History
Human activity has been present in Inwood Hill Park from prehistoric times. Through the 17th century, Native Americans known as the Lenape inhabited the area. There is evidence of a main encampment along the eastern edge of the park. The Lenape relied on both the Hudson and Harlem Rivers as sources for food. Artifacts and the remains of old campfires were found in Inwood's rock shelters, suggesting their use for shelter and temporary living quarters.
Legend has it that under a tulip tree in the park Peter Minuit, Director General of New Netherland, 'purchased' Manhattan from the a band of Native Americans in 1626 for the Dutch West India Company; the purchase price being a shipment of goods worth 60 guilders. The tree, the largest tulip on the island, survived for centuries until it was felled by a storm in the 1933. Until the 1950s the base of the tree under which this transaction allegedly took place was still to be seen, surrounded by a large iron fence, but as it rotted it was finally removed and a boulder (Shorakkopoch Rock) and plaque replaced it.
Fort Cockhill, one of many forts built in New York by the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, stood slightly north from the center of Inwood Hill Park. A small, five-sided earthen structure equipped with two cannons, it overlooked the mouth of Spuyten Duyvil Creek at its confluence with the Hudson River.
The park was home to country retreats for some of the wealthier families of the community and the rest of New York's social elite in the 19th century. One such notable who had a summer estate in Inwood was Isidor Straus, co-owner of the Macy's department store and a passenger on the ill-fated voyage of the RMS Titanic. The Lords of the Lord & Taylor department store chain owned two mansions built within the park. Both were destroyed by fire in the latter part of the 19th century.
An orphanage was located high on a bluff in what is now Inwood Hill Park in the nineteenth century. The site today includes a small paved area and park benches; no trace of the building remains. At least three freshwater springs arise in the park, one of which was used for drinking water by the workers who constructed the Henry Hudson Bridge.
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“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)