Audubon Park's journey from farmland to cityscape
The study of Audubon Park's origins, maturation, and disappearance is at
root the study of a rural society evolving into an urban community, an
examination of the relationship between people and the land they
inhabit. When John James Audubon bought fourteen acres of northern
Manhattan farmland in 1841, he set in motion a chain of events that
moved forward inexorably to the streetscape that emerged seven decades
later. The story of how that happened makes up the pages of The
Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who
Shaped It.
This fully illustrated history peels back the many layers of a rural
society evolving into an urban community, enlivened by the people who
propelled it forward: property owners, tenants, laborers, and servants.
The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot tells the intricate tale of how
individual choices in the face of family dysfunction, economic crises,
technological developments, and the myriad daily occurrences that elicit
personal reflection and change of course pushed Audubon Park forward to
the cityscape that distinguishes the neighborhood today.
A longtime evangelist for Manhattan's Audubon Park neighborhood, author
Matthew Spady delves deep into the lives of the two families most
responsible over time for the anomalous arrangement of today's
streetscape: the Audubons and the Grinnells. Buoyed by his extensive
research, Spady reveals the darker truth behind John James Audubon
(1785-1851), a towering patriarch who consumed the lives of his family
members in pursuit of his own goals. He then narrates how fifty years
after Audubon's death, George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938) and his siblings
found themselves the owners of extensive property that was not yielding
sufficient income to pay taxes, insurance, and maintenance. Like the
Audubons, they planned an exit strategy for controlled change that would
have an unexpected ending.
Beginning with the Audubons' return to America in 1839, The
Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot follows the many twists and turns of
the area's path from forest to city, ending in the twenty-first century
with the Audubon name re-purposed in today's historic district, a
multiethnic, multi-racial urban neighborhood far removed from the
homogeneous, Eurocentric Audubon Park suburb.
