Washington Heights

Washington Heights is named after the first President of the United States, mainly it is named after him because during the revolutionary war General Washington and his army built a fort there in order to fight off the British forces. The reason the fort was built there is because between what is now 183^rd and 185^th Fort Washington Avenue there is the highest natural elevation in Manhattan. Washington and his forces also used the Morris-Jumel Mansion, also in Washington Heights, in order to plan their strategy. The Continental Army lost the Battle of Fort Washington but after they left New York Washington Heights became the place where richer New Yorkers moved to as the rest of the city was grew more and more crowded. In the early 1900s the subway started going uptown and Tenement houses began to be built in the Heights.

The first communities to live there were Eastern European Jews and upper-class African Americans. During the 1930s Greeks began to move into the area then from the 1940s and 1950s Puerto Ricans. In the 1960s Cubans fleeing communism moved in, then from the 1960s till today Dominicans became the largest population of inhabitants.

“Washington Heights has welcomed immigrants for a century. The Irish arrived in the early 1900s. European Jews, among them the family of Henry Kissinger, flocked there to escape the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, around the time that affluent African-Americans like the jazz musician Count Basie migrated up from Harlem. By the 1950s and 1960s, so many Greeks lived in Washington Heights that the neighborhood was known as the Astoria of Manhattan.”(New York Times)

Today Washington Heights is home to many historical and Cultural institutions; the oldest standing bridge in NYC “High Bridge;” the oldest House on Manhattan “The Morris-Jumel Mansion” and Bennet Park where Fort Washington used to stand. As well as being home to The Cloisters Museum a structure made from 5 Medieval Cloisters which houses part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval Europe exhibit.

Besides this high art, Washington Heights was also home to many of the early graffiti artists and a haven/source of information for artists from other boroughs. Today the influence of these artists still remains and can be seen in the works of the previous generation as well as those of the new.

“In Washington Heights, it was on 188th Street and Audubon Avenue. We would hang out, see our work, and everyone could get autographs. C.A.T. 87 was from Washington Heights. TRACY 168 was in the first generation.” (NY Magazine)