Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Audubon Park’s journey from farmland to cityscape
The study of Audubon Park’s origins, maturation, and disappearance is at root the study of a rural society evolving into an urban community, an examination of the relationship between people and the land they inhabit. When John James Audubon bought fourteen acres of northern Manhattan farmland in 1841, he set in motion a chain of events that moved forward inexorably to the streetscape that emerged seven decades later. The story of how that happened makes up the pages of The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It.
This fully illustrated history peels back the many layers of a rural society evolving into an urban community, enlivened by the people who propelled it forward: property owners, tenants, laborers, and servants. The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot tells the intricate tale of how individual choices in the face of family dysfunction, economic crises, technological developments, and the myriad daily occurrences that elicit personal reflection and change of course pushed Audubon Park forward to the cityscape that distinguishes the neighborhood today.
A longtime evangelist for Manhattan’s Audubon Park neighborhood, author Matthew Spady delves deep into the lives of the two families most responsible over time for the anomalous arrangement of today’s streetscape: the Audubons and the Grinnells. Buoyed by his extensive research, Spady reveals the darker truth behind John James Audubon (1785–1851), a towering patriarch who consumed the lives of his family members in pursuit of his own goals. He then narrates how fifty years after Audubon’s death, George Bird Grinnell (1849–1938) and his siblings found themselves the owners of extensive property that was not yielding sufficient income to pay taxes, insurance, and maintenance. Like the Audubons, they planned an exit strategy for controlled change that would have an unexpected ending.
Beginning with the Audubons’ return to America in 1839, The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot follows the many twists and turns of the area’s path from forest to city, ending in the twenty-first century with the Audubon name re-purposed in today’s historic district, a multiethnic, multi-racial urban neighborhood far removed from the homogeneous, Eurocentric Audubon Park suburb.
To restore the resonant history of a New York City urban legend, Matthew Spady peels back the layers of history in a labyrinthine odyssey: from the Eden-like Minnie’s Land property of rock star artist-naturalist John James Audubon (1841) to the Upper West Side urban suburb of the Audubon Park Historic District (2009). Told by its resident keeper of the flame and founding director of the Audubon Park Alliance, this well-documented saga of demographics chronicles a dazzling cast of characters and a plot fraught with idealism, speculation, and expansion, as well as religious, political, and real estate machinations. In its pages the three L’s—location, location, and location—are replaced with the three A’s— affordability, access to nature outside the city center, and advantageous transportation.---Roberta J.M. Olson, Ph.D., Curator of Drawings, New-York Historical Society Museum and Library, Professor Emerita of Art History, Wheaton College, Norton, MA
An illuminating treat! Matthew Spady introduces a remarkable old New York enclave that once flourished beyond Manhattanville in Upper Manhattan, personifying a suburban allure that shaped the breadth of the burgeoning city. A work rich in vivid historical detail and anecdotal observation as it retraces the neighborhood’s fascinating arc from remote woodland estate to the enduring Beaux Arts streetscape one still visits today.---Eric K. Washington, author of Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem
Matthew Spady's deeply researched and well-written history of the origins and growth of what came to be known as Audubon Park sets a very high bar for historians and scholars. While it is a history of the place in northern Manhattan, Spady's work also comprises the first full account of the extended family of John James Audubon, whose lives were largely consumed by the work of their famous patriarch, and the first detailed account of how George Bird Grinnell, life-long friend of Audubon's wife, Lucy, influenced the later development of the property on which Audubon built his first and only family home overlooking the Hudson River in 1842. One of Mr. Spady's accomplishments as a writer is maintaining a neutral tone while developing his story that could easily lead one to quiet lamentation over the environmental costs of the decades of development. One of the great satisfactions readers of this work will enjoy is that the art of drawing insightful, helpful, and fair inferences from information others might overlook is apparent throughout.---Daniel Patterson, Emeritus Professor of English, Central Michigan University
Introduction
A Word About Names
Chapter 1
Triumph and Tribulation on White Street
Chapter 2
The Land Before It Was Minnie’s
Chapter 3
Arcadia Found . . .
Chapter 4
. . . and Too Quickly Lost
Chapter 5
Audubon Park Begins to Bloom
Chapter 6
Fruit Basket Turnover
Chapter 7
Audubon Park’s New Power Brokers
Chapter 8
The Hemlocks
Chapter 9
Three Widows, Three Households
Chapter 10
Reconstructing the Park
Chapter 11
A Gilded Lily
Chapter 12
Panic
Chapter 13
Halcyon Days
Chapter 14
Waning Days of Summer
Chapter 15
Exit Strategy
Chapter 16
Partition Suit
Chapter 17
Clinging to the Past . . .
Chapter 18
. . . and Facing the Future
Chapter 19
Rapid Transit, Rapid Transformation
Chapter 20
When the Bloom Faded
Postscript
Bibliography
Acknowledgements