History

Washington Heights is a neighborhood in the northern portion of the New York City borough of Manhattan. The area, with over 150,000 inhabitants as of 2010, is named for Fort Washington, a fortification constructed at the highest point on Manhattan island by Continental Army troops during theAmerican Revolutionary War, to defend the area from the British forces. Washington Heights is bordered by Harlem to the south, along 155th Street, Inwood to the north along Hillside Avenue, the Hudson River to the west, and the Harlem River and Coogan’s Bluff to the east.

Early history

In the 18th century, only the southern portion of the island was settled by Europeans, leaving the rest of Manhattan largely untouched. Among the many unspoiled tracts of land was the highest spot on the island, which provided unsurpassed views of what would become the New York metropolitan area.

When the Revolutionary War came to New York, the British had the upper hand. General George Washington and troops from his Continental Army camped on the high ground, calling it Fort Washington, to monitor the advancing Redcoats. The Continental Army retreated from its location after their defeat on November 16, 1776, in the Battle of Fort Washington. The British took the position and renamed it Fort Knyphausen in honor of the leader of the Hessians, who had taken a major part in the British victory. Their location was in the spot now called Bennett Park. Fort Washington had been established as an offensive position to prevent British vessels from sailing north on the Hudson River. Fort Lee, across the river, was its twin, built to assist in the defense of the Hudson Valley. The progress of the battle is marked by a series of bronze plaques along Broadway.

Not far from the fort was the Blue Bell Tavern, located on an intersection of Kingsbridge Road, where Broadway and West 181st Street intersect today, on the southeastern corner of modern-day Hudson Heights. On July 9, 1776, when New York’s Provincial Congress assented to the Declaration of Independence, “A rowdy crowd of soldiers and civilians (‘no decent people’ were present, one witness said later) … marched down Broadway to Bowling Green, where they toppled the statue of George III erected in 1770. The head was put on a spike at the Blue Bell Tavern … ”

The tavern was later used by Washington and his staff when the British evacuated New York, standing in front of it as they watched the American troops march south to retake New York.

By 1856 the first recorded home had been built on the site of Fort Washington. The Moorewood residence was there until the 1880s. The property was purchased by Richard Carman and sold to James Gordon Bennett Sr. for a summer estate in 1871. Bennett’s descendants later gave the land to the city to build a park honoring the Revolutionary War encampment. Bennett Park is a portion of that land. Lucius Chittenden, a New Orleans merchant, built a home on land he bought in 1846 west of what is now Cabrini Boulevard and West 187th Street. It was known as the Chittenden estate by 1864. C. P. Bucking named his home Pinehurst on land near the Hudson, a title that survives as Pinehurst Avenue.

The series of ridges overlooking the Hudson were sites of villas in the 19th century, including the extensive property of John James Audubon.

Early and mid-20th century

At the turn of the 20th century the woods started being chopped down to make way for homes. The cliffs that are now Fort Tryon Park held the mansion of Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings, a retired president of the Chicago Coke and Gas Company. He purchased 25 acres (100,000 m²) and constructed Tryon Hall, a Louis XIV-style home designed by Gus Lowell. It had a galleried entranceway from the Henry Hudson Parkway that was 50 feet (15 m) high and made of Maine granite. In 1917, Billings sold the land to John D. Rockefeller Jr. for $35,000 per acre. Tryon Hall was destroyed by fire in 1925. The estate was the basis for the book “The Dragon Murder Case” by S. S. Van Dine, in which detective Philo Vance had to solve a murder on the grounds of the estate, where a dragon was supposed to have lived.

In the early 1900s, Irish immigrants moved to Washington Heights. European Jews went to Washington Heights to escape Nazism during the 1930s and the 1940s. During the 1950s and 1960s, many Greeks moved to Washington Heights; the community was referred to as the “Astoria of Manhattan.” By the 1980s–1990s, the neighborhood became mostly Dominican.

Fort Tryon

During World War I, immigrants from Hungary and Poland moved in next to the Irish. Then, as Naziism grew in Germany, Jews fled their homeland. By the late 1930s, more than 20,000 refugees from Germany had settled in Washington Heights.

The beginning of this section of Washington Heights as a neighborhood-within-a-neighborhood seems to have started around this time, in the years before World War II. One scholar refers to the area in 1940 as “Fort Tryon” and “the Fort Tryon area.” In 1989, Steven M. Lowenstein wrote, “The greatest social distance was to be found between the area in the northwest, just south of Fort Tryon Park, which was, and remains, the most prestigious section … This difference was already remarked in 1940, continued unabated in 1970 and was still noticeable even in 1980…”Lowenstein considered Fort Tryon to be the area west of Broadway, east of the Hudson, north of West 181st Street, and south of Dyckman Street, which includes Fort Tryon Park. He writes, “Within the core area of Washington Heights (between 155th Street and Dyckman Street) there was a considerable internal difference as well. The further north and west one went, the more prestigious the neighborhood…”

Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson

In the years after World War II, the neighborhood was referred to as Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson due to the dense population of German and Austrian Jews who had settled there. A disproportionately large number of Germans who settled in the area had come from Frankfurt-am-Main, possibly giving rise to new name. No other neighborhood in the city was home to so many German Jews, who had created their own central German world in the 1930s.

