Broadway_A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles

by Fran Leadon

  Tubby Hook’s isolation from the rest of the island made it desirable and mysterious, an idyllic pastoral retreat of mansions with large porches, barns, stables, and gardens tucked into the woods along unpaved tracks. “Among the rocks and forest trees of this primitive region,” T. Addison Richards wrote in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in the summer of 1861, “one may be as secluded as in the farthest mountain wilds.”

  In 1864, William B. Isham, a prosperous downtown leather merchant, bought an Italianate villa, cruciform in plan, with wings projecting from a huge circular hall at the center, next door to the Seaman estate, and for the next forty-five years lived in apparent contentment with his wife Julia and their six children, surrounded by 24 acres of woods and lawn that looked out over the Hudson and Spuyten Duyvil Creek at the island’s northern tip. Around the time Isham moved in, local real-estate agents began to take notice of Tubby Hook and decided it needed a more marketable name. Tubby Hook became Inwood, a designation, the Tribune complained, that was “utterly without salt and savor.” One defiant Hudson River Railroad conductor continued to announce “Tubby Hook!” when his train pulled into the station, always following in mock apology with “Inwood!”

  By 1867 the Hudson River Railroad was running eight daily trains between Inwood and 30th Street, and, with the imminent sale of the 400-acre “Dyckman Tract” and the instigation of the Central Park Commission’s new street plan for upper Manhattan, it looked as though an Inwood boom was inevitable.

  “Inwood seems, by its beautiful situation on the river, to be the spot where the finest . . . residences will ultimately be located,” the Tribune reported in 1868. “Its convenience of access by the many avenues and drives, as well as by water and rail from the city, will render it accessible from every side.”

  But in 1869 the Hudson River Railroad merged with Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central, and in 1871 many of the trains that had run between Inwood and the city were diverted to the opposite side of the Harlem River, in the Bronx, where a bridge at Fourth Avenue provided direct access to Manhattan and Grand Central Depot. With fewer trains stopping at Inwood, the expected building boom never materialized, and the houses on the hill began to disappear even further into the woods.

  On the other side of the Kingsbridge Road from the hill, there were still virtually no buildings of any kind. In 1881, historian Wilson Cary Smith, writing in the Magazine of American History, described the area as “unchanged by the march of improvement.” About the only people who lived east of the Kingsbridge Road were Irish, German, and Italian immigrants, who threw up shanties around the base of Fort George Hill, next to the Harlem River.

  A fresh-water creek that locals called the “Run” flowed from Inwood Hill under the Kingsbridge Road to Sherman’s Creek, a brackish tidal marsh that cut in from the Harlem River just to the north of Fort George Hill. Dyckman’s Meadows ran from the creek along the Harlem River edge, and at low tide became a boggy, treacherous warren of reeds and hidden mud holes. The terrain on the flat side of the Kingsbridge Road was so forbidding that in 1887 Magdalena Zorn, a ten-year-old child of German immigrants, lost her way during a school picnic on Fort George Hill and wandered into the meadows. Her body, mysteriously mangled—an arm and leg were missing—wasn’t found for a full week. The police assumed she had been murdered, but the city’s coroner, Ferdinand Eidman, concluded that she had drowned and chastised the school for holding a picnic in such a desolate place.

  “The teachers had no business to go into such a dangerous neighborhood with so many little ones, and so few to look after them,” he said. “Why, I have been there several times and I wouldn’t be sure of not getting lost myself.”

  Inwood was such a backwater even the subway couldn’t domesticate it. By 1910, four years after IRT stations opened at Dyckman, 207th, 215th, and 221st streets, only a few tenements had been built in the neighborhood, and much of the land between was still given over to farming. By World War I, Inwood had more houses, schools, churches, and the Dyckman Theatre, but at least half of the lots in the area were still vacant. Not until the 1930s did Inwood really fill in and begin to resemble an urban landscape, and even then vacant lots weren’t hard to find.

  ON THE WEST SIDE of Broadway, Inwood Hill’s landed gentry died off one by one. Following Isham’s death in 1909, his daughter Julia donated the family estate to the city for Isham Park, which runs from Broadway up and over the hill to Spuyten Duyvil Creek. The Isham mansion was preserved as the park’s centerpiece and served as Parks Department offices and the headquarters of the Daughters of the American Revolution until Robert Moses tore it down in the 1940s.

