Inwood

Area: 193d St., Hillside Ave. and Dyckman St. (east to Harlem River) on the
south to Harlem River Ship Canal on the north; from the Hudson River east to the
Harlem River. Map on page 293.

In 1876 Frederick Law Olmsted—who with Calvert Vaux had designed
Central Park nineteen years earlier—and J. James R. Croes suggested to
the Department of Parks that the Inwood section be developed as a resi-
dential area and submitted a tracing proposing "what the English call a
terrace . . . the crescent-shaped intermediate space being either a quiet slope
of turf, a parterre of flowers, a playground, a picturesque rocky declivity
treated perhaps as a fernery or alpine garden." While the Olmsted-Croes
plan was not carried out in detail, it did prompt the city government and
private citizens to co-operate in preserving the beauty of Inwood's topogra-
phy, and it greatly influenced the present character of the district.

About two-fifths of Inwood, virtually all the western portion, is park
land. Exquisite Fort Tryon Park, a cliff-sided plateau, intrudes its rocky
bulk between Broadway and Riverside Drive from 192d Street to Dyckman
Street, then Inwood Hill Park rises somewhat less abruptly and, together
with the low-lying Isham Park, fills the nub of land that separates the
Hudson from the Harlem River.

These rivers and wooded hills insulate a suburban community that is as
separate an entity as any in Manhattan. Its inhabitants, most of whom
have moderate incomes and can afford thirty to fifty dollars a month for
rent, do most of their shopping along Broadway and St. Nicholas Avenue,
the two principal north-south streets, and Dyckman Street, which slants
transversely across the island.

Fort Tryon Park is one of the most beautiful public parks of America
—landscaped with trees, lawns, terraces, rock gardens, paved walks, and
many benches, all cleverly ordered in harmonious composition. The preci-
sion of its design is explicitly urban. The views from its heights are per-
haps the finest Manhattan offers, for they sweep mile after mile of the
Hudson and the Palisades, and, to the east, range across the lowlands of
Inwood. At the southern entrance to the park, near Fort Washington Ave-
nue, a large sloping rock garden forms an approach to the stone ramparts
marking the site of old Fort Tryon, built in the summer of 1776 and taken
in the fall of the same year by the Hessians. The landscaping was done,
appropriately, by Frederick Law Olmsted, son of the proposer of the park
plan for Inwood.