Nim Chimpsky the chimpanzee loved life in Riverdale

He woke up each morning in his 11-bedroom home on the Delafield Estate, was driven to class at Columbia University and returned each night to frolic on sprawling lawns with attractive, young graduate students.

It sounds like a luxurious existence. But for Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was brought to Riverdale’s Delafield Estate in 1975 as a baby and was taught more than 40 signs and 400 sign language combinations as part of an experiment at Columbia University, life was far from sweet.

The research that Columbia Professor Herbert Terrace would ultimately deem a failure was recently documented in the film Project Nim. Directed by James Marsh, the mastermind behind Man on Wire, the documentary features Nim’s researchers, teachers, caretakers, friends and the Riverdale estate that marked some of his happiest years. 

“He was free,” said teacher and researcher Laura-Ann Petitto of his time at Delafield Estate when interviewed in the film. “It was like he had been there his whole life.”

Photos and videos taken at Delafield, then owned by Columbia University, show Nim swinging from trees that covered the 28-acre estate, brushing his teeth in the mansion’s blue-tiled bathroom and sitting on the verdant lawns with his teachers and favorite tortoiseshell cat. 

Located on West 246th Street and Douglas Avenue behind the Riverdale Temple, the sprawling estate was willed to Columbia University in 1965 and later sold to developers who planned to build 33 luxury homes on its multi-acre plot. That project remains incomplete and the estate is in disrepair. 

Nim’s life took a similarly downward turn. But while Mr. Terrace eventually discontinued the research and Nim spent the rest of his life going from one caged habitat to the next, the part of the film that features Nim’s time at Delafield offers some relief from the sadness that pervades the 99-minute film.

“Our classroom was the house and the yard,” teacher Renee Falitz says in the film.