Ten stops south of Columbia on the 1 line is Times Square–42nd Street. It’s the busiest subway station in New York City, with over 45 million visitors in 2022. Ten stops north of Columbia on the 1 line is 215th Street. It’s the northernmost station in Manhattan. It’s also the island’s least visited station, with just 636,000 visitors in 2022.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I diverged from the usual pack of Columbia students on the southbound platform and, in an unfamiliarly empty 1 train car, I headed north. My destination was Inwood, a neighborhood perched between Dyckman Street and the winding Harlem River that carves a thin Manhattan peninsula out of the Bronx.

When I stepped out of the subway at 215th Street, the atmosphere was tranquil. Manhattan’s jutting skyscrapers, gridlocked streets, chaotic noises, and choruses of voices had fallen away. The distinct sounds and sights of the city—the honks, sirens, music, lights—no longer competed for my attention. I was still in Manhattan, but it felt like I could have been anywhere.

I was immersed in a sea of unassuming buildings, most of them short with simple tan and brown exteriors. The narrow streets next to me were spare of cars, and on the cracked sidewalks where I walked, I was joined by only the occasional passerby. The sky was cloudy overhead. I heard distant sounds of city life no louder than the sound of raindrops, which had just started to fall against the pavement. I was blanketed by the sheer quiet and simplicity of it all. I felt like I was in a forgotten neighborhood, the last bastion of peace and solitude on an island known for anything but.

This is a common conception of Inwood. As history shows, Manhattan was developed from literally the bottom up. Starting in the 17th century, Dutch and later English colonists settled Manhattan’s bottom end. The colonists had erected a maze of jam-packed baroque and colonial style buildings along winding, narrow roads. Meanwhile, the natural landscape of the north remained relatively untouched. The indigenous Lenape tribe labeled the northern end the island’s “best place to live” for its abundance of fish and fertile land.

Twentieth-century industrialization converted much of downtown and midtown Manhattan into a forest of skyscrapers, yet in Inwood and the northern part of the island, the forests remained those of trees rather than buildings. It was only when the modern 1 line was constructed around 1906 that engineers and city planners got the radical idea to build the tracks up to Manhattan’s northernmost end. The tracks stretched across empty fields on the island’s final sliver of untouched land.

Then, developers rapidly purchased property along the train, speculating that the cheaper rents and tranquility compared to New York City’s downtown would make Inwood an attractive site for residences. Exuberant population growth over the mid-20th century led to the sale of Manhattan’s last family-owned farm in 1954. It was replaced by a warehouse on 217th Street.

Inwood started as a neighborhood of Irish and Jewish immigrants who relied on the neighborhood’s cheap cost of living. In the following decades, however, these residents moved across the river to neighborhoods in the Bronx like Riverdale and Spuyten Duyvil, leaving behind a growing Hispanic and Dominican population. Today, charming mom-and-pop shops adorned with Spanish signage create the feel of a close-knit community.

Inwood is still home to one of the largest preserves of untouched forest in Manhattan, tucked away in Inwood Hill Park at the tip of the island. The Cloisters, adjacent to the neighborhood, is an art museum financed by John D. Rockefeller and based out of a modern castle built to resemble a 13th-century French church. Columbia’s Baker Athletics Complex, too, is housed at the northern tip of the island; the modern, glass facade of its main building sticks out like a sore thumb from the humble brick architecture of the neighborhood.

The incongruous sight of Baker’s fields reminds us that there’s something charming about a lack of pizzazz, something admirable in a quiet neighborhood that humbly holds onto its culture and attractions. If you choose to take a chance on Manhattan’s misunderstood finale, you may find Inwood to be a welcome place of rest in a city that never sleeps.