George Washington High School, detail, main portico entrance, 1925. The building at 549 Audubon Avenue was originally constructed as an annex to Morris High School in the Bronx in 1919. George Washington High School, which had been established in 1919 as well, in a different location, moved into this building in 1925. During the Great Depression a WPA mural called 'The Evolution of Music' was painted by Lucienne Bloch, an apprentice of Diego Rivera. In 1999 George Washington High School was closed and divided into four smaller schools. Famous alumni of the school include Henry Kissinger, Harry Belafonte, and Alan Greenspan.

Inwood is located at the top of Manhattan Island, at the point where the Hudson and Harlem Rivers meet at the Spuyten Duyvil. It begins as a valley to the south, roughly at Dyckman Street and Riverside Drive along the base of the Fort Tryon Park hill. The area is historically, architecturally and environmentally unique—almost half of the land is public park space that preserves the natural terrain and geological features of the island, as opposed to the designed landscapes of many parks in New York City. Inwood is distinctive in that its pattern of development and architecture was created in relation to the original landscape of Manhattan Island. In 1906, the extension of the IRT transit lines to Dyckman Street, where the first mass-transit station in the area opened, resulted in the rapid development of six- and seven-story apartment houses on land purchased from existing farms and private estates.Working-class immigrants of varied cultural origins, seeking better living conditions than those of cramped tenements downtown, moved to Inwood to reside in new, spacious and more affordable apartments in buildings designed in the Neo-Classical, Italianate and Tudor Revival styles. As the pace of development continued, steps were taken to create city parkland that would preserve the natural beauty of the landscape and provide open space for new residents. In 1911, Julia Isham Taylor donated land from her family’s estate to create Isham Park. Spurred by her gift in 1916, the city finalized the purchase of adjacent land to the west for Inwood Hill Park. New apartment houses were designed, named and advertised in reference to the new parks. Around the time of the construction of the IND transit lines along Broadway in Inwood during the 1920s, a group of distinctive Art Deco style apartments were built in the blocks around that historic transportation corridor. Today, Inwood remains characterized by early-20th-century apartment residences built in relation to the preserved landscape of its public parks to the west and south. An industrial area, serving the transportation, sanitation and utility infrastructure of New York City, occupies a large portion of its eastern edge. Four historic bridges span the rivers along the surrounding waterfront. And, although resident populations have often changed in Inwood, from migrating Native Americans to the immigrant populations of the 20th and 21st centuries, the built environment has changed little since the period of rapid development after the turn of the 20th century, yielding surprisingly rich architectural discoveries.

Fort George Amusement Park Over a century ago on the northernmost tip of Manhattan in Fort George, on the same spot where General Washington fought the British, there stood a fantastic amusement park complete with roller coasters, Ferris wheels, a skating rink, as well as fortune tellers, music halls, casinos, and hotels. The Fort George Amusement Park was located in what is now Highbridge Park, on Amsterdam Avenue between 190th and 192nd Streets. In 1895, the park was built at the end of the Third Avenue Trolley line in order to draw Manhattan residents up to the breezy riverside neighborhood for summer recreation. Around this time, it was popular for trolley companies to develop “trolley parks,” a precursor to amusement parks, at the end of their lines in order to give people a reason to use their services on weekends. Other examples of this include Luna Park and Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn. In 1905, Joseph Schenck and his brother Nicholas, who immigrated from Russia and settled in New York in 1893, visited the then small park and realized the amazing opportunity for development. They opened a saloon called “The Old Barrel” and partnered with Marcus Loew, a successful businessman who owned arcades and theaters. Loew later went on to form Loew's Theatres and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio. In 1906, the Schenck brothers built a new addition to the Fort George Amusement Park known as Paradise Park, which had an entrance fee of 10 cents at that time. While the park prospered and was a popular destination for years, by 1910 local residents began to petition for it to close. The initial benefits to the local economy began to fade and the neighborhood became plagued by public drunkenness, noise, crime, and racial tensions. Local residents began to unify and pressure the authorities to condemn the park and surrounding saloons for fire code violations and safety hazards. In December of 1911, an arsonist set fire to Paradise Park, but damages were repaired and it opened again in 1912. However, on June 9, 1913, another suspicious fire raged through the park causing over $100,000 worth of damages. The fire was so huge that some reports claimed that the flames could be seen as far south as 42nd Street. After the devastating fire, community groups such as the Public Recreation Commission and the Parks and Playground Association moved to reclaim the area and bring the land under the jurisdiction of the city. Activist Lillian Wald led the charge as the acting president for the Parks and Playground Association. The property where the Fort George Amusement Park once stood was eventually condemned and the Parks Department officially acquired it and incorporated it in to Highbridge Park.

George Washington High School, Manhattan Founded in 1917, George Washington High School moved to its current location in the Fort George section of Washington Heights in 1925. The Neo-Classical brick and limestone building features classical architectural elements including Palladian windows, Ionic columns, a roof balustrade and a central tower. Notable alumni include former Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize recipient (1973) Henry Kissinger and former Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan.

