardian’ of the old tree, and, in his way, almost as interesting.  He doesn’t have a whole lot to say to a stranger at first, but if you can get him to talking he may tell you that he has lived within the shade of that old tree for more than a score of his eighty years.  He may tell you, too, just how much he loves and protects it from vandal hands.”

“The Old Man of the River,” The New York Times reporter continued, “has been most everything—soldier, sailor, fireman.  Fought many a good fight back in 61’, was a member of the New York Fire Department for seventeen years, and as a sailor has been over many a foreign sea.”

“Pop” simply reveled in spinning fantastic yarns—and from there his legend just grew.

Boss Tweed climbs into rowboat before fleeing to Spain. Could the boatman have been "Pop" Seeley? (Frank Leslie's Illustrated Dec 18, 1875)

In 1921 an old-timer would tell reporter Eleanor Booth Simmons that Seeley “was a boatman and a great character, and he always had charge of things in these parts…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.”

Something of a curmudgeon, “Pop” was known to complain bitterly about his ill treatment as a non-union man working the docks— but where?  A well-worn Brooklyn directory from the years 1889-1890 lists an Andrew J. Seeley, occupation “boatman,” as being employed by Bush C. Hicks.  Could this have been “Pop?”

Even his time in the neighborhood, if you could call the undeveloped swampland a neighborhood, remains in doubt.

In 1915, the year of Seeley’s death, writers of his various obituaries couldn’t even agree on how long he had lived in his little hideaway nestled between the Hudson and Harlem Rivers.  Had he lived there all of his life or just a “score” of years?  No one seemed to know.  That his obituary was published in no less than three New York papers stands testament to his influence on those who passed through the region—many returning year after year just to have a talk with “Pop.”

Regardless of his sketchy origins, “Pop” Seeley would become the unofficial mayor of the marshy shallows of the area then called “Cold Spring.”

In choosing his homestead, Pop carefully selected a shady spot close to a spring from which once flowed water so sweet and icy-cold that its presence was well-known throughout the region. Seeley would initially list has address as being at the base of Cold Spring Road.

From James Reuel Smith's "Springs and Wells of Manhattan and the Bronx, New York City, at the End of the Nineteenth Century."

On November 13, 1897 amateur historian James Reuel Smith would write, “The ‘Cold Spring’ is some eight hundred feet south of the most northern point of Inwood, and on the east side of it.  It is about one hundred feet from the shore of Spuyten Duyvil Creek, or as it has come to be known as in it’s enlarged and modernized condition, the Harlem Ship Canal.  It is some six feet long east and west, and three feet wide north and south.  Its water comes out from under a piece of rock, and a springhouse is built over it of just the dimensions of the spring and some six feet high.  From this house a pipe runs the distance of some ten feet into a barrel sunk in the ground.  The overflow runs out of the barrel near the top and into the Creek.” (The Springs and Wells of Manhattan and the Bronx, New York City, at the End of the Nineteenth Century.)

But Pop’s oasis had so much more to offer than just crisp and natural water that was fit to drink— it had long been a favorite among anglers who knew the Spuyten Duyvil to be flush with striped bass.  The marshy waters were also a choice locale for oystermen who used the fertile creek to seed their oyster beds before taking the young bivalves elsewhere to mature.

Seeley Cabin in 1904 photograph.

So, it was in this tranquil oasis that “Pop” Seeley had the idea to open a boathouse complete with a modest marina where he would sell and repair old yachts—a marina that would flourish well into the early twentieth century.

Not surprisingly, Seeley’s business endeavors did not end there. In addition to his boat business, “Pop” operated a store on the shore where fishermen and sun-scorched day-trippers could purchase refreshments for steamy summer afternoons on the water spent, rod in hand, swatting flies and discussing the state of the Union.

And, in those pre-prohibition years, it is safe to say that “Pop” Seeley likely sold more lager than bait.

An inset in the below photo, snapped in 1906, indicates that “Pop” was an official distributor for the A. Liebler Bottling Company—which bottled, among other things, a product many still drink today.

Seeley Cabin in 1906 photo. (Note inset with Liebler Bottling Company sign.)

Incorporated in New York City in September of 1887, the A. Liebler Bottling Company, did a brisk business from their plant on 128^th and 10^th Avenue “bottling, selling, and delivering lager beer, soda-waters, and aerated waters, with its name and certain marks and devices blown and impressed thereon.”

