News from Audubon Park!
Recently, I updated the Audubon Park website, changing the name to Audubon Park Historic District. “The neighborhood Manhattan forgot” is not really applicable any longer unless I reworded it to something like “the neighborhood Manhattan forgot, but has been re-finding for quite some time now and that the Landmarks Preservation Commission has designated an official historic district, so we’re very much found,” which seems a bit unwieldy.
The homepage and index are reworked and over the next few months, I’ll be updating the walking tour itself, adding some information and correcting some errors that I have inadvertently perpetuated.
At the same time, I’ve created a complementary blog, Audubon Park Perspectives and now have five posts (listed below). The blog will replace this occasional newsletter, so have a look at it and if you’d like to receive email alerts when I post new topics or images, use the Subscribe box in the left bar, just below the Recent Posts list. You can unsubscribe at any time. (As in the past, I don’t sell or trade email addresses. )
Please contact me if you have any local news items you’d like me to post!
Matthew Spady [[email protected]]
Webmaster, www.AudubonParkNY.com
Visit Audubon Park: Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts and Letters
The American Academy of Arts and Letters will exhibit more than 120 paintings, photographs, sculptures, and works on paper by 37 contemporary artists in its galleries on historic Audubon Terrace, adjacent to the Audubon Park Historic District from Thursday, March 11 through Sunday, April 11, 2010. The Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, open to the public Thursdays through Sundays 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. (except Easter Sunday) will feature many works on view for the first time in New York.
Chilled to the Bone: Consequences of a Cold
For the last two weeks, a cold has been my faithful, constant companion, an amorous sort of cold that can’t bear the pain of parting, a clinging sort of cold that holds me in its tight embrace, stifled, smothered, barely able to breath. Colds make me gloomy. My thoughts turn morbid. In my gloomy, morbid state, I began reflect on some of Audubon Park’s earlier residents, men who took to their beds with mild colds and never got up again. Before the era of antibiotics, oxygen tents, and other mechanical aids for congested lungs, “you’ll catch your death in cold” was an all-too-accurate warning.
Audubon Park People: Eleanor McGrath Marra Vignola, The Last Surviving Resident
In 2009, Eleanor McGrath Marra Vignola, the last person known to have lived in the Audubon House in Audubon Park, died a month after her 93rd birthday, which she had celebrated with her family in the Bronx. She had lived in Audubon Park during the years of transition, her family moving to the Audubon House some time after enumeration for the 1910 census, the house then being was almost sixty years old and standing mere feet from the forty-foot-high retaining wall that supported the newly-constructed Riverside Drive.Surrounded by a few trees, remnants of the densely wooded vale Audubon had purchased in 1841, the house was still called Minnie’s Land and contrasted starkly with the new apartment buildings that had recently appeared along the Drive.
The Audubon Park Historic District: Lessons Learned Pursuing HD Status
Building on the success of the Audubon Park Historic District designation this past summer, Community Board 12’s Land Use Committee sponsored a community forum at its February 3 meeting, a first step in organizing interested Washington Heights residents into teams to explore and identify additional buildings (or groups of buildings) in Washington Heights for designation as New York Landmarks. Leading off the meeting, representatives from the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) were on hand to explain guidelines, offer suggestions, and answer questions. Then Wayne Benjamin, the Land Use Committee’s chair, a strong supporter of landmarking in Washington Heights, encouraged the several dozen people attending to voice their interests, sign up for development teams, and then go home and log onto CB12s website, where a projected master plan for historic landmarking in Washington Heights is available for review, a plan based on community input over the last couple of years.
Landmark for Sale
In 1922, when Charles Levy and Nathan Berler invested approximately $70,000 to build the double house at 809-811 Riverside Drive, could they have foreseen that in less than a century, both houses would be landmarks in the Audubon Park Historic District and the house Berler occupied would be on the market for well over a million dollars?