  In the 1890s, Andrew Haswell Green promoted an ambitious idea of turning the entirety of Inwood Hill into a park, but nothing came of the plan. Following Green’s death in 1903—he was murdered by an intruder—civic-minded landowners and the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society took up the cause, and in 1916 the city began acquiring land for what was to become the city’s second-largest park after Central Park.

  By then the once-bucolic hillside was an increasingly dangerous place: In the summer of 1913 the mutilated body of a pregnant Italian woman, her skull fractured and her head nearly decapitated from multiple knife wounds, was found on an isolated park trail cutting through what had once been the McCreery estate.

  As the park’s trees were allowed to infiltrate what had been lawns and gardens, the old mansions on the hill were abandoned. For years the Joseph Keppler house stood vacant, decaying furniture visible through the windows, its front porch lattices covered with wild roses. Tribune reporter Eleanor Booth Simmons, rambling over Inwood Hill in 1921, found overgrown box hedges, “quaint houses with cupolas and pillars,” and the foundations of old stables that had turned into grassy terraces.

  In the fall of 1933 writer Helen Worden visited the old Seaman estate while researching her book Round Manhattan’s Rim, which documented her rambles around the perimeter of the island. She reached the mansion after trampling through tangled weeds, only to find the doors locked and the place deserted except for a suspicious caretaker. Directed to the estate’s Arc de Triomphe entrance gate on Broadway, Worden found the estate’s then-owner, James Dwyer, a contractor, sitting behind a walnut table in an office at the top of a spiral staircase. “And what do ye be after?” he demanded.

  After some prodding, Dwyer let Worden inside the old mansion, and her brief tour revealed great halls, an ornate drawing room, a library, a large kitchen, and furniture of walnut and mahogany, but also broken windows, wide cracks in the front doors and dust on the balustrades. The house was torn down shortly after her visit.

  Today almost nothing is left of what had once been perhaps the most sought-after enclave in Gilded Age New York. There are outlines of foundations deep in the woods, covered with earth and brambles, and along Broadway, tucked behind an auto body shop on the west side of the street between 215th and 218th streets, Seaman’s Arc de Triomphe still peers out at the street, covered with graffiti and gradually succumbing to the weight of time.

  CHAPTER 48

  THE LAST FARM

  AT THE NORTHWEST CORNER OF BROADWAY AND 204TH Street, across the street from a gas station, there is, of all things, a farmhouse sitting incongruously atop a knoll above a stone retaining wall. From a wide front porch beneath a swooping Dutch gambrel roof, visitors enter through double “Dutch” doors that open in upper and lower halves. The parlor and dining room on the ground floor and the five bedrooms upstairs are filled with family mementos: a Dutch clock, a family Bible from 1702, an eight-legged mahogany table from 1740. There is a summer kitchen in a small south wing that includes two stone ovens recessed into the wall and a winter kitchen in the basement, its fireplace hung with antiquated implements: bellows, tongs, tinderboxes, trammels, skillets, and skimmers.

  The Dyckman Farmhouse Museum is a time machine, the last surviving remnant of a time when most of Manhattan consisted of plowed fields.

  The first Dyckman in th
e New World was Jan Dyckman, a Westphalian immigrant who arrived in New Amsterdam in 1660. Dyckman built a farmhouse just southwest of the present-day intersection of Ninth Avenue and 209th Street, and when he died, in 1715, the land and house passed to his son Jacobus. When Jacobus died in 1773, the estate passed to Jacobus’s son William, whose house was near what is now the north side of 210th Street, some 350 feet east of present-day Ninth Avenue.

  William Dyckman sided with the Americans during the Revolution. Four of his sons served in the Continental Army, two of them in the “Westchester Guides” that spied on the British and passed along intelligence to General Washington. The Dyckman family waited out the war in Peekskill, thirty-six miles up the Hudson, and when they returned to Manhattan at war’s end, in 1783, they found that their house had been burned by British and Hessian troops in retribution for the family’s revolutionary activities. Starting over, William began building a new house on the west side of the Kingsbridge Road, and it is that house that survives today at the corner of Broadway and 204th Street.

