Matthew Spady, "The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It" (Fordham UP, 2020)

New Books in American Studies · Dec 9, 2020 · 47m

In northern Manhattan in 1841, the naturalist John James Audubon bought 14 acres of farmland on the banks of the Hudson River and built his family a home far from the crowded downtown streets. Audubon’s country homestead is long gone, but his story launches Matthew Spady’s The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It (Fordham UP, 2020). The book traces the complex path by which woodlands became a multi-ethnic big-city neighborhood. Framing his narrative in the lives of two families—the Audubons and the Grinnells—Spady tells how family dysfunctions, economic…