Inwood
Neighborhood Intelligence

Inwood sits at the northern tip of Manhattan, between Dyckman Street and Spuyten Duyvil Creek, with the Harlem River to the east and the wooded edge of Inwood Hill Park to the west. The area was home to the Lenape before European settlement, and Inwood Hill Park still holds the last natural forest on the island. Inwood stayed rural well into the twentieth century; apartment construction followed in the early 1900s and continued through the 1930s, producing many of the Art Deco buildings that still line Broadway and the avenues behind it as the large estates west of Broadway were sold off.

The housing is mostly mid-rise prewar apartment buildings, with older houses and a few remaining estate-era landmarks. The Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, a Dutch Colonial farmhouse dating from the 1780s, sits on Broadway at 204th Street, and the Seaman-Drake Arch marks the entrance to an old estate on the same avenue. Isham Park, also a former estate, and Sherman Creek Park on the Harlem River provide open space inside the official area, while Inwood Hill Park forms its western edge.