  William died in 1787, and his estate passed to his son Jacobus and then, after Jacobus’s death in 1837, to Jacobus’s sons Isaac and Michael, who remained lifelong bachelors. In 1820, Isaac took charge of his sister Hannah’s seven-year-old son, James Frederick Dyckman Smith, who was raised in the farmhouse overlooking the Kingsbridge Road.

  By the 1860s the “Dyckman Tract” had grown to about 400 acres, making it one of the largest private tracts ever assembled in Manhattan, rivaled in size only by the eighteenth-century estates of Peter Stuyvesant, James de Lancey, and Teunis Eidesse van Huyse. The Dyckmans’ land extended from Fort George Hill north to Spuyten Duyvil Creek and included large parcels on both sides of the Kingsbridge Road and on Inwood Hill, and almost all of the fertile bottomlands stretching along the Harlem River shore. Isaac and Michael let drovers making the trek from Westchester down to the city’s slaughterhouses pasture their cattle in the fields surrounding their house, and the influx of noisy livestock along the Kingsbridge Road was perhaps one reason the brothers abandoned the family homestead and built a new house near the present-day intersection of Broadway and 225th Street.

  Isaac outlived his brother and, with no children of his own, designated his nephew James as heir. But James’s last name was Smith, not Dyckman. Isaac couldn’t bear the dissolution of the family name, and so he added a provision in his will that required James to change his name to Isaac Michael Dyckman. (James’s response must have been something along the lines of “You’re giving me four hundred acres of Manhattan? You can call me anything you want.”)

  James, or rather Isaac Michael, wasn’t sentimental when it came to real estate, and upon his uncle’s death in 1868 he immediately partitioned his inheritance into building lots and put them up for sale. Seventeen hundred lots were auctioned off in 1869, five hundred more in 1871. The dispersal of the Dyckman Tract was probably the largest land sale in Manhattan’s history, part of a frantic auctioning of farmland following the Civil War that didn’t abate until the Panic of 1873.

  Isaac Michael, suddenly wealthy beyond all reckoning, turned his back on the soil—he was listed in the 1880 Federal Census as a “retired farmer”—and lived out his days in a new, bigger house he had built in the 1850s near the corner of what is now Broadway and 218th Street.

  The old Dyckman farmhouse was sold, although the land around it continued to be farmed into the early twentieth century. Hugh and Mary Drennan, who had arrived in New York from Ireland in 1864 with four children in tow—they had five more in New York—operated a dairy farm next to the old Dyckman homestead. In the 1880s and ’90s the Drennans’ second-oldest daughter, Elizabeth, operated a general store and post office there, and for many years was the neighborhood’s postmaster. The Dyckman farmhouse, meanwhile, fell into disrepair, and by 1916 was almost a ruin, a “hovel,” Sarah Comstock reported in the New York Times, “with an unkempt yard and slovenly surroundings.”

  ISAAC MICHAEL, who died in 1899, had two daughters, Mary Alice and Fannie, and although they had never lived in the old farmhouse—they grew up in the mansion at Broadway and 218th Street—they were sentimentally attached to the place and decided to buy it back and donate it to the city as a museum. Mary Alice’s husband, Bashford Dean, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Fannie’s husband, architect Alexander McWilliam Welch, took charge of the restoration. Welch, a Columbia graduate, did meticulous work, even replacing rotten beams with hand-sawn duplicates of the same approximate vintage. The original house had been extraordinarily well built, and many features, including its distinctive Dutch doors, remained intact despite the wear and tear of 133 years. Welch demolished one wing of the house added in the 1830s, removed later finishes from the interior, rebuilt the missing back porch, and replicated period details.

  That Dean and Welch and the Dyckman sisters were going against the grain of progress was precisely what had stirred them to action. “There is, perhaps, not a city in the world one-tenth of [New York’s] size which has less average interest in its own past,” they wrote in a booklet explaining the project. “It grows quickly, takes its population from everywhere, and tears down its buildings and rebuilds them at a furious rate.”

