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Uptown, a Marble Ruin Sits Alongside an Auto-Body Shop | The New Yorker

Uptown, a Marble Ruin Sits Alongside an Auto-Body Shop | The New Yorker
The Seaman Drake Arch

In Inwood, a scaled-down marble replica of the Arc de Triomphe is the only surviving element of Seaman’s Folly.

By David Owen

The Seaman Drake Arch

Valentine Seaman was born in Queens County in 1770 and studied medicine in Philadelphia under Benjamin Rush. He defied early-nineteenth-century anti-vaxxers by introducing Edward Jenner’s “kine-pock” inoculation to New York City, initially by administering it to one of his own children. In 1851, his son John Ferris Seaman bought twenty-six acres near the northern tip of Manhattan, in what’s now called Inwood but was then known as Tubby Hook. He built an ornate, multi-cupolaed, statue-embellished mansion on the crest of a hill, using marble that had been quarried approximately where Columbia University’s football stadium stands today. “If you were coming south into the city on the railroad in the late eighteen-hundreds, the mansion was the first thing you saw,” Cole Thompson, a real-estate salesperson and amateur local historian, said one morning, in his office, on West 207th Street. “The Seamans called it Mt. Olympus on the Hudson; others called it Seaman’s Folly.”

Read more: Uptown, a Marble Ruin Sits Alongside an Auto-Body Shop | The New Yorker

Related:

Seaman-Drake Arch – Encrusted Relic of a Mid-19th-Century Inwood Estate | NY Times

Historic Inwood – The Seaman Drake Arch

Historic Inwood – The Dyckman Oval

Historic Inwood: “Goodbye to Glocamorra” (1968)

Heights History – Hilltop Park

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