Urban Gadabout: Spring tours of Manhattan's northernmost neighborhoods, Washington Heights, Inwood, and even Marble Hill

The Audubon Terrace complex at Broadway and 155th Street, on part of the property once owned by naturalist-painter John James Audubon, must have been quite a sight when it was built, roughly between 1906 and 1930. The developers' assumption that Manhattan's seemingly relentless northward push would sustain such a grand assemblage of academic and cultural institutions has so far proved over-optimistic. (See the Audubon Park tour, May 6, in the list of Spring 2012 WAHI Tours in the click-through.)

by Ken

If you live in a place (if you don't live in a place, this may not apply to you), there are reasons -- whether or not it has occurred to you -- why that place is where it is and has developed the way it has. In the case of a city of any size and age, it's overwhelmingly likely that there are layers upon layers of history and geography and what-all, most of which can still be seen in one form or another. And of course in this country even our oldest cities aren't that old. I remember when I spent the fall of my junior year in college in Caen, the capital of Lower Normandy, and every day on my walk to and from the university I passed one of the two abbeys (one for men, one for women) built by the still-future William the Conqueror -- that is, before he moseyed off to England, when Caen was his capital as duke of Normandy. Guillaume made that crossing of the English Channel in 1066, you'll recall. Now that's old.

In Manhattan our history doesn't trace back anywhere near that far, but there's still tons of it, and it starts, straightforwardly, at least as far as settlement by European colonials is concerned, at the bottom. There's not much of Dutch New Amsterdam left, but we know a lot of where things happened there. Even with the English takeover, the new city was packed tightly down there, but when expansion began, even allowing for geographical obstacles in the form of marshes and heights, it moved amazingly rapidly, and for this transformation there's abundant surviving evidence.

The Native American populations that had long inhabited the area had their own travel and trade patterns, many of which the spreading settlers followed. Naturally there were soon colonial settlements scattered around the island even as the new city itself pushed northward, with the prosperous burgers pulling up stakes amazingly frequently and resettling in the new "in" precincts. For a time, the process of northward expansion must have seemed inexorable. In general, those venturesome souls and institutions that gambled on continued northward expansion won those bets. Eventually, as I was noting in a recent Urban Gadabout post ("Urban Gadabout: When east is west and north is south -- travels in the Bronx and Brooklyn"), the northward push jumped the Harlem River into the Bronx.

But there was a limit to how far north the "core" of the city would move. Oh, the whole of the island -- minus the parkland set-asides -- was eventually paved over and settled, but not settled in that core-of-the-city way. I got a graphic glimpse of what development "overreach" on a recent Municipal Art Society walking tour of "Audubon Park," which I put in quotes because there isn't any actual park. The name refers to a designated historic district occupying land that once constituted the rural estate of the great naturalist and painter John James Audubon, north of 155th Street and west of Broadway, which is to say across 155th Street from Manhattan's most important cemetery, the "uptown" cemetery of Trinity Church, the Episcopal heart of the growing city.

At the southeast corner of Broadway and 155th is the beautiful Church of the Intercession, which was built to house a merged pair of Episcopal places of worship as a far-northern outpost of, what else?, Trinity Church, which had a number of such satellite chapels around town, a partial measure of its considerable sway over the borough of Manhattan. There's a picture and a bit more comment on the church in the click-through.

The crown jewel of the area is the cultural complex built in the early 20th century by railroad heir Archer Huntington, who brought in some of the city's leading architects and in its various buildings housed such institutions as the Hispanic Society, American Geographical Society, Museum of the American Indian, American Numismatic Society, and Academy of Arts and Letters. Unfortunately, the neighborhood was never transformed into the kind of elegant social hub Huntington envisaged, and while the complex is still there, and even still has a couple of its original resident institutions, along with replacements for most of the other originals.

Which is the long-way-round way of explaining that James Renner, noted as a historian of Manhattan's far-northern neighborhoods, Washington Heights and Inwood, has scheduled a series of spring tours of the area Sundays at noon, which includes his own tour of Audubon Park on May 6. I bring it up now because the series begins this Sunday, March 25, with a tour of "Fort Washington-Hudson Heights." For a complete listing, click through.


FOR MORE ON THE WAHI SPRING TOURS OF
WASHINGTON HEIGHTS AND INWOOD, CLICK HERE


YES, THERE WILL BE A SUNDAY CLASSICS
PREVIEW: TOMORROW IN THE 6PM PT SLOT

Sorry, my scheduling got thrown with the unexpected naming of Jim Yong Kim as the next World Bank president, which I felt obliged to write about, and then I really wanted to get the WAHI Tours schedule in today, which pushed the music preview back to tomorrow.

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