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.

Before Inwood and Washington Heights were densely populated and long before the Henry Hudson Bridge stretched across the Hudson, the Johnson Family built their ironworks in the Spuyten Duyvil. Having first worked upstate as part of another firm, Elias Johnson had made a fair amount of money creating munitions and provisions for the Mexican American War. Ready to strike out on his own, Johnson raised some capital and began building his factory in Spuyten Duyvil in 1853 with his son Isaac. Nor was Isaac a neophyte, he had graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that same year with a degree in Civil Engineering. It was Isaac Johnson who sited the mill, scouting locations throughout the city (including what is now Central Park.) Eying the peninsula jutting out from Spuyten Duvel, Johnson decided to put the foundry there with the land being shared by a rolling mill. The proximity to the railroads and New York's waterways made the plant quickly prosperous. Soon it was pushing out ironwork for all manner of commercial and home applications. The Johnsons soon were able to afford fancy homes, expensive lifestyles, and trips to exotic locales. However, their prosperity was only beginning. During the civil war, the Johnsons built prototypes of a cannon for the Union, guaranteeing their quality. Its success made the Johnson Foundry an important munitions supplier, a role the foundry would continue in through World War I. It would also branch out into steel production as well as automobile mechanics (dominating the automobile parts industry in its nascent stages.) As the prospects of the foundry grew so did the number of their employees, starting in the low hundreds to over sixteen hundred employees at the time of its closing. The Johnsons, a fairly religious family, were said to be fairly interested in the well being and health of their workers and built a number of reading rooms, chapels, and accommodations for their workers. The end would come, not from depression or disaster, but the New York Legislature. In 1919, it was decided that the ship canal would be straightened to make it more navigable. Peninsulas like the one that the Johnson Foundry were situated on were to be blasted away and dredged. It would take four more years, but the Johnson foundry would be closed and demolished.

Before Inwood and Washington Heights were densely populated and long before the Henry Hudson Bridge stretched across the Hudson, the Johnson Family built their ironworks in the Spuyten Duyvil.

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."