At the time, the company’s top-selling product was Yuengling beer.  Still in business today, the popular brand holds the distinction of being America’s oldest brewery.

Turn of the century postcard for the Liebler Bottling Company.

Of course there was the matter of “Pop’s” water supply. Seeley himself, who, by some accounts, would have it plugged, because it competed with his flourishing beer and soda sales, controlled the cold spring.

In June of 1898, Smith, who had visited the spring just a year earlier and described it as “the largest…within the corporate limits of the City of New York,” would lament: “As this spring interfered with Seeley’s sale of soft drinks to boatmen, he put a padlock on the spring house, and filled in with earth the space where the water appeared outside, so that the overflow runs into the creek below the level of the tide.” (The Springs and Wells of Manhattan and the Bronx, New York City, at the End of the Nineteenth Century)

Smith would later describe local reaction to the closing of the well as “incendiary.”

Nevertheless, “Pop” would remain, until his death, a well-liked character despite his many flaws and eccentricities.

Pop Seeley obit The Sun February 13, 1915.

According to his obituary, published in the Sun on February 13, 1915, “Andrew J. Seeley, often referred to as ‘The Old Man of the Hudson,’ since he spent eighty four years on the banks of that river, dropped dead yesterday at a lunch wagon at Broadway and 216^th Street.  Mr. Seeley was one of the most picturesque characters of the Inwood district and was a favorite with many boaters, who visited him yearly. In his heyday he was considered one of the best scullers on the Hudson, often winning the admiration of other experts by his agility in falling out and climbing into a frail scull without upsetting it.  He lived with his eighty year old wife at the foot of Cold Spring road and the Hudson River.”

Pop Seeley obit from the New York Herald, February 18, 1915.

Another obituary, published in the New York Herald would report, “Andrew J. Seeley, the aged boatman of the Spuyten Duyvil and known to everyone in that vicinity as “Pop” Seeley, stepped into a coffee wagon at Broadway and 216^th Street last night and after ordering a sandwich dropped dead.  He was eighty-five years old and it was said his death as the result of general collapse.

Despite his age “Pop” Seeley could row a boat as strongly and skillfully as he did many years ago when he had a reputation as a sculler.  In the last forty years the police have credited him with numerous rescues off drowning persons in Spuyten Duyvil.  Only a month ago he saved a woman and her child.

His specialty was the rescuing of boys who insisted on swimming in the dangerous channel.  His boat was always at the ready for an emergency, and he pulled many of them out of the water.”

What follows is a description of an encounter with Pop Seeley written by a first class passenger on the electric launch Aria after the vessel made a stop at Seeley’s boathouse in 1904.  On October first of that year the account was printed in a periodical titled “Our Paper.”

“On the northern end of Manhattan Island will be found a place marked on the map as Spuyten Duyvil.  Although a part of the great New York city, it has not kept place with the populace’s grand march onward, but retains a great deal of its original simplicity.

Very near here is the King’s bridge of the Revolutionary time, which marked the outer barriers of the British forces and which was very carefully guarded by them.

Spuyten Duyvil Creek, itself, can be entered from both the Hudson and Harlem rivers and is a convenient thoroughfare for the smaller boats.

Here are planted the tiny oysters, and from here, when of the right size, millions of them are taken to larger beds.

No wise person ever attempts to swim across the Creek, as there are many treacherous little eddies and under currents to hamper the swimmer.

The story runs that way back in the time when the Dutch held sway over the island, a German was left by his fellows of one side of the Creek.  When he discovered their departure, heeding no warnings, he threw himself into the water, exclaiming, “I will swim across it in spite of the devil!” and away he went to his own destruction. Since then the place has born the name of Spuyten Duyvil.

On one side of the Creek is the Cold Spring Mountain—so named from the many springs of pure, cold water, which bubble out among and over the rocks.  Here, over the mountain, the Indians used to stealthily approach and make their mightily raids upon the unsuspecting villagers, and then, with a fierce war-whoop, triumphantly return, laden with their spoils.

But, in spite of all the wonderful happenings there in by-gone days, Spuyten Duyvil would be to us but simply a place of interest which we visited, had it not been for two personages whom we met there—known far and near in this region as the ‘powers that be’ of the Creek—Pop and Ma’am Seeley.  They are types of those kind-hearted people one sometimes meets in little out-of-the-way places—ignorant of the ways and workings of the great world, but well versed in local legendary lore and the simple mysteries of their own home life.

