Gorman Park

Gorman Park is a "neighborhood" park 1.89 acres in area in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.^[1] It is bounded by Broadway on the west and Wadsworth Terrace on the east and stretches from 188th to 190th Streets. The land rises more than a hundred feet in a steep incline from Broadway to Wadsworth Terrace. The park features a path that winds upward among trees. In 2011 it became the focus of a local zoning and land use dispute when Quadriad Realty Partners proposed to build new residential towers taller than the by-right zoning rules permit on a vacant lot adjacent to the park in exchange for adding land to the park and thoroughly renovating it.^[2]

As the story goes, the wife of Mr. Charles Webb (a real estate investor and Yale graduate),Ms. Gertie Emily Gorman, died Sept. 25, 1923, less than a year after they were married. But her uncle thought Webb had killed her, probably with bichloride of mercury. So did many of her friends, and so did one of her doctors, who suspected that Mr. Webb had been poisoning her food or drink and tried to bar him from her sick room. Her mother, Gertrude Amelia Gorman, who died in 1920, had never liked Mr. Webb, who had courted her daughter for years and who her mother thought was just a fortune hunter. Insinuations from her relatives that she had been poisoned surfaced even while she was dying at a Westchester country club.

But an intensive investigation by New York City’s renowned chief of toxicology, Alexander O. Gettler, and his assistants at their Bellevue Hospital lab detected no significant traces of poison in her body. They did discover that she had severely damaged kidneys and pneumonia; her mother had also died of kidney failure. The cause of death was ruled natural.

On Aug. 21, 1923, while she was ill, Mrs. Webb had executed a 20-line will leaving her entire estate to her husband; it superseded a will that would have divided the proceeds among her relatives. Mr. Webb, who was cleared of any wrongdoing related to the will or his wife’s death, spent more than five years successfully defending the new will against challenges from his wife’s family.

After they had been beaten back, Mr. Webb donated two acres of land to the city in 1929 in honor of both his wife and her mother. Gorman Memorial Park, on a terraced slope, is between 189th and 190th Streets, between Broadway and Wadsworth Terrace. The park has many sitting areas, paths and a wide staircase to Broadway. A stone wall features an inscription dedicating the park to “Gertie A. Gorman,” as his wife had wished.

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Coordinates: 40°51′21″N 73°55′57″W / 40.85583°N 73.93250°W / 40.85583; -73.93250