My wife and I live in Fort George, in the uppermost part of Manhattan Island; there's only the more well-known Inwood neighborhood to the north before the Spuyten Duyvil Creek separates us from the Bronx. Fort George, the name, isn't something you hear much -- the neighborhood is often lumped in with Washington Heights, our larger neighbor to the south -- but it's the traditional name of the place, and what you'll find on most decent maps.
I make a point to call it Fort George because it's good to be specific about things, and because the neighborhood has its own personality and mood. Washington Heights has its bustle and beautiful bridge, Inwood has the old Dykman farmhouse and the ancient Inwood Hill Park, and we've got The Cloisters and Fort Tryon.
I get a good look at Fort Tryon Park every morning when I leave my building for the subway. The long and mild fall this year has made the park especially beautiful, and it tugs at me with a welcoming and then a reprimand as I go to my daily staring contest with a computer in Midtown. Brooding above the park is the five-story tower of The Cloisters, the severe and aloof heart of the neighborhood. It houses the medieval European collection of the Metropolitan Museum: all that heavy, brilliant, and anonymous work -- it's a lot for a small neighborhood to bear. Normal uptown modernity -- the bodegas, beauty parlors and Chinese take out joints -- creaks against all that ancient weight, and the result is that the neighborhood is a little haunted.
Here in Fort George, and anywhere in the city, really, you don't get to hear things that are too far off. You get the jets circling to LaGuardia: they outline the open space above -- a valuable reminder of scale in a place where a look at the horizon is rare. You get sirens describing some of the horizontal layout, but it's usually only a few blocks around. But there's a special sound here, a sound that accentuates the haunted mood of the place: the train that runs upside the Hudson, when it lets its whistle blow. I hear it sometimes in the early hours of the morning. I love it because I know where it is -- on the other side of the hills -- and yet it gets here, instantaneously illuminating the land between it and me like a lightning flash.
It covers a lot of space to arrive conspiratorially. The sound rolls up the steep hills of the far side of Fort Tryon Park and over The Cloisters -- the stained glass, sarcophagi and oddly posed figures -- and back downhill over the paths and through trees, across Broadway, and into my building. And I know intuitively in the same instant that the sound has also traveled the other way: across the Hudson, up the cliffs of the Palisades, probably into the towns along the river. Someone is, I'm sure, hearing it up there too.