When the children of the Jewish immigrants to the Hudson Heights area grew up, they tended to leave the neighborhood, and sometimes, the city. By 1960 German Jews accounted for only 16% of the population in Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson. The neighborhood became less overtly Jewish into the 1970s as Soviet immigrants moved to the area. After the Soviet immigration, families from the Caribbean, especially Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, made it their home. So many Dominicans live in Washington Heights that candidates for the presidency of the Dominican Republic campaign in parades in the area. In the 1980s African-Americans began to move in, followed shortly by other groups. “Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson” no longer described the area.

Late 20th and early 21st centuries

1980s crime epidemic

Although Washington Heights currently has among the lowest reported crime rates within neighborhoods in Manhattan, it was once very different.

In the 1980s, the area was severely affected by the crack cocaine epidemic, as was the rest of New York City. This was due, in part, to the neighborhood crack gang, known as the Wild Cowboys or the Red Top Gang, who were associated with Santiago Luis Polanco Rodríguez. The Wild Cowboys were responsible for the higher number of crimes, especially murders, during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Robert Jackall wrote a book, Wild Cowboys: Urban Marauders and the Forces of Order, describing the events that took place during that period of lawlessness. Homelessness was rampant. Washington Heights had become the largest drug distribution center in the Northeastern United States during that time. A housing project in the neighborhood was nicknamed “Crack City,” an epithet commonly bestowed upon rough areas at the time.

On October 18, 1988, 24-year-old Police Officer Michael Buczek was murdered by Dominican drug dealers in Washington Heights. The killers fled to the Dominican Republic, where one – Daniel Mirambeaux, the alleged shooter – died in police custody in June 1989 after plunging to his death under mysterious circumstances, and a second was apprehended by U.S. Marshals in 2000. The third suspect was apprehended in the Dominican Republic in May 2002, after which Pablo Almonte, 51, and Jose Fernandez, 52, received maximum 25-years-to-life prison sentences for their roles in the murder of Officer Buczek. In the ensuing years, the Buczek family founded the Michael John Buczek Foundation. There is a street, an elementary school, and a little league baseball field named in honor of Officer Buczek; in addition, Michael Buczek Little League hosts 30 teams with over 350 boys and girls, who are coached by officers from the 34th Precinct.

Urban renewal and lower crime rates

Crime fell in the subsequent years. Police presence increased, building landlords allowed police to patrol in apartment buildings, which led to the arrests of thousands of drug dealers a year in Washington Heights. The arrest of police officers involved in drug dealing changed the neighborhood dramatically. People were also being stopped for quality of life crimes. A new police precinct was also added in the area. Today, its crime rate, along with that of neighboring Harlem, is much lower.

Even though crime complaints were down 5.88% in 2007 over 2001 (and down 65.47% from 1993), there were five murders in lower Washington Heights (that is, below W. 178th St.) in 2007. By comparison, in the upper portion of Washington Heights, where the 34th Precinct includes Fort George, Hudson Heights and as well as the separate neighborhood of Inwood, there was only one murder in 2007; likewise, above W. 179th Street, crime complaints were down 21.05% in 2007 over 2001 (and down 83.15% from 1993). That puts lower Washington Heights on par with Harlem, where the 30th Precinct also recorded five murders in 2007. By comparison, the 13th Precinct (Flatiron District, Stuyvesant Town and Union Square) recorded three murders in 2007 and the 20th Precinct (the Upper West Side) recorded none.

By the 2000s, after years when gangsters ruled a thriving illegal drug trade, urban renewal began. Many Dominicans moved to Morris Heights, University Heights, and other West Bronx neighborhoods, as well as Los Angeles, California. While gentrification is often blamed for rapid changes in the neighborhood, the changes in population also reflect the departure of the dominant nationality. Even though Dominicans still make up 73 percent of the neighborhood, their moves to the Bronx have made room for other Hispanic groups, such as Ecuadorians, according to The Latino Data Project of the City University of New York. The proportion of whites in Washington Heights has declined from 18 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2005.

In 2011, Washington Heights was the fourth-safest neighborhood in Manhattan, according to one analysis of police records. Its “Crime and Safety Report,” which ranks every neighborhood in the five boroughs, found that the drop in crime in Upper Manhattan led the neighborhood nearly to the top; Inwood ranked third. By comparison, Greenwich Village ranked 68th.

The New York Post listed one part of the neighborhood – the block of Frederick Douglass Boulevard between West 155th Street and the Harlem River Drive – as one of “the most dangerous blocks in the city” because police crime statistics for 2015 showed that 18 robberies had been reported there, more than for any other city block.

Geography

Washington Heights is on the high ridge in Upper Manhattan that rises steeply north of the narrow valley that carries 133rd Street to the former ferry landing on the Hudson River that served the village of Manhattanville. Though the neighborhood was once considered to run as far south as 133rd Street, modern usage defines the neighborhood as running north from Hamilton Heights at 155th Street to Inwood, topping out at just below Hillside Avenue or Dyckman Street, depending on the source.

The wooded slopes of Washington Heights seen from a sandy cove on the Hudson as they were about 1845 are illustrated in a canvas by John James Audubon’s son, Victor Clifford Audubon, conserved by the Museum of the City of New York.

Location of Manhattan’s highest point:

Fifteen blocks from the northern end of Washington Heights, in its Hudson Heights neighborhood near Pinehurst Avenue and West 183rd Street in Bennett Park, is a plaque marking Manhattan’s highest natural elevation, 265 feet (81 m) above sea level, at what was the location of Fort Washington, the Revolutionary War camp of General George Washington and his troops, from whom Washington Heights takes its name.