The southern end of Fort Tryon Park, where this overlook is located, was once the estate of Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings, a wealthy industrialist who moved to New York from Chicago in 1901 after retiring as head of the Peoples Gas Light and Coke Company at the age of 40. Never one to suffer the restraints of modesty, Billings once famously had the grand ballroom of Louis Sherry's restaurant decked out as a woodland scene, complete with a layer of sod on the floor, and threw a lavish party wherein 36 formally attired guests dined on horseback (photo), sipping chilled champagne from their saddlebags while being served by personal attendants dressed as grooms. (The horses were brought up to the ballroom by freight elevator.)
I didn't realize it at the time, but I when I took this photo (looking out over the Henry Hudson Parkway, the Hudson River, the George Washington Bridge, and the New Jersey Palisades), I was perched on top of a massive vaulted stone gallery through which, and over which, a 1600-foot winding driveway (which still exists as a pedestrian path) once passed on its way up the ridge to Billings's opulent mansion. The mansion burned down in 1926, but the gallery remains, one of a few vestiges of the luxurious lifestyle that once flourished on these grounds. (This bird's-eye view shows where the gallery is situated in the park today.)
This enormous stone structure carries one section of the park drive over another.
When I entered the bathroom in that stone building across the way, this playground looked more or less the way it does in this photo. But by the time I emerged back into daylight, a minute or two later, at least a hundred middle-school-aged kids had flooded into the central paved area. I figured they must be there for recess, about to start playing some game.
But then I thought I noticed a flailing of limbs and hair somewhere in the center of the mob. Were two girls fighting each other? Glancing to my left, I noticed a Parks employee standing idly by, watching the action like it was a TV show. A few moments later, two or three police officers came chugging into the playground on foot. The kids took off running and screaming in all directions, evaporating in a chaotic preadolescent whirlwind that made it impossible to determine who had been involved in the fracas. A minute later the playground was empty again.
I walked over to talk to the Parks lady, to verify that I had not just been hallucinating. She said these fights happen all the time once the weather warms up. The kids apparently use this playground as their standard dueling grounds, and hordes of them show up just after school lets out every time a fight is rumored. No one's been seriously hurt so far, but she's always worried someone's going to pull out a gun borrowed from some "crazy uncle".
According to one man on the scene, the DEP has determined there's some guy in Yonkers dumping tires in the Hudson, and the gentleman above, using a rope and grappling hook, has hauled in more than a hundred of them as they've floated by the little beach and pier at the end of Dyckman Street in Inwood Hill Park. The tire removal is part of a larger initiative by a group of friends to fix up and maintain this section of the park; they've also picked up all the litter in the area, planted tomatoes and cucumbers, and built a woodchip path running along the water.
Yacahudah, who lives in his car with his wife here in Inwood, might be the jolliest and most good-natured person I have ever met; just being in his presence is a joyful experience. He also seems to be something of a scholar on the Old Testament, with a library of books, including the 1200-page Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon, stacked on top of his dashboard. We're going to pay him another visit somewhere down the road, and we'll learn more about him then.
This is another section of the Inwood Hill Park mudflats that we visited a couple months ago. Off in the distance, beyond the three moored boats, you might just be able to make out a rowing scull (the white motorboat tailing it is easier to see); the Columbia University crew team practices (and does other things) out here.
The shingle-laden St. Stephen's United Methodist Church, above, was built in 1897 on a small island, known as Marble Hill, that only existed for about two decades. How did this island come to be and then not to be? That is the question. And here is the answer:
(Warning: the geography discussed here can get very confusing. These maps will make things much clearer.)
Marble Hill began its life (within the bounds of modern geological history, anyway) as the northernmost part of the island of Manhattan, separated from the Bronx by Spuyten Duyvil Creek, a narrow, meandering waterway connecting the Harlem and Hudson Rivers.
The Harlem River was being developed as a viable commercial waterway in the late 1800s, but Spuyten Duyvil Creek was too shallow and tortuous for large ships to navigate. In 1895, the Harlem River Ship Canal was opened, providing an alternative route to the Hudson, one sufficiently deep and straight for commercial vessels to ply. The canal passed just south of Marble Hill, severing it from the rest of Manhattan and turning it into an island of its own.
It sat alone, encircled by water, for almost 20 years, until 1914, when Spuyten Duyvil Creek was filled in. Politically part of the borough of Manhattan, Marble Hill was now physically connected to the Bronx (although its isolation from the surrounding streets, revealing the old course of Spuyten Duyvil Creek, can still be seen today). This set off some strange territorial disputes, climaxing in 1939 when the Bronx borough president, James J. Lyons, "annexed" the neighborhood, staking a Bronx flag in a promontory overlooking the canal and declaring Marble Hill the Bronx "Sudetenland" (a strange choice of words, as this would seem to make him the Bronx Hitler). But his theatrics were to no avail: Manhattan has never relinquished possession of its little exclave.
Political boundaries and electoral districts aside, however, Marble Hill is practically part of the Bronx today. It has a Bronx zip code and area code, and it belongs to school and community boards in, and receives most of its emergency services from, the Bronx. Geography triumphs over politics, at least in the everyday lives of its residents.
Unlike the rest of the borough, Marble Hill is full of freestanding houses, some of which even have lawns!
As we learned earlier, the bridge that stood on this site in the early 1900s had to be replaced with a larger one able to accommodate the new subway line that would be passing over it (you can see a 1 train — or two 1 trains that just passed each other, if you look closely enough — on the bridge in this shot). The existing bridge, which was still perfectly usable, was simply floated down the river and installed at a new location that needed a crossing. The bridge you see here, opened in 1962, is a newer incarnation of that original replacement.
This is the 190th Street A station, where Victor Hess performed his subterranean radiation research.
