Looking for Some Peace and Quiet? Try West 96th Street

By Yvonne Vávra

I went to West 96th Street to find some calm. There’s a green stretch and a winding path, a little brook babbling its way toward the Hudson. A woman in a long skirt, with a boy and a dog in tow, is about to cross what can only generously be called a bridge. She may want to reconsider. And that dog might actually be a goat. Honestly, they could all just jump to the other side and be safer for it.

This is not today’s 96th Street, oh no. On today’s 96th Street, there’s a Mobil gas station to my right and a large construction site to my left, and I’ve missed my chance to cross at the lights on West End Avenue. Cars rush onto the Henry Hudson Parkway from city traffic, while others suddenly appear off it from behind a bend I can’t see past. So I’m stuck here for a while, on this in-between block, where the charming Upper West Side gives way to whatever the highway is roaring about. Plenty of time to imagine the oasis I came here for, inspired by a painting by William Rickarby Miller from 1869.

Miller’s little brook was no pipe dream. Old maps show that this stretch of 96th Street was indeed once a stream. They also show that the Hudson shoreline here was not always as straight as it is today. There was a sizable indentation that gave the village of Strycker’s Bay its name—which is also the title of Miller’s painting.

The land was owned by the Strycker family, who had already acquired property on the island by the mid-17th century. In “Hidden Waters of New York City”, Sergey Kadinsky writes that the first Strycker family member arrived from the Dutch city of Haarlem, near Amsterdam, in 1640, and built a life farming the land and trading furs with the Lenape. And because any mention of the Lenape sends me down a research rabbit hole, I now know that our little loudmouthed 96th Street was once—long before the city became the city—a rather rare and special place.

Back then, our part of the island was far from the prime real estate it is today. The Native Americans of Mannahatta did not occupy much of the island’s middle section, especially on the west side, likely because of its rugged terrain. In his 1922 book, “Indian Paths in the Great Metropolis”, Reginald Pelham Bolton writes: “It was rocky throughout, with a scanty deposit of soil, the hollows insufficiently drained, and therefore boggy.” We’ve come a long way, huh? Bolton goes on: “But the main objection, from an Indian point of view, lay in the exposure of the west side of the island to the bitter wintry winds.”  Now that, I can relate to.

However, there was at least one favorable spot in this otherwise rough terrain: Strycker’s Bay with its freshwater spring—our little 96th Street brook. Bolton notes that oyster shell middens have been discovered here, clear evidence of Native American habitation.

The 96th Street stream was by no means the only one. The island was once overflowing with them. In what is now the Upper West Side, Milkman Spring ran along Broadway at West 61st and 62nd streets; Saw Kill flowed from around West 85th Street south along Columbus through the site of the American Museum of Natural History; and Montayne’s Rivulet ran from West 95th and Columbus into the park at 101st Street and up toward what is now the Davis Center. It’s one of two still-active springs in Central Park.

The other is Tanner’s Spring, north of 82nd Street near Summit Rock. It’s named after Dr. Henry S. Tanner, a passionate advocate of fasting for better health. In 1880, he turned himself into a public spectacle by going without food for 40 days, sustained only by water from Tanner’s Spring. After his stunt, New Yorkers from all over the city came to Central Park to fill their bottles with its supposed healing waters.

We know how things ended for our unnamed brook at 96th Street. The Hudson River Railroad was built in 1846, the bay was filled in during the 1860s, and the viaduct lifting Riverside Drive over the old, now-concrete valley followed in 1900. Then came Robert Moses, who finished the job with the highway in the 1930s. Still, we got a larger Riverside Park out of it—132 acres of new recreational space. Sliced by a highway, sure. But more is more.

Surrounded by the vroom of the cars, I watch a boy conquer a dinosaur on the playground by the highway. Maybe this is where Miller’s long-skirted woman considered taking on the rickety bridge. It’s now where I tackle the highway, navigating its mood as I move through tunnels and detours, until I reach the river. The idyll is still here, beautiful enough to block out the noise of the traffic above. The Hudson sparkles, ducks are cackling, runners are shaking off the day, and two seniors are cuddling on a bench. It’s not the 1869 kind of pastoral calm, but exactly the kind I was looking for.

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