Firemen spraying an apartment building under construction on Seaman Avenue, Inwood; July 1929.

Here, in what would later become Inwood Hill Park, a large tulip tree grew 165 feet tall with a 20-foot circumference. The tulip tree stood in this spot for more than 200 years. It was a popular location for outings and picnics for the local community. The tree remained the same for two centuries as development and progress changed the nearby land and waterways. Despite many tree surgeries, repairs, and barriers, the nearly dead tree was finally felled by a storm in 1938. The large boulder that currently occupies this site, called Shorakkopoch Rock, includes a plaque that notes both the aforementioned botanical history as well as the site' earlier— if perhaps apocryphal— history. Namely, that in 1626 Peter Minuit purchased the island of Manhattan from the local tribe "for trinkets and bead then worth about 60 guilders" at this very spot.

"West 214th street, east from Seaman Avenue to Park Terrace West, showing this street being opened. Steps will be installed for pedestrian use only. Under construction at the left us the Isham Gardens Apartment House. Isham Park is on the right and the manor is atop the hill, 1924."

Museum of Indian Art and Library of the Dyckman Institute, 1935. In 1926 Inwood historian and local archeologist Reginald Pelham Bolton (under the auspices of the Dyckman Institute) opened a “The Indian Life Reservation” in Inwood Hill Park. The area was to be staffed with actual Native Americans to depict the lifestyle of the Lenape, the indigenous community that lived in Manhattan for the centuries prior to the arrival of Europeans. The "reservation" included the Native American staff (Cherokees, Mohawks and other tribe members) reenacting traditional life: making beads, pottery, and headdresses and performing ceremonial dances and competitions. Bolton had also been digging for artifacts in the park since the turn of the century and continued to do so during the years of his ill-conceived (though popular at the time) experiment. As a visitors center (remember this was a VERY different, less enlightened period) the Institute took over the 120-year-old cottage that sat next to the giant tulip tree that once graced this park. The structure also housed a "native" pottery studio The 20-acre reservation closed sometime in the 1930s, though Native American dances were still ongoing as late as 1938.

April — better known as the month of showers, Frederick Law Olmsted’s birthday, and Earth Day — has also been designated National Landscape Architect month. Aside from Olmsted, however, landscape architects continue to fly largely under the radar. A case in point: Clarke and Rapuano, a firm with enormous impact on New York City’s urban landscape, whose name is hardly known outside the profession.

William D. Hassler was a photographer working in New York in the early 1900s. He shot all around the city, but let's take a look at his images of his own life in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood.

William Bradley Isham, a prominent leather merchant who later worked in the banking industry, rented the land that is now Isham Park from the estate of Dr. Floyd T. Ferris in 1862 as a summer residence. Around 1864 Isham bought the property which had beautiful views of the Hudson River and the Harlem River as it was situated on a hilltop. Upon his death in 1909, parcels of the estate went to members of the Isham family. Starting in 1911 and roughly through 1922 various members gifted lots to the city to create and expand the park. The city also purchased lots throughout the area originally intended to be added to Isham park, but eventually, it was decided to add the extra lands to the newly created Inwood Hill Park and maintain the boundaries of the original Isham estates. Current day Isham Park is a 20-acre park bordered by Seaman Avenue, Isham Street, Broadway, and 214th and 215th Street. Originally the park extended out to the Harlem River but with the creation of Inwood Hill Park in 1926, the lands were reallocated. It is said that Peter Minuit purchased the island of Manhattan from the Lenape Native Americans in Inwood Hill Park. The site is currently marked by a boulder known as Shorakkopoch Rock. The area originally intended to be added to Isham park, but eventually, it was decided to add the extra lands to the newly created Inwood Hill Park and maintain the boundaries of the original Isham estates.

Isham Park Dedicated September 28, 1912 Isham Memorial, ca. late 1930s In 1911, land for the purpose of a public park was offered as a gift to the city by Julia Isham Taylor. Newspaper accounts reveal that Mrs. Taylor’s gift was intended to preserve green space and views from her father‘s land—a central, natural high point in the area. A bit later, Julia’s aunt Flora bought and added land to the gift “just to preserve the view” to the Hudson River. The gifts of land from the Isham family are detailed on a bronze plaque in the stone wall surrounding a circular paved terrace situated above Broadway between 214th and Isham Streets. Samuel Isham, Julia’s brother, is quoted in the New York Times on March 24, 1912: “My father . . . re-graded the whole hill from top to bottom, planted nearly all of the trees that now remain . . . .” So the enormous gingko tree still seen at the Broadway entrance just above Isham Street, the former entrance to the estate, may have been planted by William Isham in the late 1860s.

Cold Spring, Inwood, 1897. This is what photographer James Reuel Smith wrote about this water source: "The “Cold Spring” is some eight hundred feet south of the most northern point of Inwood, and on the east side of it. It is about one hundred feet from the shore of Spuyten Duyvil Creek, or as it has come to be known as in it’s enlarged and modernized condition, the Harlem Ship Canal. It is some six feet long east and west, and three feet wide north and south. Its water comes out from under a piece of rock, and a spring house is built over it of just the dimensions of the spring and some six feet high. This is the largest spring within the corporate limits of the City of New York. With the exception of the cottage of an old boatman, Abraham Seeley by name, there is not a house within a mile of this spring, but it pours forth as copious a stream as though its duties were to supply a city’s needs."