IV
Even up in Manhattan there are still places astonishingly unlike what is expected of the crowded little island on which stands New York proper. There is Fort Washington with tall trees growing out of the Revolutionary breastworks, land, under their branches, a fine view up the Hudson to the mountains—a quiet, sequestered bit of public park which the public hasn't yet learned to treat as a park, though within sight of the crowds crossing the viaduct from the Grant Monument on Riverside. There are wild flowers up there every spring, and until quite recently so few people visited this spot for days at a time that there were sometimes woodcock and perhaps other game in the thickly wooded ravine by the railroad. Soon, however, the grass on the breastworks will be worn off entirely, and the aged deaf man who tends the river light on Jeffreys Hook will become sophisticated, if he is still alive.
Cemetery Ridge, Near Richmond, Staten Island.
It will take longer, however, for the regions to the north, beyond Washington Heights, down through Inwood and past Tubby Hook, to look like part of a city. And across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek from Manhattan Island, up through the winding roads of Riverdale to Mount St. Vincent, and so across the line to Yonkers, it is still wooded, comparatively secluded and country-like, even though so many of the fine country places thereabouts are being deserted. Over to the eastward, across Broadway, a peaceful road which does not look like a part of the same thoroughfare as the one with actors and sky-scrapers upon it, there are the still wilder stretches of Mosholu and Van Cortlandt Park, where, a year or two ago, large, well-painted signs on the trees used to say "Beware of the Buffaloes."
A Peaceful Scene in New York.
In the distance is St. Andrew's Church, Borough of Richmond, Staten Island.
The open country sport of golf has had a good deal to do with making this rural park more generally appreciated. Golf has done for Van Cortlandt what the bicycle had done for the Bronx and Pelham Bay Parks. There are still natural, wild enough looking bits, off from the beaten paths, in all these parks, scenes that look delightfully dark and sylvan in the yearly thousands of amateur photographs—the camera does not show the German family approaching from the rear, or the egg-shells and broken beer-bottles behind the bushes—but beware of the police if you break a twig, or pick a blossom.