It was Pop who met us with outstretched hands, not a haughty New York shake, but a warm grip.  As an especial proof of good fellowship, according to his custom, he first made a pretense of spitting on his hands before extending them cordially.

It was Ma’am who welcomed us no less warmly and invited us to call, treating us with as much consideration as though we had been her especial guests.

A simple, kind-hearted old couple are they, who although not given to worldliness, live quiet, helpful lives, enjoying what pleasures come to them, without trying to seek outside interests.  Although living right in the shadow of New York city, Ma’am solemnly informed us she had never been to a theatre or a picnic in her life.  Her careful training has evidently extended to her daughter, who recorded but one picnic on her list of pleasures, and who, until her marriage, had never seen the inside of a theatre.

Pop seemed to delight a good deal in telling how he escaped the strict clutches of his better half.  Among his escapades was a visit to Coney Island by night, and one to the Aquarium at the battery by day.  He declared that Ma’am lay in wait for him with a broom when he at length stealthily returned.

Pop was a non-union man and gave us quite a spirited talk on the far-reaching powers of that organization.  A large building had to be left uncompleted because its builder did not “belong.” Other buildings put up by independent parties, were injured almost beyond repair.  No boats could get loads unless they were unionists.  He told the story of a thirty five cent pet-cock, which rapidly increased to a dollar and a half because it could not be sold unless a man went along to fix it.

The Seeley home is a small, unpainted house, presenting a better appearance inside than out.  The front commands a view of the wharves with their numerous houseboats, waiting for chance buyers or for some repairs. A little to the right of the house is the inevitable hen yard with its few tenants.

Following the well-worn path, protected by the many trees, you come to one of the famous cold springs and near it—if you please—is a building no less important than the one in which A. J. Seeley supplies his customers with tonics and a few of the luxuries of life.

Here you may find Pop at almost any hour, and here it is that pleasure parties stop to refresh themselves, or eat their luncheon and, as he would tell you, “to see Pop.”

Just back of the store stretches a long line of woods, and pedestrians may find many pleasant and well-beaten paths to take them to the top of the mountain. It is an ideal place to reach on a hot day.

Our memory steals back to the time when we left Spuyten Duyvil and our friends there.

It shows us Pop, leaning over a large pan, with a huge piece of watermelon in his hand.  Next we see Ma’am, with hands upraised and eyes turned heavenward, devoutly thanking God that a boat, stolen while left in her care, had been recovered.  There is Annie, earnestly telling of her miraculous escape from the owls of the wood, and of her thwarting their attempts to pick out her eyes by throwing her apron over her head.  The sleepy, frightened eyes of the tired little boy follow us wistfully.  Last, but not least, we recall the members of the crew returning to the Aria laden with their spoils, watermelon and tonic, so generously provided by the Seeley’s.  Then farewell to Spuyten Duyvil.”

Aftermath of Fire on 207th and Broadway (photo taken: January 4, 2012)

A massive fire ripped through a building on 207th and Broadway last night.  Above are before and after photos of the devastation.

For news and additional photos click on this news link from DNAInfo.com.

Princess Naomi and her grandchildren in 1930's photo taken by Reginald Bolton (Source:NYHS)

Since moving to Inwood  I’d heard stories of an almost mythical figure known only as Princess Naomi, who, in the 1930’s, took up residence near the old tulip tree in Inwood Hill Park. The site of the tree, which was felled by a hurricane in 1938, is now marked by a boulder with a plaque claiming to be the spot where Native Americans sold the entire island of Manhattan for a handful of trinkets. But for years, or so I’d been told, the shady spot along the Spuyten Duyvil, belonged to Naomi.

The story of Naomi fascinated me and I decided to make a trip to the National Museum of the American Indian to make an inquiry. What I received was an earful and an education on the public’s romantic notion of Indian life as presented in both history books and popular culture.  “First of all,” I was told, “there is no such thing as an Indian Princess.”

“Have you ever heard of an Indian King or Queen or Duke?” the woman asked in an unabashedly mocking tone.

“No,” I apologized, not meaning to offend.

Soon a rational discussion began, but the helpful staff of librarians and historians could find no mention of Naomi, sometimes spelled Naomie, in their records.

