History & Culture
Depending on how your look at it, Inwood is both a beginning and a final frontier. The unspoiled wilds of Inwood Hill Park, the first sight greeting commuters crossing the Henry Hudson Bridge, hold the last undeveloped land on all of Manhattan. Its rugged hillsides were once a desirable summer sojourn for Gilded Age elites, a handful of whom erected grand mansions overlooking the river. All were lost to the ages, but you can still find Manhattan’s last remaining farmhouse, built by the Dyckman Family in 1785, along with a curious enclave of suburban single-family homes bound by the Park West-West 217th Street Historic District. The built-up section of Inwood today feels like most mid-rise neighborhoods in New York City, with a mix of ground-floor retail and apartments above. Marble Hill and University Heights, in the Bronx, are connected via bridge.