ABOUT | African Burials in New York >> The City Expands >> A Community Reacts
HISTORY | History of Inwood >> Skeletons in Chains? >> March 1903 Excavations
TODAY | A Museum Gets Involved >> New Development Seeks Justice >> Get Involved

HISTORY OF INWOOD

New York City’s population expanded north, developing Manhattan Island as a functional grid throughout the 19th century. The last area developed, residing at the northernmost tip of Manhattan, is today’s Inwood. Stretching river to river north of Dyckman St. (the 200th street of the grid), the neighborhood of Inwood remains one of the hilliest and untouched neighborhoods, with Inwood Park on the westside taking over roughly half of the neighborhood’s area.

Inwood is home to a handful of Revolutionary War battles in the 1770s, vast farmland through the 1850s, and Indigenous Lenape tribes until the early 1920s. Late to urban development, Inwood and its bordering neighborhood Washington Heights were archaeological interest points at the turn of the 20th century for relic-hunters interested in procuring Revolutionary War and Lenape artifacts. Those amateur archaeologists have left extensive records of their excavations and findings, including the Inwood African Burial Ground.

The following maps provide a visual context of the neighborhood of Inwood. The detailed cartography portrays overlays of Manhattan’s terrain, the 1811 Commissioner’s Plan grid, and farmland plot lines.

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1836

The Upper Manhattan area at this time remained very rural. As depicted here, very few buildings are noted in today’s Inwood neighborhood. A handful of unnamed black squares representing dwellings are shown; one towards the northern tip is labeled as “Kingsbridge Hotel.” Fort Washington and Fort George are labeled, most likely ruins and crumbled walls left standing. Another remarkable designation is that of the “Norgle Burying Ground” (The Nagel surname is seen written various ways throughout historical documents).

1851

Upper Manhattan didn’t see much change since the previous map, fifteen years prior. Again, the Nagel Cemetery can be seen as well as other speckled properties. This map, however, displays the farmland borders, which shows just how expansive property ownership was in Inwood. These farms had various crops and animals, but also various fruit trees. The neighborhood, and even the Inwood African burial ground, was known for its cherry, pear, and apple orchards (Brown, 1919: 153). Kingsbridge Road is still the only main thoroughfare for travelers heading to and leaving New York City at this time.

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1870

By the late 1860s, Upper Manhattan began to see grid development north of 155th Street, where the original 1811 grid plan ended. On this 1870 map, the gridded streets are more clearly defined as well as the new bulkhead expected to build out the edges of the island. One part where this plan fails is the carving out and widening of the passage connecting Hudson and Harlem Rivers, abandoning the region of Marble Hill into today’s Bronx neighborhood and altering the tip of the island. Yet again, the Nagel Burial Ground is distinctly labeled.

1880

Here we now see the land filled in on Manhattan’s borders and development reaching the streets in the 180s in Washington Heights. Remnants of Fort Tryon and Fort George’s wall remain, while Fort Washington’s appears to be still standing. There are fewer buildings and points of interest labeled (such as the Nagel Cemetery), however there are much more detailed terrain levels and tree density. Because of the varying elevation in Inwood, the process of leveling is time consuming and expensive. The area in the northwest will eventually remain untouched and become Inwood Hill Park. The hill that the Inwood African burial ground sits on between 211th and 213th streets between Broadway and Tenth Avenue does not get left alone. This soil will eventually be extracted to fill the valleys to the east, revealing the burial ground to workmen and onlookers.

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INWOOD SEES DEVELOPMENT!

By the 1900s, the finite details of city blocks were set for all of Manhattan island. In Upper Manhattan, roads became more leveled to allow for a new type of transportation: motor vehicles. Roads were still dirt, but were carved out throughout almost all of Inwood. After the Inwood African burial ground was leveled for grading material, the city block it sat on did not see any development for decades.

According to the NYC Department of Records & Information Services, one of the earliest developments was that of P.S. 98 on the East end of the block in 1924 and a building on the South end built in the late 1930s. The auto shop that sits above the burial ground today was built in the 1980s. From current research, it is unknown what buildings, if any, existed between the 1940s and 1980s and what work may have been done on that land since the excavations in 1903.

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