On a gray day in early spring, Indian Road Café looks drowsily out over the Spuyten Duyvil Creek to the cliffs and high-rise apartment buildings on the southern shore of the Bronx. The café is a cozy outpost on the northern edge of Inwood, on the northernmost tip of Mahattan Island. Inside, the little restaurant is buzzing with locals who have come for lunch and coffee—an operation carefully managed by Rachel Wilde and Jason Minter.
Rachel Wilde, the manager of Indian Road Café, has lived in Inwood for seven years—in fact, just around the corner from the Indian Road Café. She followed a job offer to New York City when she was in her twenties, and her first experience living in the city was in a boarding house downtown. After she married, she and her husband began to look for an apartment: first they found a nice place in Murray Hill, but following the suggestion of one of her husband’s colleagues—her husband is an academic, a professor of classics—they turned their search to Inwood. Here they found an apartment for the same price as the one in Murray Hill, but much larger. They chose Inwood partly for the additional square feet, and partly because of Inwood’s plentiful green space. The neighborhood boasts impressive parks, including the 196-acre Inwood Hill Park, which is just across the street from Indian Road Café (Jackson).
Jason Minter, the owner of the Indian Road Café, describes Inwood Hill Park as “unusual”: it is enormous, has remarkable geography, and is associated with many legends. Inwood Hill Park is home to Manhattan Island’s last natural forest, and according to legend the sale of Manhattan Island from the Lenape Indians to the Dutch took place under the park’s giant tulip tree. The park is also home to Lenape rock shelters, extensive hiking trails, a bald eagle nursery, and New York City’s last remaining salt marsh (Jackson). East of Inwood Hill Park are the famous 215th Street steps, the historic Dyckman Farmhouse, as well as another, smaller, 20-acre park called Isham Park. Adjacent to Inwood Hill Park on the northeastern tip of the island is Columbia Univesity’s athletic complex and the Allen Pavilion of the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. These are the most significant institutions and landmarks of the neighborhood, which also includes an MTA subway yard and city sanitation facilities to the east (Jackson). The most distinctive physical feature of the neighborhood is its collection of beautiful, prewar art deco apartment buildings, the most striking of which can be found on Seaman Avenue. Due to its relatively late settlement in the early 20th century, Inwood developed the second largest collection of art deco buildings in the city, after the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.
Inwood’s parks help to foster a sense of community in the neighborhood. Rachel remarked that it is difficult to take the dog for a walk in the park without running into somebody you know. Jason explains that the neighborhood has a small-town feel, in that everybody knows everybody else’s business and newcomers are warmly welcomed. He calls Inwood “the first small town of the Hudson Valley,” and Rachel thinks of it as “the Mayberry of New York.”
The small-town feel of the neighborhood results in part from its small geographic size and small population: only 46,746 as of 2010 (NYC Census FactFinder).[1] The small-town feel also results from the fact that the neighborhood is highly residential, home to many families. According to Rachel, “the long-standing joke here is that when you move into the neighborhood, you either have to get a child or a dog—one or the other, or else they’ll kick you out!” Inwood also owes its residential nature to its R-7 zoning, which makes it difficult to open new businesses, restaurants, and clubs. As a result this neighborhood appeals less to young singles than to young married couples, who like Inwood because there they can start a family while still remaining in the city. Once the children reach school age, however, many families move out to areas with better schools. In her early years in Inwood, Rachel rarely saw any child older than three: “the kids hit five and then you’re gone.” However this trend has recently begun to change. A few years back a committee of families tackled the local school system and managed to improve public education sufficiently that many families now choose to stay in the neighborhood and raise their children here.
Many people settle in Inwood because they are priced out of neighborhoods like SoHo, especially academics, musicians—particularly jazz musicians—artists, actors, and young professionals (Jackson). Overall the people of Inwood value family, community, and quiet living. According to Rachel, “the neighborhood reflects their own cultural sensibility: even if you have money, you don’t flaunt it.” The exception, of course, is the Dominicans on Dyckman Street.
This brings us to Jason Minter’s story. Jason, now the owner of Indian Road Café, first moved to Inwood in 1991—specifically, to the basement of his girlfriend’s father’s brownstone. Soon the couple got their own apartment in the neighborhood. Jason’s girlfriend’s family was long established in Inwood: they belonged to the Dominican community.