So the hunt continued—but gradually I began to stumble on bits and pieces of Naomi’s life and times in Inwood Hill.

Her real name was Naomi Kennedy.  She hailed from New Orleans.  And, if the stories are to be believed, she was of Cherokee descent.   (The original inhabitants of the area had been the Lenape.)

New York Evening Post, 1935.

According to a 1935 column in the New York Evening Post, titled “A Good Time on a Quarter,” tourists, curious New Yorkers and children could take the subway to 207^th Street and “lunch with an Indian with a gold tooth.”

The Indian, of course, was Naomi.

According to the article, in order to reach Naomi, one had to “walk west into Inwood Hill Park and take the plainly marked trail to the Tulip tree where Hendrick Hudson stepped ashore to barter with the Indians.”

And while the writer of the Post article, one Henry Beckett, may not have had a full grasp of Hudson’s voyage nor the politically correct vernacular of the modern age, he had met Naomi under the tulip tree in 1935 and left behind a description for the ages.

Tulip tree and cottage, 1913. (Source: Library of Congress)

According to Beckett, “Just beyond the tree, now dying at last, is a small brown house with green shutters. Go around to the front porch.  Unless unlucky, Indian braves and squaws in rocking chairs making souvenir trinkets of bright beads. Speak boldly, for there’s not a tomahawk on the premises, and ask for Princess Naomi.”

“Okay friend,” she said, using the Cherokee word for “righto,” when I requested a pow-wow. “Step inside and have a chair while I get my specs.”

Although her skin is coppery, the princess has a smile that is literally golden because of a gold tooth.  She wears Indian clothes decorated with much beadwork.

Boxer Bill Kennedy; record: (His boxing record: won 19 (KO 3) + lost 28 (KO 10) + drawn 10 = 62)

“Cherokees,” she said, “don’t have much show around here, so I am lucky to have this place.  I come from Oklahoma and my tribe used to live in Georgia, where they learned to speak English.  Well, I always wanted to come to New York, but my son, a boxer—he goes by the name of Billy Kennedy—told me I couldn’t stand an ordinary house, with steam heat, so he put in an application to get me the post of caretaker here.”

Thus it happens that a Cherokee princess is now queen of the Vale of Shora-Kap-Pok, a glen where the Weckuaesgeek once lived.

Naomi then went on to tell the reporter that she had held the post for the past six years.

“I must be the goods,” Naomi said.

Princess Naomi in front of Indian caves in Inwood Hill Park. (New Yorks Times, Nov. 15, 1936)

“All of the Indians in the city, about 600 of them, members of fifty tribes, come to see me.  Some make baskets, bracelets, and moccasins. Those on the porch now are Iroquois.  I get along with them all—Algonquians, Mohawk, anything.  I’m vice-president of the United Indians of America, a Brooklyn organization.  September 29 is Indian Day up here.  Big Doings.”

Naomi went on to tell the reporter, “Back in the woods a bit is what’s called an Indian cave, but between you and I and the gate-post, I don’t believe Indians ever lived there. It leaks.  Oh, here comes Chief White Eagle. My tribalman.”

“The chief,” the article continues, “who lives at the Y.M.C.A. and is a CWA recreation leader, wants to establish a real Indian village, with tepees and more substantial houses, all in Indian style.”

Interviewing Chief White Eagle, the reporter learned more of the plan for an Indian village in the park: “Indians would come here from all over.  Railroads could advertise it. Grand publicity.  I have a general plan for the village, but in order to lay it out right I must first fly over the ground in an airplane.”

Following up on Chief White Eagle’s comment, the reporter wrote: “The Chief’s countenance was as solemn as a Chief’s face should be. If the idea of using an airplane to lay out an Indian village struck him as incongruous, he did not show it.”

In summary, the Post reporter wrote, “The attractions of Inwood Park include glacial pot holes, with boulders maybe 50,000 years old, a shell heap indicating hundreds of years of Indian feasting, the pottery studio of Harry and Aimee Voorhees and the Dyckman Institute with its collections.

You too dear reader can lunch with an Indian princess on the shore of the Spuyten Duyvil (Harlem Ship Canal to you). Bring your own lunch.

EXPENSES: Subway: 10 cents. Large root beer served by princess: 10 cents. Bead trinket: nickel.  Total: Two bits.

