Pioneers

Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day
January 20, 2014

     So far so good: another night's sleep racked up, Beau is even displaying signs of not wanting to go out for that last walk late in the evening.

      Refreshed after being able to sleep fully, I decide that Beau and I will travel to Inwood to celebrate the holiday and take a look at the neighborhood that begins at Dyckman Street and the northern end of Fort Tryon Park.  I take the #1 to Dyckman Street, but I am too far to the east for my destination: I ought to have caught the "A" to the Dyckman Street stop on that line.  The extra few blocks between the eastern and western stops aren't particularly savory, the only people out on the street seem to be groups of adolescent boys with basketballs, dressed in dark sweats and sneakers, hanging out in front the faceless buildings, killing time.  Occasionally we pass a solitary woman, bustling on an errand; or a mother and a group of girls close in age, her children.  Everyone I see is speaking Spanish, or broken English.

       Reaching Dyckman and Riverside Drive, I see the Cloisters' bell tower reigning over the hill to my left.  The woman from whom I bought a coat for Beau yesterday lives on Riverside Drive's last block, a few feet away.   She told me about this entrance to the park, which is, literally across the street from the subway, and only a few feet from the entrance to the West Side Highway.

        I cross the street moving right to take in the restaurants along Dyckman Street's last few blocks.  They all look pretty inviting: the façades are attractive, the offerings upscale.  The people passing on the street also look different from those I passed as I crossed Sherman Avenue: they are native English speakers, and are making some effort at fashionability.  I see a young, open-faced couple, and stop to ask them about the neighborhood, thinking they are locals.  Actually, they live in Stuyvesant Town and are thinking of moving up to the area.  They say they want to leave the East Village.

       A few minutes later and a few feet further down the street, I stop a young, auburn-haired man and ask him about the neighborhood.  He is a local: he moved to Inwood from an apartment on Frederick Douglas Boulevard in Harlem two years ago and glad he did.  He counsels me to look at Payson Avenue, the cross street one block down the way and to walk its length to Inwood Hill Park, saying there are some beautiful residences on it.  So we do.

         Initially, I'm not especially impressed with Payson Street, but I see trees in the distance and hope for better things.  At the end of Payson Street, with the trees of a park in sight, I encounter a woman walking a friendly dog.  Her name is Pamela, and she moved to the neighborhood from Bank and Bleecker Streets in Greenwich Village.  I ask if I can accompany her on part of her walk as we turn onto Seaman Avenue and then past Isham Park, stopping at Isham Street in front of Good Shepherd Church on Isham and 208th Streets.   Pamela tells me she left an apartment in the Village she loved because it was getting too expensive: the apartment now rents for $6,000 a month.  She lives comfortably in Inwood, although she avoids Isham Park on account of its history of rapes.  On the other hand, Inwood Hill Park she finds to her liking.  As to the neighborhood, she laments the lack of a fitness center that offers classes and having only the gym at Planet Fitness available, but she believes that as the neighborhood gentrifies, that need will be filled.

          "I wouldn't go east of Broadway --it's Mardi Gras every night.  Inwood Hill Park is quiet and safe, though.  Don't take this the wrong way, but Hispanics don't like the cold --they never go there."

          I take my leave of Pamela and walk along the street that separates Inwood Park from Isham Park, arriving at Park Terrace West, which Pamela told me is where a lot of young gay men have now moved.  I walk Park Terrace West until I reach Columbia's Baker Field at 218th Street.  I walk 218th Street towards Inwood Hill Park, passing the well-appointed Indian Road Café at 218th Street and Indian Road, the northernmost corner of Manhattan.

           Inwood Hill Park, I have come to realize as I walk, is not a small pocket park, but a rival to Fort Tryon.  It reaches as far as the fringes of Wien Stadium and Baker Field, then dips down towards the banks of the Harlem River's narrow channel.  I walk into the park and take the road that follows Spuyten Duyvil Creek, passing Shorakkopoch Park, where Peter Minuit is said to have consummated the purchase of Manhattan from the Indians.  The road rises, so I take it, Beau and I hiking to its top then down and out of the park and across Henshaw Street into Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, looking back to see white spire and red-brick façade of the the Mormon Church at Payson Avenue's end.

          In the park I take the path built along the belvedere that opens out over the Hudson River.  Exiting at the circle on the other side of which begins Fort Washington Avenue, Beau and I set our compass towards home.  We will walk the entire way.

          We wend our way west to Wadsworth Avenue, then over to Amsterdam Avenue: we are now in Highbridge, a solidly Hispanic area.  Every other block there is a barbershop, doing a good business.  I wonder how many barbers the Dominican Republic trains every year, as all the shops display that country's flag prominently.  We walk to St. Nicholas Avenue, passing the Morris-Jumel Mansion and the Jumel Terrace Historic District, with its 49 brick and wood rowhouses.  The mansion, which belonged to Eliza Jumel (Aaron Burr's wife) is a white colonial beauty.  I walk Beau around the garden, where he meets two West Highland terriers also taking a walk.  As I leave the small park, Beau meets another dog, owned by a woman in her 70s who tells me she moved to the apartment building on the other side of the park when she sold her five-bedroom house in Greenwich some years ago:

          "When I moved in, I was the first white woman to live there!  I didn't believe in paying a lot of money to live somewhere if I didn't own, and I didn't want the bother of a house, so I moved here."

          Lovely as Jumel Terrace is, the surrounding streets are uninviting.  Continuing south, I turn east on 160th Street and Edgecombe Avenue.  It's a bleak area which changes its complexion, but not its tone, when it becomes Edgecombe Avenue north of Sugar Hill.  Chain link fence divides the streets beyond the avenue's heights, along whose benches shabby and dissipated men --white and black and Hispanic-- sit, waiting for nothing to happen.

          I follow Edgecombe Avenue until 141st Street, turning towards Convent Avenue and City College, an area called Hamilton Heights.  In the vicinity of the college (whose grounds are those of a former Catholic seminary), the buildings are elegant and well-manicured, often in the Dutch style.  I pass The Grange, Alexander Hamilton's home, moved to City College's grounds from its location at 287 Convent Avenue next to St. Luke's Episcopal Church on 141st Street, to which it had been previously moved from 143rd Street when the church acquired the property in bankruptcy after Hamilton's death in a duel with Vice-President Burr on July 11,1804.

          The homes of the two political adversaries were twenty blocks apart, although Burr only took up with Eliza Jumel some thirty years after he killed Burr.  Jumel and Burr were officially divorced the day Burr died, September 14, 1836, while Eliza Jumel died in 1865 at the age of 90.  The Grange, built in 1802, is the only home Hamilton, a brilliant financier, is ever known to have owned; the Morris-Jumel house, built in 1765 for the Morris family, was purchased by Eliza and her husband Stephen Jumel in 1810 and remained Eliza's home for fifty-five years.

          The rest of the walk is through familiar territory.  Columbia's northward expansion will change the areas Beau and I ambled through not at all.  So even as the City changes, parts of it remain the same, unimproved.

           On the other hand, areas like the Fort Tryon and Inwood areas, safe and green, are being discovered by the intrepid unafraid to pioneer.  New York is still a city where, turn down a street one way, you encounter affluence; turn the other, squalor.  The trick in relocating to cheaper areas is knowing where those margins begin and end.