Here a park, there a park... The Inwood Journal comes to you from the northern tip of Manhattan Island, an area rich in parkland. Just visible at the bottom of the map is the northern tip of Fort Tryon Park, home of the Cloisters, a delightful medieval adjunct to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Beginning above Dyckman Street and running along the banks of the Hudson River, is Dyckman Fields where baseball, soccer, hockey, football and romance make joyful sounds in season. Separated from Dyckman Fields by the tracks of the New York Central Railroad is Inwood Hill Park, which sports the highest natural elevation in Manhattan -- a large hill or small mountain, depending on your perspective -- and a marker which shows where the Dutch bought the island from the Indians. And just south of the Inwood Journal's office and west of Broadway is another small park, bristling with outcroppings of schist, called Isham Park.

Actually, there's one more park in the area, but it's not public. Columbia University owns the land north of West 218th St and west of Broadway to which it has given the name Baker Field. Over the years, Baker Field has been developed to include a major sports stadium (The Lawrence A. Wien Stadium for baseball, football, track, soccer, etc.), tennis courts, and a field house for its crew team, which rows in the Spuyten Duyvil Creek connecting the Hudson River on the west and the East River. I have a particular fondness for Columbia, my alma mater for both undergraduate (Columbia College) and Graduate studies (experimental psychology). But that's for another day.

Let's take a quick walk through Isham Park.