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Isham Park
40°52′11″N 73°55′09″W / 40.86972°N 73.91917°W
Isham Park is a 20-acre (81,000 m2) historic park located in Inwood, Manhattan, New York City. The park was created in large part through gifts to the city from the Isham family of land from the William Bradley Isham estate. It sits roughly between Broadway, Isham Street, Seaman Avenue, and West 214th and 215th Streets.
The park once extended to the Harlem River, but after the creation of Inwood Hill Park and the reconfiguration of area streets, the boundary became Seaman Avenue. The extent of the current park now equals that of the original Isham estate. The Isham mansion, which originally came with the park gift, was torn down in the 1940s due to its deteriorating condition.
Isham Park is noted at its southern end for some exposed marble outcroppings which date from the Cambrian period. This is a popular location for college geology classes to visit. There is a public garden in the northeastern corner. Much of the rest of the park has trees and brush growing in a rather wild manner, although the center of the park at the top of the hill is a grass lawn.
William Bradley Isham (pronounced EYE-sham), was a leather merchant whose factories and warehouses were located at 91 and 93 Gold Street and 61 Cliff Street, and who also became the vice-president and later a director of the Bank of the Metropolis, and the president of the Bond and Mortgage Guarantee Company. Isham was a successful man. He was a patron of the American Museum of Natural History, a member of the prestigious Down Town Association, the New-York Historical Society and the Chicago Historical Society, the Metropolitan Club and the Riding Club, the National Academy of Design, the New England Club, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Botanical Garden. He lived at 5 East 61st Street near Fifth Avenue.
In 1862, Isham rented as a summer residence a house and property in uptown Manhattan, in the neighborhood now known as Inwood, from the estate of Dr. Floyd T. Ferris, a well-known physician who had died seven years earlier. The two-story house had been built in the 1850s and was later described as "...an interesting brick and frame building of peculiar shape, having a spacious central hall with a winding staircase and gallery from which the rooms extend in three wings...". With four wings laid out as a cross, with the entrance to the house in the central area, improved the light and ventilation available for each of the wings, and the house's placement on a hilltop in the middle of Manhattan Island, with views of both the Hudson River to the west and the Harlem River to the east insured that the estate would always be subject to cool breezes.
Two years after first renting it, Isham bought the property as his summer estate. It included 24 acres (9.7 ha) of land, the two-story house, a greenhouse, a gardener's cottage, a stable, and a cold spring, one of the few natural sources of fresh water in the area. James Reuel Smith said about the spring in 1898 that
it is at the foot of one of four little fruit trees, which, with two others a short distance away, are all that is left of what was perhaps long ago a flourishing orchard. The tree behind the spring looks like a peach tree. Buttercups grow around it. Wild birds sing in the four fruit trees and drink at the spring. Their piping song mingles with the whistling tugs on the Canal.
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Isham Park AI simulator
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Isham Park
40°52′11″N 73°55′09″W / 40.86972°N 73.91917°W
Isham Park is a 20-acre (81,000 m2) historic park located in Inwood, Manhattan, New York City. The park was created in large part through gifts to the city from the Isham family of land from the William Bradley Isham estate. It sits roughly between Broadway, Isham Street, Seaman Avenue, and West 214th and 215th Streets.
The park once extended to the Harlem River, but after the creation of Inwood Hill Park and the reconfiguration of area streets, the boundary became Seaman Avenue. The extent of the current park now equals that of the original Isham estate. The Isham mansion, which originally came with the park gift, was torn down in the 1940s due to its deteriorating condition.
Isham Park is noted at its southern end for some exposed marble outcroppings which date from the Cambrian period. This is a popular location for college geology classes to visit. There is a public garden in the northeastern corner. Much of the rest of the park has trees and brush growing in a rather wild manner, although the center of the park at the top of the hill is a grass lawn.
William Bradley Isham (pronounced EYE-sham), was a leather merchant whose factories and warehouses were located at 91 and 93 Gold Street and 61 Cliff Street, and who also became the vice-president and later a director of the Bank of the Metropolis, and the president of the Bond and Mortgage Guarantee Company. Isham was a successful man. He was a patron of the American Museum of Natural History, a member of the prestigious Down Town Association, the New-York Historical Society and the Chicago Historical Society, the Metropolitan Club and the Riding Club, the National Academy of Design, the New England Club, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Botanical Garden. He lived at 5 East 61st Street near Fifth Avenue.
In 1862, Isham rented as a summer residence a house and property in uptown Manhattan, in the neighborhood now known as Inwood, from the estate of Dr. Floyd T. Ferris, a well-known physician who had died seven years earlier. The two-story house had been built in the 1850s and was later described as "...an interesting brick and frame building of peculiar shape, having a spacious central hall with a winding staircase and gallery from which the rooms extend in three wings...". With four wings laid out as a cross, with the entrance to the house in the central area, improved the light and ventilation available for each of the wings, and the house's placement on a hilltop in the middle of Manhattan Island, with views of both the Hudson River to the west and the Harlem River to the east insured that the estate would always be subject to cool breezes.
Two years after first renting it, Isham bought the property as his summer estate. It included 24 acres (9.7 ha) of land, the two-story house, a greenhouse, a gardener's cottage, a stable, and a cold spring, one of the few natural sources of fresh water in the area. James Reuel Smith said about the spring in 1898 that
it is at the foot of one of four little fruit trees, which, with two others a short distance away, are all that is left of what was perhaps long ago a flourishing orchard. The tree behind the spring looks like a peach tree. Buttercups grow around it. Wild birds sing in the four fruit trees and drink at the spring. Their piping song mingles with the whistling tugs on the Canal.