Bronx of old buried by Riverdale Park

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The northwest Bronx has not seen the kilns, foundries and hospital wards of Spuyten Duyvil in decades, and the agrarian past of leafy Riverdale is similarly out of reach. But on a recent walking tour, the convergent histories of these two neighborhoods came starkly back to life.

“The two places are very different from each other,” explained Nestor Danyluk, a tour guide for the Bronx Historical Society. “One was a working class factory town, and the other was an enclave of the upper crust.”

Guiding a group of about 10 curious Bronxites along the eastern boundary of Riverdale Park, Mr. Danyluk stopped periodically to describe the history of splendid estates including Alderbrook House at 4715 Independence Ave., which was built in the late 1850s and belonged to the Pyne family.

The Pynes, who were among the earliest European Riverdalians, used the house as a summer home between May and November until a fire in 1890, according to city records. Roughing it in the wilds of the Bronx as a youth, Moses Pyne recalled how his father “rode horseback a great deal, bathed and rowed on the Hudson. I have known him to rise at daybreak, row across the Hudson, climb the Palisades, smoke a cigar on top, and return in time for a bath and breakfast with his family and then catch the 7:57 train to New York.”

Further south, Spuyten Duyvil’s smoke stacks seared memories of industry into the minds of its inhabitants. By the 1860s, the Johnson Iron Foundry and the Spuyten Duyvil Rolling Mill Co. employed more than 300 men in the manufacture of cannons that were sent off for use in the Civil War.

Small houses, a chapel, taverns and a school for children were built to the north of the factory. The neighborhood developed along with its institutions, including Seton Hospital, which tended to populations of the consumptive poor. Years later, when the Great Depression struck, Spuyten Duyvil’s neighbor, Marble Hill, was home to a boxcar village on the site of what is today’s John F. Kennedy Educational Campus.

The completion of the Henry Hudson Bridge in 1936 changed everything, Mr. Danyluk said.

Nestor Danyluk, Bronx Historical Society, Riverdale Park, Spuyten Duyvil, Nic Cavell
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