Gail Addiss

Project: Happy 250th Anniversary America! Through walking tours, small exhibits, and possibly a public forum, this project’s goal is to contribute to public awareness of the importance of Revolutionary War sites in shaping northern Manhattan’s public parks. The early 20th century preservation of these sites—fortifications and battlefields—both preserved historic grounds and created parks with scenic views that enhance the quality of life for residents in the growing city. The parks’ dedication ceremonies also served to inform new immigrant communities of the nation’s founding narrative.

Gail Addiss has been working in architecture since 1978. After graduating from Rutgers and NJIT she worked on a wide range of building and landscape design projects. In the 1980s, as an architect for the New York City Parks Department, she became curious about the complex history and topography of northern Manhattan when she helped restore an abandoned viewing pavilion that overlooked the Hudson River just north of the George Washington Bridge. The classically designed building, then in ruins, was a fragment of a lost history that she wanted to learn more about.

Later, as Supervising Architect for the NYPD for Mayor Dinkins’s Safe Streets Safe City Community Policing Program, Addiss had the difficult task of siting a new police precinct building within the crime-ridden 34th Precinct, which then served all of Manhattan north of 155th Street and had the highest murder rate in the city, as well as being a center of the crack-cocaine trade.

To locate the new precinct Addiss’ team began to investigate every neighborhood in the precinct. The streets curved over steep hills and abutted many large hilltop parks with military names like Fort George or Fort Washington. The clearly numbered street grid had disappeared and was replaced with romantically named streets like Laurel Place. Addiss wanted to understand how this developed and was able to do further research when she moved to Inwood in 2003. She became involved with park activities, particularly in the Isham Park Restoration Project (IPRP), better known as Bruce’s Garden, a Community Garden within Isham Park. There she began a program for local writers to read from their works.

To structure her research and formally study the history of the area Addiss entered the CUNY Graduate Center’s Liberal Studies Program, and wrote a thesis on the area, “The Critique Became the Counter-Narrative: Planning Manhattan North of the Street Grid” (2019).