Step inside the historic cottage at Fort Tryon Park during Open House New York for a rare opportunity to explore one of the park’s original structures. Built as the gatehouse for the early 20th-century Billings Estate, the cottage now serves as the offices of NYC Parks and the Fort Tryon Park Conservancy. Visitors can learn about the cottage’s history, architecture, and connection to the Billings Estate while exploring this unique piece of Fort Tryon Park’s past.
Tag Archives: History
Hispanic Society: Book Presentation with Jonathan Goldman
Book Presentation with Jonathan Goldman
Join us for a conversation with Jonathan Goldman on the Puerto Rican experience in 1920s New York.
Learn more about the book here:
In Hidden Histories of Jazz Age: New York: From the Suppressed to the Strange, Jonathan Goldman offers a fresh look at 1920s New York City, unearthing stories of everyday life and marginalized communities. In sections that intertwine entertainment, politics, art, technology, crime, shopping, eating, and recreation, the book portrays sweeping events such as the Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, and immigration reform through anecdotes of individual experiences that counter the era’s popular conceptions of ballooning wealth and uproarious celebration. Jonathan Ezra Goldman’s whirlwind tour of early 1920s New York City visits an all-female police platoon, a Black amusement park shut down before it opened, an Arabic literary salon, socialist Puerto Rican cigar factories, Chinatown funerals, lesbian cafes, overcrowded jails, toxic dumps, and Ku Klux Klan recruitment offices. The grand narratives of the 1920s interweave with little-known anecdotes about well-known figures such as Marcus Garvey, Dorothy Parker, and Babe Ruth, serving as a backdrop to the everyday challenges and triumphs of a city beset by crowds, automobile traffic, and rapidly changing technology and urban infrastructure, as well as erased stories of injustices like Jim Crow practices, immigration anxieties, and the violent treatment of political dissent. These stories still resonate today, showing that this dizzying, exuberant ride through hidden history can help twenty-first readers see our own moment more clearly.
Jonathan Ezra Goldman is Professor in the Humanities Department at New York Institute of Technology. His previous books include Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity and Joyce and the Law. He lives in New York City.
Dyckman Farmhouse: Guided Tour with Museum Admission
Guided Tours are included with Museum Admission. Please reserve your spot for the Guided Tour here AND your Museum Admission ticket here. Guided Tour and Museum Admission tickets are also avaliable for purchase day-of at our front desk.
Participants will learn about those who have shaped the stories of Inwood, including the Lenape, Revolutionary War soldiers, the Dyckman Family, free and enslaved African people, and present-day residents of Northern Manhattan.
15 spots available for each tour.
First come, first serve.
Dyckman Farmhouse: Back Porch History 1776 – A Defining Moment in the Story of Northern Manhattan
Back Porch History: 1776 – A Defining Moment in the Story of Northern Manhattan with Don Rice
Join us for a free, in-person lecture about the American Revolution and Northern Manhattan history at Dyckman Farmhouse Museum! Nearly 250 years ago, in November 1776, Dyckman was consumed by warfare. Thousands of British and Hessian soldiers attacked the hillsides and overwhelmed the American defenses there. For the next seven years, occupying forces sucked the area dry, leaving behind a countryside devoid of natural resources and pockmarked with wrecked farmsteads and roads. It was a defining moment in Inwood’s past. Using primary sources and rare images, we’ll relive the events that led up to the battle of Fort Washington in 1776.
Come learn about the Dyckman family’s role in trying to protect the neighborhood and their home, and discover if anything still remains from those tumultuous times.
RSVP Required – Register on Eventbrite!
DonRice was board president of the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum Alliance from 2016-2025. In 2009, he founded the “Lost Inwood” series of popular local history talks and almost a decade later, in 2019, Rice co-authored a book of the same name with fellow local historian Cole Thompson. He’s lived with his family in North Manhattan for more than 25 years and is retired from a career in the Broadway Music field.
Dyckman Farmhouse Museum: 1776 – A Defining Moment in the Story of Northern Manhattan with Don Rice
Join us for a free, in-person lecture about the American Revolution and Northern Manhattan history at Dyckman Farmhouse Museum!
Nearly 250 years ago, in November 1776, Dyckman was consumed by warfare.
Thousands of British and Hessian soldiers attacked the hillsides and overwhelmed the American defenses there. For the next seven years, occupying forces sucked the area dry, leaving behind a countryside devoid of natural resources and pockmarked with wrecked farmsteads and roads. It was a defining moment in Inwood’s past.
Using primary sources and rare images, we’ll relive the events that led up to the battle of Fort Washington in 1776.
Come learn about the Dyckman family’s role in trying to protect the neighborhood and their home, and discover if anything still remains from those tumultuous times.
FREE, but RSVP Required: Register on Eventbrite
Don Rice was board president of the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum Alliance from 2016-2025. In 2009, he founded the “Lost Inwood” series of popular local history talks and almost a decade later, in 2019, Rice co-authored a book of the same name with fellow local historian Cole Thompson. He’s lived with his family in North Manhattan for more than 25 years and is retired from a career in the Broadway Music field.