When I was 21 years old I had the good fortune to be able to study abroad. I like to think that I didn’t take the experience for granted- I remember being filled with excitement every moment leading up to it, and treasure the memories of those six months to this very day.
One thing I don’t think I fully appreciated until now, though, was how fortunate I was to have come out the other side of that semester virtually unscathed. I traveled alone, a lot, in countries where I wasn’t fluent in the language. Stuff went wrong- I got lost, sometimes at night, sometimes with a $7,000 French horn on my back. German cops demanded to see my passport, twice. I had to hitch a ride in a stranger’s car to get out of a sticky situation, *twice*. Other things happened that I won’t mention here because my mother reads these essays and I like to keep her blood pressure down. Nothing bad happened. I hopped on a plane in December, with all the belongings I came with plus some souvenirs, my body and mind intact, and went on with my life.
In the 13 years since that trip I’ve read so many stories of solo-traveling women whose experiences did not go so smoothly. Whose experiences ended their lives. It’s such that when I recall those experiences of my early 20s, I think of them fondly, but also with a muted horror. I was really fucking lucky.
It’s a similar horror I feel every time another black person is killed by the cops. Less muted, though, because it’s not a memory, it’s here, it’s now, and it could still happen to me or my friends or my family, no matter what we do. I’ve just been really, really lucky so far.
Direction: North up Broadway, starting from the south point of Ft. Tyron Park, walking up to Inwood Hill Park
I decided not to listen to anything as I walked the 25 minutes to my starting point. I miss the normal sounds of the city- traffic, bars, reggaeton- but this new audio mix is also interesting. It’s as if someone had a go at reorganizing the ambient sounds- the city is quieter, and nature louder. I’m definitely not the only person to have noticed this.
As I crossed underneath the George Washington Bridge, I was convinced that a man approaching me from the other side was someone I knew. His familiar eyes peering out from over his mask, however, didn’t share the same recognition when they met mine. I wonder how often this has happened- people having the same eyes as someone else, looking the same as them behind a mask. I wonder if anyone has misrecognized me.
On my way up I caught a shot of 181st St., usually teeming with people, carts, music, bustle, espeically on a sunny day like this day.
I’m always astonished by how easily my body readapts to these long walks, after days and weeks with relatively little activity. I can go an hour or more without my legs wearing out or my feet getting sore. Ten years of NYC commuting doesn’t leave you so easily, I guess.
I got to the bottom of Fort Tyron Park without breaking a sweat and hit play:
Album: Fleetwood Mac- Rumours
The weekend I did this walk, I had just started the new High Fidelity TV show, and the main character references this album in the first episode. I’d listened to the album before, but I hadn’t listened to it, you know? (Oh God, that show is already making me more pretentious.)
Right from the jump, though, I knew this album was the right choice for me, because the lyrics of the first track are as horny as I am:
“When times go bad, when times go rough / Won’t you lay me down in the tall grass / And let me do my stuff?”
If you want to pop a Zyrtec and go find some tall grass with me when all this is over, hit me up. ❤
If I had to describe Inwood in one word it would be: s p a c e
You can see the sky. You can take a breath. You can stretch out your arms and not hit anyone.
No skyscrapers, the apartments are bigger, and when someone isn’t blasting their stereo, it’s actually quiet. That’s true for a lot of uptown north of Harlem, but in Inwood the silence and the space seems so much more profound.
I tried to find out why there’s so much space up here — how has Inwood gotten away with having only one office building? I ended up finding several reasons!*
- The most interesting fact, and a fact that I was not aware of until researching for this essay, is that Inwood has only two (2) streets that connect it to the rest of the Manhattan street system- Broadway, and Fort George Hill (which turns into St. Nicholas Ave, a.k.a. Santa Street, farther south).
- Why was the neighborhood designed this way? Turns out, the area of Manhattan north of 155th street was not part of the original Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, which was the plan that gave us the famous city grid. These old timey white dudes had no clue just how exponentially population of Manhattan would grow when they were planning- their guess was that there would be around 400,000 people living there by 1860, which they assumed would fill the grid up to 34th street, when in fact by 1860 the population was twice that. They also thought that planning beyond 155th Street would make the plan less attractive from a real estate development standpoint, since that is where the rocky steep hills of Upper Manhattan begin.
