The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It

The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It
By Matthew Spady
Fordham University Press, 2020
320 pages

In northern Manhattan in 1841, the naturalist John James Audubon bought 14 acres of farmland on the banks of the Hudson River and built his family a home far from the crowded downtown streets. Audubon’s country homestead is long gone, but his story launches Matthew Spady’s The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It . The book traces the complex path by which woodlands became a multi-ethnic big-city neighborhood. Framing his narrative in the lives of two families — the Audubons and the Grinnells — Spady tells how family dysfunctions, economic crises, and technological change created a Manhattan neighborhood that no one could have predicted at its birth.