Save the Inwood Arch

There is a 35-foot-high, 20-foot-deep, marble triumphal arch at the northernmost point of Manhattan. It is one of only four post-Roman triumphal arches, along with the Washington Square Arch, the Manhattan Bridge entrance off Canal Street, and Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch outside Prospect Park. Why this arch is omitted from the decisive Wikipedia “list of post-Roman Triumphal Arches”—the Dewey Arch (1899-1900), formerly of Madison Square, is allowed a spot—is a mystery to me. The Dewey Arch only stood for one year. It was not even stone.

The insult does not stop there. The other three arches are listed as Historical Landmarks by the Landmark Preservation Commission. Two of them, The Washington Square Arch and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch, are symbols for their districts. The Washington Square Arch is one of the city’s big moneymakers. You can find it plastered on brochures and posters and flyers, cameoed in local broadcast news intros and Law & Order setting establishment shots, molded into key chains and refrigerator magnets and earrings ($18 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Our arch only has a name, and even that is disputed. 

Some call it the Seaman-Drake Arch, alluding to its original owners, one of many aristocratic families that once lived in northern Manhattan at the turn of the last century. The arch was the entrance to the estate’s winding driveway. For others, it is the Inwood Arch, named after the neighborhood that usurped the old gentry whose names now mark the streets: Isham, Dyckman, Nagle, Vermilyea. 

Inwood has grown around the arch to the inch. A pair of automobile repair shops—one of which uses the arch as a driveway—and a retaining wall sandwich the structure. Graffiti covers the crumbling entablature and the marble has been blackened and chewed away by acid rain. Ivy climbs through the bare windows and bores into the piers. Walls are painted an eggshell yellow to match the buildings in front and the intrados is lined with soot from idling cars. 

That it survived at all is incredible. This city is a monument cemetery. The Original Penn Station’s “Don’t Amputate-Renovate,” “Save 5Pointz,” or “Save the Stables” are a handful of the many death rattles from this common grave. No one has ever spoken for the arch. There have been no rallies held or petitions filed for its preservation. The arch just slipped through the cracks, too obscure to destroy or save. On top of that, it is still, technically, used for its original purpose: a driveway.

There were once stairs that led to an attic inside the arch’s right pier. This was the office of the gatekeeper, who watched through the small windows for arriving guests. Whatever memory was there has been erased; the roof collapsed decades ago. Things like the gatekeeper’s registry, a catalog of the giants who would pass through the arch’s iron gate (only the hinges remain, also painted over in eggshell yellow), or a guest list that had the allocated time for every person slated to arrive. All of those Dyckmans and Nagles and Vermilyeas would have been inside the pages. 

“Mount Olympus,” visitors called it, or “Seaman’s Folly,” or the big, white, marble thing on top of the hill. French women on horseback posed in the sculpture gardens, a well was hidden inside of a wooden gazebo, and two cupolas peeked over the trees that covered the 26-acres owned by the Seaman-Drakes. Ivy crawled up the walls and two rows of daisies led from the estate to the stables. 145 relatives contested for the deed to the property after Ann Drake Seaman died, a Titanomachy that ended with one victor: Lawrence Drake, Ann’s nephew. He sold the property 28 years later, and Mount Olympus was gone 30 years after that. The Seamans got a street but not the Drakes.

The gateway is all that survived. Fitting too, since the Horae stood at the gates to Mount Olympus and marked the cycles of time. Did the gatekeeper mark it as well, perhaps unknowingly? Maybe he was a smoker and stained the ceiling like the cars did the intrados. Maybe the walls were painted an eggshell yellow to make the most out of what little sunlight came in, or a house plant was perched on the windowsill to add some life. Wishful thinking, I know.

If only it were possible to go back, tear away the ivy and soot and graffiti and eggshell. Would the gatekeeper believe me if I told him that it was his arch that stood the test of time, that all the people he welcomed and dismissed are now names that people know but don’t recognize, fastened to lampposts and written on the awnings of bodegas (“what on earth is a bodega?” he might ask)? Could I convince him to let me through the gate, feel the grass before it is torn from the ground, pluck the apples from the trees? I bet that he finds me mad and orders me to leave before he calls the authorities. He would be right to do so. My name is not on the list.