- By the time the city began looking to develop above 155th Street in the 1860s, they were sick of the grid! Part of this was because of the development of Central Park (which was not part of the original grid plan); this project made city planners realize how shitty and boring grids are. All of the leveling of hills and rocks (and 39% of the homes and buildings already built on the land) necessary to fulfill the 1811 plan had done away with a lot of the natural beauty of the island. So, they hired the same folks who worked on Central Park, headed by a man named Andrew Haswell Green, to finish planning out the streets of upper Manhattan.
- Green envisioned an upper Manhattan that acquiesced to the natural topography of the land, and what we have today is a slightly more developed version of his proposed plan. This includes having only a few main roads leading into the area we now call Inwood, due to that area’s rolling hills making more longitudinal streets difficult to build.
- Inwood hasn’t been rezoned since 1961! The city tried to pass rezoning legislation two years ago, but the uptown community rallied together to officially oppose it, and a judge struck it down the bill, much to the relief of long-term residents.
Never let anyone tell you that community action doesn’t work. Or that grids are cool.
(An aside- I didn’t go near here on my walk, but in my research I found out *another* baseball field used to exist up here- The Dyckman Oval. People were so horny for baseball!!)
My favorite Fleetwood Mac song came on as I went over to investigate a large repurposed parking lot structure. It looked sad and empty, with shuttered doors, broken windows, graffiti, but something about it told me it used to be something grander.
“But listen carefully to the sound
Of your loneliness
Like a heartbeat, drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had”
Luckily I saw the crumbling engraving along the top of its facade —
P A C K A R D
And luckily I know what Packard Cars are because of a musical.
One Google search took me to the story about this building. Apparently it’s one of the last remnants of Packard that still exists in Manhattan, though through outer shell only. It opened in 1927 as a fancy two-story showroom meant to woo wealthy car-driving Westchester commuters.
When the car manufacturing sector went belly up during World War II, Packard leased the building as barracks for the Army, and then sold the building outright in 1946. The structure has since gone on to house a handful of other car showrooms, a parking garage, and a 62-lane bowling alley called Manhattan Lanes.
Acadia Realty Trust bought the building in 2005 for $25 million, hoping to develop it into a gentrification nightmare called Sherman Plaza. The neighborhood fought back viciously, and the company attempted several different plans before giving up and selling the property to FBE Limited in 2018 for $26 million, who then sold the property to Hello Living later that year for $55 million. Hello Living’s development plans may circumvent the rezoning hullabaloo as they will be building as-of-right (a term I just learned while working on this section!).
(P.S. — reading about how hard my neighbors have been fighting to keep uptown affordable inspired me to donate some of my limited funds to the Met Council On Housing. I think it was a good investment. ❤)
I’d started my official walk close to the bottom of Fort Tryon Park, and, walking on the sidewalk bordering its east side, reached its northern edge by the time track #4 on the album began to play. This corner of the park boasts a gentle grassy slope, and I cringed a little at how many people were there, taking advantage of the beautiful Sunday we were having.
“Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow
Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here”
Deep breath. Hope for the best. Walk on.
“You can go your own way
You can call it another lonely day”
Most New Yorkers consider Dyckman Street to be the official southern border of Inwood, and I will admit the moment I reached the intersection of Broadway and Dyckman, it really felt like I had arrived somewhere new. Suddenly I was in a European city- cafes glittered, tulips blushed, cyclists zoomed. The sudden vibe shift was so stark that I put a hand on my pocket to make sure I had my passport.
I even saw a beautiful old woman sitting at her screen door, wearing red, her long white hair flowing down to her shoulders as she stared out at her little garden with stone saints. Super Euro aesthetic.
“and the songbirds keep singing/like they know the score”
When I reached Payson Avenue, close to my destination of the park, I stumbled upon a very unexpected sight- my old baker’s rack. A couple loading up a small u-haul were working together to maneuver the beautiful, worn piece of furniture up into it. It was the exact kind of baker’s rack I had had to put out on the street when I moved into my current apartment due to lack of space. Arced black finish steel tubing, a grid of metal for holding hooks and baskets, a wooden shelf, and metal baskets underneath. It was quintessential late-20’s Kyra. I still miss it.
I couldn’t just walk away without asking about it, so I turned and talked loudly and awkwardly at them through my mask. And turns out? They found it on the street!
There’s no I’ll ever know if it was really and truly my baker’s rack but it was definitely my baker’s rack. ❤
Rumours didn’t get me all the way to the park because of my conversation with the couple. Didn’t even notice it had ended until a block or two later- the new audio mix of the city had entranced me once again. My favorite moment was experiencing the mix of someone practicing piano mingled with birds and a yappy dog.
