Space Pirates Ahoy

With the exception of some asphalt paths, the forested areas of Inwood Hill Park have remained mostly unaltered by human landscaping. Nature exists on a grander scale here at the far north end of Manhattan Island than perhaps anywhere else in the boroughs, yet it is not just the natural formation of the park that makes it special, but its interplay with Inwood, where old men in Guayaberas sit at card tables playing dominos and sipping beer, unmolested by police. With woods spilling out onto the streets and elevated points within offering foliage-framed views of huge apartment complexes on one side and the Hudson on the other, its 196 acres are much more than Manhattan's nature preserve or a miniaturized upstate vacation. Although it was here first, the park seems to have settled in upon the city like some post-apocalyptic infection of untended life.

Though I'd spent a couple thousand hours in Inwood Park, I still could not even picture the setting while riding uptown on the A Train last Thursday. Perhaps it was knowing upon my arrival the park would be peopled with joggers holding a demonstration before candidates for the powerless office that is Manhattan Borough President. Such a failure of visual imagination might seem hard to understand, but try to picture your mother in a Fila suit riding on an elephant and rapping. Though these are all things with which you are individually familiar, I doubt you can picture it. At some point near the end of the ride, I became aware of a man in jogging gear sitting across from me. He did not blend with the other riders. This man, I realized, was here to run the park.

In 1993, after our first year of high school, my 15-year-old and infinitely wise friend Agüe moved up to Inwood. Shortly thereafter he convinced me and our friend Dallas, after some drinking, to climb to the top of Inwood Hill. It was one of those "Hey-wanna see something cool?" propositions that barely worked, with Dallas and me attempting twice to retreat but ultimately being drawn into Agüe's madness. We ascended steep and rocky dirt paths through the sort of full, deep darkness you never see (or don't, actually) in the city, passing no one on the way. The park was ours.

Upon reaching the top, Agüe called for us to sit on a concrete bench where he promptly threw up and passed out. While waiting for our man to recover, we noticed that our seat overlooked the lights of the Bronx, and our sense of fear became one of adventure. Agüe, who'd perhaps brought us up here to share just such a feeling, remained unmoved. We got him out of there, but it was a rough haul. On the way down Dallas and I scared the crap out of some lone, middle-aged, joint-smoking hippie by asking for directions while carrying what looked like a corpse. Since that night, we and our friends have wandered the park at all hours and in all seasons, but never alone.

Manhattan's redone Hudson piers may have become an attraction, but Inwood Park still belongs to those who remember New York, wires beautifully exposed if prone to short circuits, when you could walk the streets without passing a soul so long as you didn't take safety as a birthright.

New Yorkers for Parks (NY4P), which had brought together the would-be presidents and the demonstrating joggers, has a noble mission: To double the proportion of the city's budget dedicated to parks. Naturally, they seek allies, the more vociferous the better. I doubt they-or anyone-expected the pitchforks-and-torches atmosphere that characterized the event.

I arrived to find the jog site filling up with the sort of outsiders who are ever out of touch with the urban ecology of their own blocks, regardless of time in residence. They did not seem to be either especially wealthy, or gentrifying pioneers, just perennial outsiders. They were, though, a subset of a group we shall call "space pirates," who blow in from off-world and declare ownership. One woman told me she had been running in Inwood for years. I asked her, how long exactly. More emphatic this time: "Years." Street cred abounds. Avast ye swabs.

Another jogger took the run with some sort of toy dog. Later, he talked about his group, "Inwoof."

Of the three candidates who showed up, Bill Perkins got the most love for actually taking the run alongside the demonstrators, after which he vacillated between trying to placate the shouting crowd and transmuting at least part of their anger into enthusiasm with party chants, breaking into a rabble-rousing call and response: "Whose parks are these?"

"Our parks!"

Candidate Adriano Espillat hit the worst note with some flashback drivel about Inwood Park being ravaged by drug wars.

The crowd's complaints smacked more of out-of-towner priorities than monied ones: The same people who whined that local police don't bust pot-smoking locals also whined about being issued leash-law tickets. (A refreshing reversal, if you ask me.) This, coupled with the outcry for a massive police presence, conveyed the perhaps unintentional but altogether unavoidable sentiment of "bust Them, not Us."

There are, though, crimes worth taking seriously. In three years, NY4P has logged one stick-up, three murders and an attack in the area around Inwood Hill. The joggers' upset was based primarily on two of these crimes, the more recent of which was a failed attempt at what was most likely the rape or murder of a woman jogger, thwarted by the approach of a male jogger. Far more frightening and heinous, though, was the tragic and high-profile strangulation murder of Sarah Fox last summer, which understandably incited fear and rage.

The sort of lone predators who flee from any real opposition committed both the recent attack and, quite likely, Sarah Fox's murder. The joggers have responded in the only sensible fashion: by banding together to jog safely.

The joggers, though, asked for more mounted and plainclothes police, repairs to runners' paths, which are more than adequate at present, and new paved paths for police vehicles. Enter the steamrollers. They also pressed for illumination in the woods, presumably to permit night jogs-perhaps the clearest indication that these people have no handle on the logistics of safety. The crowd also neared hissing and booing when candidates promised a Parks Enforcement Patrol, or PEP, presence.

Candidate Stan Michels won no votes when he correctly observed that a few serious crimes in three years over about a square mile do not constitute a localized outpost of 70s-style anarchy.

I agree. I don't dismiss concerns about crime, but it's monumentally egocentric to demand that this bastion of urban solitude and beauty should be renovated to accommodate scenic jogs. One older man accidentally nailed it: The park is beautiful, he said, but "what will you do about the dangerous seclusion?"

When Inwood Hill Park is flooded with police on defecating horses and the woods with foot cops, it will be one more once uniquely New York institution fallen to space pirates' demand for comfort in place of content they cannot appreciate.