Dominicans are the most recent wave of immigrants to arrive in Inwood. In earlier times, Inwood was home to many Irish. According to Nancy Beth Jackson of the New York Times, Inwood was “the unofficial capital of the Irish diaspora” (Jackson). Though baseball—a Dominican favorite—has long-replaced Gaelic football as the most popular game of the streets, traces of Inwood’s Irish past still remain, most notably in the Church of the Good Shepard, a Roman Catholic church on the corner of Broadway and Isham Street (Jackson). In recent decades the Church has started conducting masses in Spanish to accommodate the new Latin American immigrants. Associated with the Church is the Good Shepard parochial school, which provides the opportunity for a high-quality education in the neighborhood.
The population of Inwood is not exclusively Roman Catholic. Inwood has witnessed the establishment of many new churches, many of them protestant, which have become very active in the community. Only Jews in Inwood seem underserved, and to remedy this they have recently formed an organization called “Inwood Jews”[2] which advocates for more ethnic and religious resources such as kosher markets.
Much of Inwood’s population is foreign-born, and almost all of the foreign-born come from Latin America. Out of all the neighborhoods in Manhattan, Marble Hill-Inwood has the third-highest percentage of residents who are foreign-born—46%—after Chinatown (56.1%) and Washington Heights (49.2%) (The Newest New Yorkers 45). Out of the foreign-born population in Inwood, an overwhelming 69% are Dominican. This gives the neighborhood a heavy Dominican feel, as expressed by Dominican restaurants like Mamajuana on the corner of Seaman Avenue and Dyckman Street (The Newest New Yorkers 48). Marble Hill-Inwood is the third most popular neighborhood for Dominicans in New York City, after Washington Heights—the most popular—and Concourse-Concourse Village in the Bronx (The Newest New Yorkers 66). The remaining foreign-born population in Inwood comes from other parts of Latin America: 8.4% of the foreign-born are from Mexico, 2.6% are from Ecuador, 3.6% are from Cuba, and 1.9% are from Columbia (The Newest New Yorkers 49).
Now Dominicans are beginning to move across the Harlem River to the Western Bronx. According to the The Newest New Yorkers, “The western Bronx has shown the highest growth citywide in its Dominican immigrant population since 2000, whereas Upper Manhattan exhibited the greatest decline” (66). Though Inwood is not gentrifying, its rents are rising, which may be one factors that drives Dominicans to the more-affordable Bronx.
Despite this new trend, Inwood will likely remain a hub of Dominican cultural life for quite some time, particularly around Dyckman Street. At night Dyckman Street comes to life as one of the most exclusive Dominican nightclub scenes in the city. Dominicans from all over the city come to Dyckman Street to party, and it may cost them as much as one hundred dollars to walk in the door of some clubs. Needless to say, this high-end nightlife caters to the most affluent members of the Dominican community. The partying starts on the weekends around 11 p.m. Around 9 p.m., nail salons fill with dressed-up Dominican ladies in stiletto heels, many of whom start sharing drinks right in the salon. This is part of the Dominican party culture: a routine to get ready for a night out. Rachel knows about this premier nightlife strip from her staff, some of whom leave work at Indian Road Café at 11 p.m. to work a shift on Dyckman from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. Dyckman Street is an exception in the otherwise quiet, residential neighborhood. There is no nightlife in Inwood outside Dyckman, and those who are not Dominican choose to go downtown to have a good time.
How can one reconcile these two parts of Inwood, the quiet and the wild? The young professionals and new families, recent arrivals to the neighborhood, peacefully coexist with the Dominican immigrants already living there. There is neither conflict nor animosity between the two groups. It helps, of course, that the two are separated geographically: quiet neighborhoods lie in the north, while flashy Dyckman Street marks Inwood’s southern border. Another significant geographic division is Broadway, which splits the neighborhood diagonally into a west side and an east side. Parts east of Broadway are heavily Dominican, whereas parts west of Broadway are more ethnically mixed. But the real divide is economic rather than racial: west of Broadway the rents are higher by about 30 percent than on the east (Jackson).