  The house opened to the public in the summer of 1916 as the Dyckman House Park and Museum. “You will probably come upon it with a start,” Comstock reported in the Times, “a flawless little old Dutch house, surrounded by trim brick paths, immaculate in its new paint, looking down primly upon the procession of automobiles that constantly flows past its door.”

  The Dyckman house remains much the same today, an unlikely oasis from the unceasing business of the city. we are open! please knock! estamos abiertos! por favor toquen! a sign on the front door announces. An annual fall festival attracts local stroller-pushing parents and their charges for an afternoon of stories, pumpkin carving, cider press demonstrations, and even Dutch language lessons, which, once you’re inside the Dyckman house, all seem like perfectly normal things to do on a weekend in twenty-first century New York. That’s the thing about cities: one’s perspective can shift slightly and suddenly everything appears altered. When viewed from Broadway, the Dyckman house doesn’t seem real; when seen from the Dyckman house, Broadway doesn’t seem real.

  BY THE TIME the Dyckman house was resuscitated and opened as a museum, Inwood’s remaining farms had been plowed under by new apartment buildings. Then, in 1924, a large Italian family began tilling the soil on Broadway and so became Manhattan’s last farmers.

  Vincenzo and Mary Benedetto were both born in Italy and immigrated to New York in 1900. Their four boys (Patrick, or “Patsy,” Vito, Carlo, and George) and five girls (Marie, Martha, Marietta, Josephine, and Diana) were all born in the city. Vincenzo delivered ice to apartment buildings from a horse-drawn wagon. The Benedetto farm, four blocks north of the Dyckman farmhouse, was situated on a little less than 2 acres of land encompassing a small block bounded by Broadway, Tenth Avenue, and 213th and 214th streets. The land came with an existing, decidedly humble two-story red brick house that peered out at Tenth Avenue from beneath the elevated IRT tracks. Mary, who unlike her husband could read and write, managed the farm, and Vincenzo, Patsy, Vito, and Carlo, with help from an uncle or two, did the planting and plowing. The landlord, Leo Fellman of New Orleans, rented the spread to the Benedettos for $30 a month.

  The farm had good soil and produced “delicious” vegetables and fruit, according to Josephine Benedetto, who was three years old when her family moved there. They grew tomatoes, corn, string beans, carrots, beets, broccoli, radishes, and lettuce; peaches, cherries, pears, pumpkins, and squash; and raised chickens that laid both brown and white eggs priced at fifteen cents a dozen. Josephine was spared from heavy farm labor but helped sell produce from a stand next to the house. She didn’t like the chickens and stayed away from them.

  The Depression hit only five years after the Benedettos plowed their first furrow. When Federal Census enumerator Clarice Kagan
stopped by the farm on April 17, 1930, she was apparently so underwhelmed by the scale of the Benedettos’ operation that she left column 10 of the census questionnaire (“Does this family live on a farm?”) blank. Kagan listed Vincenzo’s occupation as “iceman,” not farmer, and Mary as a “worker” in what Kagan characterized not as a farm but only as a “vegetable garden.” Later that fall, Mary told Time magazine that 1930 had been an especially hard year.

  Despite the Depression, Inwood had become a humming, working community of clerks, dressmakers, taxi drivers, contractors, accountants, printers, salesmen, stenographers, waiters, laborers, plumbers, steelworkers, butchers, seamstresses, and electricians. The Benedetto farm was an anomaly, the surrounding blocks filling up with people, some 300 of them in just two apartment buildings on Broadway on the other side of 213th Street.

  The Benedetto farm as seen from Broadway, 1933.

  The Benedetto family became perennial subjects for newspapers and magazines, and in time came to resent the attention. In the fall of 1933, Helen Worden happened on the farm while researching her travelogue Round Manhattan’s Rim. Intrigued by the pumpkins, squash, and tomatoes piled high on the Benedettos’ farm stand, Worden stepped over some bean sprouts and accosted a man with a hoe (probably Vincenzo) with questions about the place. The man shook his head and went into the house, whereupon, Worden wrote, Mary emerged yelling, “No stories, no stories! Every time the papers say this only farm in New York, man raises rent.”