View of the Harlem River, north from 201st Street, 1914. Shot from the upper floors of the Sherman Creek Generating Station, a coal power plant completed in 1913, Irving Underhill’s view captures three notable landmarks: At left, twin smokestacks rise from the Kingsbridge Power House, the massive coal-fired generating station — then claimed to be the world’s largest — that supplied power for Manhattan’s trolley network. The the left of the Power House is the Third Avenue Railway Company’s car barn. At center right, is the University Heights Bridge, previously known as the Fordham Bridge. At far right, rising on a Bronx bluff is the University Heights campus of New York University.

Jewish Memorial Hospital, 1942. Constructed in the mid 1930s with funds from the Public Works Administration, this Art Deco hospital building commemorated the Jewish veterans of World War I. In the early 1970s the hospital made plans for an additional ten-story building. The new structure was never begun because the hospital entered bankruptcy proceedings in 1977. The hospital finally closed in 1983 and the building was demolished.

Fort George Amusement Park , ca. 1907. Fort George Amusement Park was located in what is now the northernmost end of Highbridge Park between 190th and 192nd Streets and Amsterdam Avenue, at the spot that was historically notable for being the location George Washington defended a British assault after the Battle of Brooklyn. The amusement park, called Harlem's Coney Island, offered two Ferris wheels, three roller coasters, nine saloons, a pony track, hotels, a casino, shooting galleries, a tunnel boat ride, and two music halls. Easily accessible at the end of the Third Avenue Trolley line, the park opened in 1895. Much like its south Brooklyn counterpart, the amusements quickly garnered a reputation as a loud place filled with drunken visitors and unchecked crime. The park suffered two, likely purpose-set, fires in 1911 and 1913 and closed for good after the second one.

New York City covers a region of hills, rivers, and valleys making planning of subway routes complicated depending on location as routes had to rise and ascend gradually. In Northern Manhattan the topographical elevations were much higher than low lying neighborhood counterparts. The construction and design of the Dyckman Street Station as an embankment elevated station was for this sole reason. During the time of this construction image of the incomplete station the area was still underdeveloped in many parts. With the opening of new subway stations and greater transit options, the neighborhood grew vastly. The Dyckman Street Station opened March 12, 1906. In the background of the image you can make out the Kingsbridge Power Plant which provided the electricity to run the trolleys of the Third Avenue Railway Company

Construction of the Jewish Memorial Hospital, 1934.

Sherman Creek power station, 1916. Opened in 1914, this eight-story, 62,000 square-foot, coal-burning power station was said to be the largest and most modern plant of its kind in the world. The dedication ceremony took place on a cold day in January, but more than 1000 people attended. (After the guided tours of the facility, the guests were served a lovely lunch catered by Delmonico’s.) At the cost of six million dollars, the facility took two years to build. It was designed to deliver alternating current exclusively and used three massive 22,500 horsepower Westinghouse Parsons double flow turbines. An illustration of the giant plant was used in advertisements starting in 1920, paid for by the United Electric Lights & Power Company, to convince those not yet on the electrical grid that the time to join was now. Despite all the modern technologies and providing a needed utility, the giant, noisy plant had its critics from the beginning. Not long after opening neighbors complained about the noises of the vented air and a sound dampening infrastructure was installed. Landowners on the Sherman Creek whose properties were being flooded with superheated water from the plant sued United Electric and won. By the 1960s communities wanted the coal burning polluters out of their neighborhoods. By then the plant was Consolidated Edison, and in 1966 the city closed the facility citing air pollution. It went offline completely in 1970. Plans for the non-functioning plant included razing it for highrise housing or an affordable housing adaptive reuse scheme. None came to be, and the plant was finally demolished in 1997 and replaced with a smaller substation.

George Washington Educational Complex ca. 1925 George Washington High School, home to such alumni as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, actor and singer Harry Belafonte, and baseball star Manny Ramirez, came into existence on February 2, 1917. The high school’s current structure was completed in 1925. Within five years the student body of GWHS had grown to six thousand students, and it was one of the top schools in the city. The demographics of the school began to shift dramatically during the 1960s, along with those of the neighborhood. Over the course of the decade the graduating classes of the high school went from 18% to 70% minority students. In 1964 black and Puerto Rican students boycotted schools that they felt did not employ enough black and Latino faculty members nor place enough emphasis on black and Latino history. In 1983, according to The New York Times, GWHS’ students were 70 percent Spanish speaking, with 90 percent of the Spanish speaking population of Dominican origin. By the late 1980s the school was overcrowded and had fallen into disrepair, with dropout rates well above city averages. At the end of the 1990s, the school was divided into four smaller high schools and renamed George Washington Educational Campus, with the hope of paving a road back to the schools’ former prestige

George Washington High School, 1926.

Wood-frame two story building with candy shop storefront, 1932. Despite some drastic (and unfortunate) alterations and facade coverings, this small wood-frame structure still stands. The wooden diamond-shaped details at the roofline have survived, as well as the unusual second story side porch.