One of the reasons we added time in New York to our trip was to explore some of the places that the Bowery Boys talk about in their podcast. Today, we followed their footsteps (well, mostly) from their podcast about Inwood and Marble Hill at the north end of Manhattan, beginning with a long ride on the A train to 207th Street Station – we had the car to ourselves for the last few minutes of the ride.
We emerged onto 207th Street and strolled north a couple of blocks until we entered Inwood Hill Park, the northernmost park in Manhattan, home of the last natural forest and last salt marsh on the island.
We followed along with the podcast and visited the Indian Caves as well as the rock which claims to be the site of the “sale” of the island to Peter Minuit (it wasn’t the real site, if there was one).
We strolled along the Spuyten Duyvil creek, which was having a quiet morning.
One of the local experts who was interviewed on the podcast gives presentations at Inwood Farm restaurant, so we decided to go there for lunch. Diane had a healthy meal, but I enjoyed a $23 Burger and Beer lunch, a price which would be hard to match at home, much less elsewhere in Manhattan!
The restaurant has various community events, including a recent auction for breast cancer awareness.
The next stop in the podcast was Isham Park, which had been an estate in the 19th Century. It was donated to the city to be a park; the main residence was supposed to be a history museum, but Robert Moses had it destroyed instead.
The entrance to the park was at milepost 12 on the Albany Post Road; the marker is somewhat the worse for time, but it’s still there.
We stopped by the largest Irish Catholic church in the area, the Church of the Good Shepherd and looked at the outside of the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, which was closed for the day.
Then it was off to Fort Tryon Park and The Cloisters, where we spent the rest of the afternoon. The Cloisters is dedicated to medieval art, and the park is just very pretty.
We left the park about 5pm and headed back to Midtown for an early dinner at The Casual Greek. We’d tried to go there the past two nights, but it’s a 15-minute walk from our hotel, and we got distracted by other restaurants both times. This time, we got all the way there and had a very pleasant dinner indeed.
We walked back to our hotel by way of 42nd Street so we could pay our respects to the Daily News and Commodore Vanderbilt before calling it a night.