Despite this geographic and economic divide, Inwood is a neighborhood where people of all economic and ethnic backgrounds comingle. Evidence of this can be found in both the staff and the clientele of Indian Road Café. As Jason put it, “its everything”: Mexicans, Peruvians, Dominicans, people from multicultural backgrounds, whites, African Americans, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and even an Irish bartender—though he comes straight from Ireland, not a product of the 19th-century Irish wave of immigration. Most of the staff lives within a few blocks of the café, and about 80 percent of the clientele is local. This makes Indian Road Café very representative of Inwood as a neighborhood which brings different types of people together into a tight community.
Indian Road Café is itself evidence of the close-knit community Inwood offers. In describing the café’s brand, Rachel says, “think local, small, community.” It is a place for people from the neighborhood to meet and talk, and it also offers an opportunity for parents to have an evening out while staying close enough to home. Indian Road Café holds events like the monthly Inwood History Night—themed discussions for locals to share personal stories and memories—and the weekly Pub Quiz. Rachel jokes that with all these gatherings the place is “half community center.”
Jason believes that the café was a “game-changer” for Inwood: it proved that cafés could be successful here, which led many new cafés to open in the neighborhood. This trend is a reflection of the changing population of Inwood as it becomes more attractive for urban professionals. The growth of restaurants and cafés has also caused a change in people’s habits, as residents of Inwood realize that they need not leave the neighborhood to find a good place to eat. But Jason is not worried about the competition, since Indian Road Café’s unique, community-centered feel is difficult to imitate.
Though Inwood is not particularly troubled with crime and poverty, it does face a few problems. First, since many of the buildings were built in the beginning of the century, quite a few are in need of repairs. Second, Inwood has very little shopping—not even a hardware store. As a result the neighborhood is not yet self-sufficient, since many residents must travel to buy basic necessities, from a screwdriver to a new pair of socks. Finally, Inwood’s residents were hit particularly hard by the recession, since their occupations—musicians, artists, actors, teachers, and young professionals—are particularly vulnerable to the effects of tough economic times. Fortunately, though, the future of the neighborhood is in good hands. Inwood has a very active community board and local Dominican-Americans are developing a significant presence in city politics (Jackson). Though Rachel and Jason are unaware of exactly what social or welfare services are located in Inwood, they say that there must be a soup kitchen or a shelter in the neighborhood, since the neighborhood farmer’s market and food coops sometimes bring extra food to Indian Road Café on days when soup kitchens would be closed.
Although Jason sees Inwood becoming more attractive to urban professionals, he does not foresee any dramatic transformation of the neighborhood in the coming years. He says that “it won’t be the next Williamsburg,” since gentrification is limited by how long it takes to get downtown. Transportation is one major reason why people who can afford higher rents do not find Inwood very attractive. The neighborhood is only served by the 1 train and last stop of the A train, which makes it difficult to go anywhere beyond the West Side.[3]
Jason says that “Inwood will always be the next new thing.” It has been touted as the next place that the gentrifiers will move into, but there seems little chance of gentrification happening anytime soon. Inwood remains a little oasis on the northernmost tip of Manhattan Island, a small town tucked into a corner of the big city, and a close community that embraces people of all ethnic and economic backgrounds. Fortunately it will likely stay that way far into the future.
[1] We must subtract from this the population of Marble Hill, which is grouped with Inwood in the census.
[2] For more information, see www.inwoodjews.org .
[3] Inwood is almost completely disconnected from the East Side of Manhattan—residents joke that it is easier to get to 17th Street than it is to get to East 145th Street. Though the green boro cabs have partly made up for the lack in transportation, Inwood still has none of the convenience of downtown Brooklyn.
Works Cited
Jackson, Nancy Beth. “If You’re Thinking of Living In/Inwood; Away From Manhattan Without Leaving.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 14 Dec. 2002. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.
United States. The City of New York. Department of City Planning. The Newest New Yorkers: Characteristics of the City’s Foreign-Born Population. By Arun Peter Lobo and Joseph J. Salvo. NYC Department of City Planning, Dec. 2013. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.
United States Census Bureau.“NYC Census FactFinder,” generated by Sasha Whittaker using NYC Census FactFinder. < http://maps.nyc.gov/census/> 28 Apr. 2014.
(All other information not from these sources came from a personal interview with Rachael Wilde and Jason Minter on April 29th, 2014.)
