Inwood and Fort Tryon Park: Manhattan's Northern Secret

Inwood is Manhattan's northernmost neighbourhood and one of its last genuinely affordable communities — a Dominican-American and increasingly diverse enclave perched above the deep gorge of the Harlem River Ship Canal and defined by the rocky outcrops of Manhattan schist that give the neighbourhood its dramatic topography. Fort Tryon Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and donated to the city by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1935, occupies the highest ground at the northern tip of the island, its bluffs offering some of the most dramatic views in New York — the Hudson River, the Palisades of New Jersey, and the George Washington Bridge visible from lookout points that feel more like upstate New York than the city below.

The Cloisters museum and gardens, perched at the highest point of Fort Tryon Park, is the branch of the Metropolitan Museum devoted to medieval European art and architecture — actual medieval monastery cloisters, chapels, and garden elements reassembled from materials brought from Spain, France, and the Netherlands create an extraordinarily convincing medieval atmosphere entirely removed from the surrounding city. The Unicorn Tapestries (seven masterworks of Flemish weaving from around 1500) and the Merode Altarpiece are among the most extraordinary objects in any New York museum.

Inwood Hill Park adjacent to Fort Tryon contains the only remaining natural forest in Manhattan — a grove of ancient tulip trees growing from the same rocky schist outcrops where the Lenape people inhabited the island long before European settlement. The farmer's market on Sherman Avenue on Saturdays and the Dominican restaurants along Dyckman Street (Inwood's commercial heart) offer a grounded sense of the neighbourhood's everyday life below the parks. The A train from Midtown takes approximately 35 minutes to Inwood-207th Street — one of the great subway journeys in the city for the views it offers of the Hudson Valley approaching from the south.