Upper Riverside Residents Alliance: Introduction Book
The URRA Introduction Book is now available as a PDF:
Historic Districts Council: Audubon Park
The beginnings of the community now known as Audubon Park date back to 1841, when John James Audubon purchased fourteen acres and built a large mansion along the Hudson River shortly after publishing his famous work, Birds of America.
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You may view this booklet by the Historic Districts Council here.
Josette Bailey was born in the village of Harlem on March 12th 1954 to attorneys Joseph Arthur Bailey, and Helen Alexandra Gordon Bailey. She is the oldest of three children, and the only girl. Her family lived in both Manhattan, and the Bronx, moving every so often to satisfy both her father’s wanderlust, and her mother’s desire never to leave New York City.
Her parents had a law office near the Apollo Theater in the 1960-1970’s and Josette recalls watching the street action of West 125th Street, and listening to the iconic soundtrack of Motown emanating from the theater.
The family moved to 630 West 158th Street (one of the houses included in Save West 158th Street) and lived there for more than fifty years.
She has seen many incarnations of the Audubon Park Historic District from genteel, to cracked out, to gentrified.
She attended both public, and private schools, and is a proud alumna of the Nightingale Bamford School, and provincially attached Native New Yorker.
Josette attended Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY where she majored in English Literature.
She earned a Masters degree from the Gallatin School at NYU in Inter-disciplinary Studies.
Josette has worked in theater as both an actor and playwright.
She was a religious educator for the Unitarian Universalists, at the Fourth Universalist Society and worked as a program administrator for the YMCA of Greater New York, amongst the many other jobs that she has held.
Josette is currently a student at the Harlem Family Institute, studying to become a NY State licensed psychoanalyst. She is acutely aware of the pathology of the American personality, and the failed nature of the American dream. She knows that many people, if not all of us, are in pain, and is angry that much of the pain of Native people, Black Americans, and other people of color is aggravated, and intensified by the on-going systemic nature of racism, and oppression, which is endemic to this society.
She observes that the failure to landmark historically, and culturally significant communities in Northern Manhattan is but another iteration of that peculiar American disease – a disease that constantly manifests as a failure to recognize the historic contributions, and the beauty of place of certain communities.
She asks, and invites all people who find the URRA website, and reads its contents to join us in the fight to save 857 Riverside Drive and West 158th Street.
Vivian Ducat is a rarity known as a Native New Yorker, having grown up on 72nd and Riverside Drive when there were rail yards at the base of her street before Donald Trump’s Riverside South development became a reality. She is the child of German-speaking Jewish WWII refugees, some of whom settled in Washington Heights in the 1930’s and ‘40’s an area that at the time was referred to as Frankfurt on the Hudson.
Vivian has been a member and then a public member of Community Board 12’s Land Use Committee for about the last 15 years, and co-chair of a neighborhood group in Lower Washington Heights, the Riverside Oval Association. Her efforts together with Matthew Spady to preserve the row houses on 158th Street were honored by the Historic District Council with a Six to Celebrate designation.
Vivian has a master’s from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation as well as an A.B. from Harvard in archaeology. During her long career in broadcast and museum-oriented documentary filmmaking, she has worked on many projects about history, including a number that have dealt with New York City.
The son of an architect and librarian, both passionate about history, Matthew Spady was exposed to architectural preservation from an early age. His first hands-on experience was restoring a house on Richmond, Virginia’s Church Hill in 1972, where he came under the influence of that city’s famed preservationist Elizabeth Scott Bocock.
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He collaborated on the Audubon Park Historic District designation, co-writing the request for evaluation and developing a virtual walking tour, www.AudubonParkNY.com, to raise awareness about the neighborhood. He is currently working with neighborhood preservationists to expand the Audubon Park Historic District and save 857 Riverside Drive, a house dating to 1851 with strong ties to a group of Abolitionists working in northern Manhattan in the mid-nineteenth century.
In September 2020, Fordham University Press (Empire Editions) published his history: The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It.
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He holds degrees in English and Music from the College of William and Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the College-Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati.
Joseph V. Amodio is a veteran journalist and television writer who has covered a range of subjects — from entertainment and culture to health and medicine — for The New York Times Magazine, Newsday, Men’s Health, Details, Glamour,
Ladies’ Home Journal, Barrons.com and CNN.com, among others.
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His work has been syndicated across the globe.
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He has also written scripts for various true-crime docudrama series airing on Netflix, Discovery, A&E, NatGeo and other networks, and has served as a communications consultant at the Library of Congress.
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His interest in preservation began with the effort to save 857 Riverside, the Washington Heights home with ties to the Underground Railroad and a little-known abolitionist community in Upper Manhattan.
His request for evaluation written for the NYC Landmarks Commission, generated a feature story in The New York Times and a series of press conferences covered by ABC, NBC, CBS, WNYC and other media outlets.
Peter Green is an experienced and award-winning editor, reporter and newsroom manager well versed in news tech and with a fine eye for telling stories about numbers and using numbers to tell stories.
He has been a foreign correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and spent eight years at Bloomberg News.
He has won awards for investigative reporting about tax evasion and for covering hurricanes at Bloomberg, and for editing features and investigations at Crain’s New York Business.
He is skilled at mentoring reporters and helping them tease out the best storylines from their tips and reporting, and ensuring those stories tell a smart tale worth reading, while preserving the writer's voice.
Peter is bilingual in French and fluent in Czech.
David Freeland is the author of Automats, Taxi Dances and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure; Ladies of Soul, and the recently published book, American Hotel: The Waldorf-Astoria and the Making of a Century. [Book Talk]
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As an historian and journalist, David has written for The Wall Street Journal, AM New York, Time Out New York, New York History, American Songwriter, and other publications.
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He appeared in episodes of NBC TV’s “Who Do You Think You Are” and NYC Media’s “Secrets of New York.”
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David lives in Washington Heights, where he leads walking tours and gives lectures on the culture and history of New York City.
He was instrumental in the long-term effort to preserve five historic buildings associated with Tin Pan Alley on West 28th, which were designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in December of 2019.