THE name “Isham ” is closely associated with Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood on Manhattan Island (though not the most northerly; that prize goes to Marble Hill, which is actually on a small piece of New York County on the mainland). In the 1800s, William B. Isham owned much of the neighborhood territory, when it was bisected only by Kingsbridge Road, now known as Broadway. Isham’s daughter donated it to the city, which turned it into Isham Park. Isham is pronounced EYE-shim, one of those NYC pronunciations that make little sense to me; a short “i” is what I had defaulted to.
When I’m up in this part of town, I check to see if some things are still there, like this grand old sign at Isham Broadway Pharmacy in blue and white, Broadway near West 211th. It’s in a font normally reserved to the players’ names on backs of jerseys. I’ve never seen it in a different context. You can tell it’s been there quite awhile, with the vessel with the pestle iconography and the Rx abbreviation for “prescription” (actually “recipe”). The word recetas means the same in Spanish. The signs on the second floor use similar block lettering.
That’s not all! The smaller sign at the bottom uses a font called Belwe, with its odd slanted and wiggly serifs. It was designed by German designer George Belwe in the 19-oughts. It’s sued mainly on signage or heds, as its idiosyncracies would make it a poor text font. The rest of the ad is in good old Helvetica.
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10/6/25
1 comment
Not just a NYC pronunciation, as the Baronets Isham, an English landed gentry family with an hereditary knighthood for the eldest son, have always pronounced their name that way, and possibly William Isham was somehow related to that family, especially if the north Manhattan land patent went back to the 17th/18th C., and the grantee may have been probably a younger son of one of the baronets of that era, and William’s ancestor.