How does an author go about writing an inclusive history, when the key players in the story appear to be predominantly white men? In this New York State Library webinar, author Matthew Spady will describe his search for sources to inform The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It, the study of how one slice of northern Manhattan evolved from farmland to suburb to cityscape. He will begin the webinar with a brief overview of Audubon Park’s history, from its emergence out of John James Audubon’s farm Minnie’s Land into an exclusive gated community for prosperous 19th-century New Yorkers, and finally to its disappearance beneath a cityscape of Beaux Arts apartment houses and museums in the wake of New York City’s subway system in the early 20th century. He’ll then turn to a discussion of his twenty-year search for sources, particularly those that expanded the narrative beyond Audubon Park’s white, predominantly male landowners to the women who ran the households and the many individuals, including the enslaved, who provided the labor that kept those households running. 

Matthew Spady has been an evangelist for the Audubon Park neighborhood for more than two decades, researching, writing, and speaking to promote its rich history. A leader in the decade-long community effort that culminated in the Audubon Park Historic District, he contributed to the “Audubon Park Historic District Designation Report,” and has been quoted in the New York Times, Manhattan Times, Avenue Magazine, Brick Underground, and in multiple Audubon-related histories and biographies.

As creator of the virtual walking tour AudubonParkNY.com and curator for the AudubonParkPerspectives.org news site, he regularly leads walking tours of the Audubon Park Historic District and neighboring Trinity Cemetery and has given numerous presentations about the area’s rich history for groups such as the Sharon Historical Society, Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group, Historic Districts Council, Researching New York Conference, Association of Public Historians of New York State, and the Roebling Chapter of the Society for Industrial Archeology.

He is director of the Audubon Park Alliance, a not-for-profit group devoted to promoting the neighborhood’s rich cultural and architectural history, and board member of Save Harlem Now! and the Upper Riverside Residents Alliance.