Princess Naomi, Utica NY Observer, 1932

But Princess Naomi was much more than a local curiosity.  She was part of a growing neighborhood of which she truly seemed to care about.

Niagara Falls Gazette, Dec. 24, 1932

Several years before the article in the Post, Naomi saw a group of nearly thirty Inwood kids sliding and playing on the then frozen Spuyten Duyvil.  According to a 1932 article in the Niagara Falls Gazette, Naomi warned the children that the ice was dangerously thin; but kids being kids, they failed to heed her warning.

A short time later the ice gave way.

Naomi and her son Bill were helpless to stop the unfolding tragedy as they watched the kids take the icy plunge from the window of their cottage.

As the wet and shivering children scrambled out of the Spuyten Duyvil many likely made their way to Naomi’s cottage, described as a wooden shack directly across from the old Isham Park Yacht Club.

Unfortunately one child, ten-year-old James “Red” McGuire, who lived on Cooper street and attended Good Shepherd, drowned in the tragedy.

Of course there are other sources that mention Princess Naomi including the oral histories collected by author Jeff Kisseloff in his book “You Must Remember This.”

In one section Kisseloff  interviews Dorothy Menkin who moved to Inwood from the Bronx in 1933.  In the book Menkin describes the Inwood Hill Park of her youth: “There were two peach trees at the very top overlooking Dyckman Street.  The kids used to eat them, and of course they got sick.  Then there was the famous tulip tree.  It was almost dead then.  They were propping it up with cement.  The Indians would come in September and dance around that tree and sing their songs.  Princess Naomi had her little gift shop next to the tree.  She was some character.  She was in costume all the time, but come Sunday she took the costume off and walked around 207^th Street with high heels and everything.”

Another former Inwood resident, Mary Devlin, who was born in 1900, also had fond memories of Princess Naomi.  From her description to Jeff Kisseloff: “I used to take my children up to Inwood Hill Park every day.  There was a big spring right by Princess Naomi’s shop.  I would bring my empty milk bottles, fill them with water, and bring them home.

Princess Naomi was lovely.  My children were crazy about her.  She had a little museum with trinkets and things.  On Labor Day weekend, they had pow-wows every year.  The Indians came from all over, and they pitched their tents.  Then the men would put up a platform, where they all did their dances, and they had Indian contests.”

Annual Indian Day Festival in Inwood Hill Park, New York Times, October 1, 1934

But while these staged gatherings were thrilling events for the children of Inwood and the surrounding region, the participants themselves often had misgivings about the performances.

Native American Gloria Miguel, who lived in Brooklyn, dreaded the subway rides to Inwood.  Half Algonquin and half Cuna (a Central American tribe), young Gloria, who answered to Bright Moon at home, described her childhood experiences to Jeff Kisseloff:

“When I went up to Inwood, it was like a big spotlight on me.  I went along with my family because they took me, but I was very shy about it. I didn’t want people to look at me or take photographs of me.  It wasn’t until later that I realized that my background was something to be very proud of and that those people were just ignorant.

I had a North American outfit that my mother made for me.  It was a little dress made of cloth with some fringe on it.  I had moccasins and a beaded headband.  It was just a show outfit.  It wasn’t from the background of my people.  Since my parents did this for show business, they dressed according to what the show was.  They both had authentic costumes at home.  I just sat in my costume and watched.

Indian festival day in Inwood Hill Park, 1930's. (Source: Public Places of Childhood, 1915-1930, Sanford Gaster)

With the pow-wows (where she met Crazy Bull, the grandson of Sitting Bull) they were grasping onto the culture, trying to be proud in their way.  That moment was there for them before going back to welfare and their own neighborhood.  It was their way of holding on.”

Robert Moses

By 1938, Robert Moses, as part of his development plan for the park, evicted all of the residents, legal or illegal, of Inwood Hill.  There were house-boaters, potters, squatters and of course Princess Naomi and her son Billy Kennedy, a featherweight boxer who helped build and paint fences in the park when he wasn’t in the ring. (His boxing record: won 19 (KO 3) + lost 28 (KO 10) + drawn 10 = 62)

Years later, Moses would say of the eviction process, which included chopping down what was left of the tulip tree: “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 kiln, the old tulip tree, and other flora and fauna was terrific.” (Public Works, 1970).

Where Princess Naomi wound up after her unceremonious eviction in a mystery to this writer, but hopefully someone reading this article can help fill in those missing pieces.