 |
Current mood:  pure Category: Life
On my way to school, 5th grade, I walked alone down the winding hill and came upon a dead rooster just lying there on the empty sidewalk. Rumor had it that the bird was stuffed with pennies, evidence of Santeria, or maybe just a cock fight. Later that day I went with Patricia Dooley to the candy store on Broadway and 207th street to play pinball in the back of the store where a short guy in thick black glasses ran numbers and cursed at us fucking kids for making so much goddamn noise. Just another day in the neighborhood.
I grew up in Inwood, the neighbor hood that Jim Carroll was known to live in. Inwood is the northern tip of Manhattan, real colorful, working class, mixed, just like me. Irish and Latin, just like me. Up here, far from the sophistication of the Manhattan everyone knows, parents talked to their kids with heavy accents and crude expressions, told us to “cut the crap and shut up” between hard drags on Marlborough cigarettes while calling on Jesus Mary and Saint Joseph. In school, nuns slapped the back of our heads and told us to get up on our two fat feet. Most of the time we ran free in those beautiful streets of Upper Manhattan, beyond the upper east and upper west, past Spanish Harlem and Harlem, past Washington Heights and the Cloisters, the last stop on the A train, up where the 2 rivers met. Like where civilization is said to have begun in the fertile region between the Tigres and the Euphrates, Inwood is located at the tip of the island of Manhattan, where the Hudson and the Harlem rivers met.
Spuyten Duyvil is the creek that connects the Harlem and the Hudson rivers, which forms the northern boundary of Manhattan as we now know it. The name means “to spite the devil” but we liked to say “in spite of the devil” because the currents are terrible and people can easily drown there. The 225th street bridge, formally known as the Broadway Bridge, spans the creek, connecting Manhattan to the Bronx. The bridge has a narrow concrete path on the metal grill of it’s floor and you can peer down at the churning water some 50 ft below. Rumor has it that a clean up boat once found a giraffe in the waters, which must have fallen from a boat transporting the circus. I have recurring dreams of longing to go there to look down at the water and hopefully catch a glimpse of the huge black prehistoric fish that I imagined lived there.
Inwood is hilly and green. There are parks, forests, mountains and lots of blue sky. There is a saltwater inlet where swans come and you can find oysters as well. You can also spot owls, herons and eagles The businesses along Broadway are one story high and the apartments are no more than 6. There are no Starbucks or chains in the neighborhood still. It was in this area that Peter Styvesant bought the Island of Manhattan from the Indians for $24 in trinkets.
There is a historic home in Inwood called the Dyckman House. It is a preserved dutch colonial farmhouse built in 1784 that now serves as a museum. The building is an example of what the homes in the area used to look like. It sits there in the working class neighborhood on the corner of 204th street and Broadway, perched on a hilly area above street level. There are barracks behind the house that German troops used to live in during the Revolutionary war. Like on Ellis Island, you can feel the ghosts of a time long gone in the small rooms and garden.
I adore everything about this wonderful neighborhood. Just like any kid from a small town, growing up I couldn’t wait to get out. Now I love to go back and walk the streets I used to walk, see the people who still live there, hike, tour the Dyckman house, visit my old catholic school and stop in the Church of the Good Shepherd. Climb on the rocks I grew up climbing, and see all there is to see, notice what has changed and what has stayed the same.
I was a generation younger than Jim Carroll. He didn’t live there anymore by the time I knew who he was. Then one day I passed him on 207th street, recognized our celebrity from Inwood. He must have been visiting a friend or family. His pale skin and shiny red hair were literally glowing in the bright afternoon sunlight.
I highly recommend you take the train up sometime and get some local latin food and walk in the park, maybe even hike up to where you can see the Westside highway and the Hudson River below. So cool, so beautiful, Inwood, Manhattan, I love you.
Please visit me at my blog http://hollyramos.blogspot...com/
7:09 PM
Powered by  | | English | | Albanian | | Arabic | | Bulgarian | | Catalan | | Chinese | | Croatian | | Czech | | Danish | | Dutch | | Estonian | | Filipino | | Finnish | | French | | Galician | | German | | Greek | | Hebrew | | Hindi | | Hungarian | | Indonesian | | Italian | | Japanese | | Korean | | Latvian | | Lithuanian | | Maltese | | Norwegian | | Polish | | Portuguese | | Romanian | | Russian | | Serbian | | Slovak | | Slovenian | | Spanish | | Swedish | | Thai | | Turkish | | Ukrainian | | Vietnamese |
|