Inwood Hill Park was the first uptown park I ever visited when I moved to New York 11 years ago. A friend invited me up for a hike, and I remember being blown away by how easy it was to forget that I was still technically inside of a city. On an island full of concrete, deprived of so much of its natural topography, with even its most famous park (Central) one that was constructed despite the land instead of with it, you just know when you enter Inwood Hill Park that it is something different. Something ancient. It is the last remaining old growth forest on Manhattan Island- largely untouched and unlandscaped.
I entered the park about midday on that Sunday. Very few people were walking my part of the trails, so on the occasions where I found myself alone for a stretch, I pulled down my mask and inhaled.
Who knew an indoor kid like me could miss the smell of trees so much?
Apparently the underlying theme of Inwood for the past two centuries has been “community action to protect what’s there”. A big reason why we have Inwood Hill Park today is due to a group of people in the early 1900s who, concerned by the razing of streets and overdevelopment of the island farther south, decided to work to protect this uptown land. Four men in particular, Reginald Pelham Bolton, William L. Calver, Alanson Skinner, and Amos Oneroad, led independent archaeological excavations in the area, finding artifacts of both Indigenous dwellings and Revolutionary War camps. The Lenape people lived in this area for thousands of years before European settlers arrived, and the archaeologists found many remnants of their time here, including shells, beads, and dug-outs for refuse.
These findings, along with other historical contexts and stunning views of the area, convinced the city to keep Inwood Hill undeveloped, and they gradually bought the land outright from private estate owners throughout the first half of the 1900s. Ironically, the original dwellers (the Lenape) had already been forced out over a century before, and in the 1930s infamous city official Robert Moses kicked out all of the remaining squatters there- a reminder that, even when things are protected, rich white people will still find a way to displace somebody.
I hadn’t meant to walk an entire trail that day, but the woods and the birds and the wet sweet smells of the forest sucked me in and wouldn’t let me go until I had seen as much of it as my out-of-shape butt could see.
I don’t find myself on many forest trails in my day to day life, so I still delight in things that some more seasoned hikers might wave away as old hat, like big rocks being used as landmarks, and color-coded trail marks painted on the trees.
I still kept taking the wrong trail by accident because I am an Indoor Kid. One of my wrong turns turned into a wonderful moment though, when I was able to watch a mother racoon rescue one of her cubs, who had fallen out of their tree den. It was practically a scene from Bambi.
One of the reasons I was trying (and failing) to follow a certain trail was because I was trying (and failing) to catch a view of the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, which is one of the cool things you’re supposed to be able to see from certain parts of the park.
Fun fact: most people think that Manhattan is just the island, but there is one little curve of land attached to the Bronx that is technically a part of our borough. Why? Because it used to be attached to Manhattan instead of the Bronx!
In the late 1800s, construction began on the Harlem River Canal, which took the original path of the Spuyten Deuyvil Creek, a narrow and difficult passage for large ships, and moved it farther south, widened it, and straightened it out. This new strait that connected the Hudson and Harlem Rivers effectively cut the area of Marble Hill off of the island, making it its own mini-island for almost 20 years. They got around to filling in the old creek bed in 1914, using rocks dug up while forming the foundation of Grand Central Terminal, and Marble Hill officially became one of the most confusing pieces of land in New York City.
Here’s a handy visual aid to explain what they did that I found over on Hidden Waters Blog.
And of course I found that big dumb rock.
I’d rather not talk about it. Instead, I encourage you to read this Smithsonian article, and to click around on The Lenape Center’s website.
As I left the park heading for home, I realized thatthe most elevated structure in this area is the Cloisters over in Fort Tryon Park
When I later made this observation while paying a socially distant visit to my dear friend and noted Inwood resident Robin Virginie, she told me that she likes to pretend it’s the town church that everyone goes to but that she herself never attends.
We talked about 43% louder than our usual speaking volumes, through our masks, 6 feet apart, in utter delight to see one another. “You’re the first in real life friend I’ve seen in months!” she sang. I wanted to wrap my arms around her, and squeeze out 60 days worth of hugs in one fell swoop. I did not, of course. Also, that move might have killed her.
There’s no way of knowing right now what sort of world we will find on the other side of this, but I know for me, I will never again take these moments with friends for granted. I will hold and touch and smile and look and laugh and stave off any complacency towards casual intimacy for as long as I possibly can.
Get ready for some potentially fatal hugs from yours truly.
❤
-ks-
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*Most of my information about the Manhattan Grid came from the online exhibition The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-Now. It’s an incredible resource, and I highly highly encourage you to explore the entire website.
