Hudson Heights, Manhattan

Before European explorers and settlers, the Lenape Indians lived on the island they called Mannahatta. Just to the north of Hudson Heights, in what is now Inwood Hill Park, the Lenape tribe exchanged the island for items worth about 60 Dutch Gilders in a deal with Peter Minuit in 1626. He named the island New Amsterdam. The area north of central Manhattan was called Niew Haarlem until the British gained control of the area during the Revolutionary War. They renamed the area Lancaster, and gave it a northern border near what is now 129th Street. The ridge that overlooks the Hudson River was once inhabited by the Wecquaesgeek Indians and called Chquaesgeck. Later it was called Lange Bergh (Long Hill) by Dutch settlers until the 17th century.[3]

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.[11]

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.[12] 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.[13] 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.[11]

Hudson Heights is known for its hills. Looking east up 181st Street from Plaza Lafayette

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.[14] 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 ... "[14]

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.[15]

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.[16] It was known as the Chittenden estate by 1864.[15] C. P. Bucking, a manufacturer of sheepskins,[17] named his home on land near the Hudson "Pinehurst", a name that survives as Pinehurst Avenue.[16]

At the turn of the 20th century the woods started being chopped down to make way for homes. The area was settled by Irish immigrants in the early years of the century.

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.[18][19] 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 setting for the book The Dragon Murder Case by S. S. Van Dine,[20] in which detective Philo Vance had to solve a murder on the grounds of the estate, where a dragon was supposed to have lived.[15]

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..."[21]

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..."[21]

During the World War I, immigrants from Hungary and Poland moved in next to the Irish.[22] Then, as Nazism grew in Germany, Jews fled their homeland. By the late 1930s, more than 20,000 refugees from Germany had settled in Washington Heights.[23]

Stairs running from the end of Pinehurst Avenue down to West 181st Street

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.[24] A disproportionately large number of Germans who settled in the area had come from Frankfurt-am-Main, possibly giving rise to new name.[21] No other neighborhood in the city was home to so many German Jews, who had created their own central German world in the 1930s.[25]

So cosmopolitan was that world that in 1934 members of the German-Jewish Club of New York started Aufbau, a newsletter for its members that grew into a newspaper. Its offices were nearby on Broadway.[26] The newspaper became known as a "prominent intellectual voice and a main forum for German Jewry in the United States," according to the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. "It featured the work of great prominent writers and intellectuals such as Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Stefan Zweig, and Hannah Arendt. It was one of the only newspapers to report on the atrocities of the Holocaust during World War II."[27]

In 1941 it published the Aufbau Almanac, a guide to living in the United States that explained the American political system, education, insurance law, the post office and sports.[28] After the war, Aufbau helped families that had been scattered by European battles to reconnect by listing survivors' names.[29] Aufbau's offices eventually moved to the Upper West Side. The paper nearly went bankrupt in 2006, but was purchased by Jewish Media AG, and exists today as a monthly news magazine. Its editorial offices are now in Berlin, but it keeps a correspondent in New York.[30]

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.[22] 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.[31] In the 1980s African-Americans began to move in, followed shortly by other groups. "Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson" no longer described the area.

Hudson View Gardens, one of the largest cooperative apartment complexes in the area, is designed in what the AIA Guide to New York City described as the "Scarsdale Tudor" style.[32]

"Hudson Heights" began to be used as a name for the neighborhood around 1993.[8][33] Neighborhood activists formed a group in late 1992 to help promote the neighborhood[34] and after considering several names, settled on the one that became part of their organization's name: Hudson Heights Owners' Coalition. According to one of the group's founders, real estate brokers did not start using the name until after the group was formed.[33]

The new name replaced the outdated reference to German heritage, which some have criticized, even though the German-speaking population is negligible at best.[35] Although many Russian speakers still live there, Spanish-speakers vastly outnumber the Russophones, and English remains the lingua franca.

Elizabeth Ritter, the president of the owners' group, said, "We didn't set out to change the name of the neighborhood, but we were careful in how we selected the name of the organization."[36] In 2011, Curbed New York published on article which used Hudson Heights as an example of "How to Gentrify a Neighborhood", the first step of which was "Create a nickname to separate the area from its crime-riddled past."[37]

Today the name "Hudson Heights" has been adopted by arts organizations such as Hudson Heights Duo and the Hudson Heights String Academy, and businesses including Hudson Heights Pediatrics and Hudson Heights Restoration. Newspapers from The Wall Street Journal[38] and the New York Times[39] to The Village Voice[40] use the name in reference to the neighborhood, as did The New York Sun before it went bankrupt,[24] Money magazine in its November 2007 article named Hudson Heights the best neighborhood to retire to in New York City.[41] "Hudson Heights" was used by Gourmet magazine in its September 2007 article about dining in Washington Heights,[42] and by The New Yorker in May 2016 about a concert in The Cloisters.[43]

Nearly every structure was built before World War II – which in New York real estate parlance is referred to as pre-war – many of them in the Art Deco style. Facades in the Tudor are also well represented, while others are in the Art Nouveau, Neo-Classical, and Collegiate Gothic styles. Many of the apartment houses are co-ops and a few are condos; the remainder are still rental buildings.

The largest residential complexes in the area were started by real estate developer Dr. Charles V. Paterno; Hudson View Gardens opened in 1924 and was originally started and sold as a housing cooperative. The Tudor-style complex was designed by the architect George F. Pelham, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.[9] Pelham also designed The Pinehurst on Fort Washington Avenue at West 180th Street, which opened in 1908.[44] Paterno is remembered by the Paterno Trivium,[45] erected in spring 2000 at the intersection of Cabrini Boulevard, Pinehurst Avenue and West 187th Street.

Pelham's son, George F. Pelham Jr., was the architect of Castle Village, on the other side of Cabrini Boulevard. This series of five buildings was finished in 1939 and converted to a co-op in 1985. On May 12, 2005 a large, 65-foot high retaining wall separating the Castle Village complex from the Henry Hudson Parkway collapsed onto the northbound lanes of the parkway and the 181st Street northbound on-ramp. Portions of the wall were nearly 100 years old according to records indicating the wall was constructed between 1905 and the 1930s.[46] The collapse lead to the on-ramp's closure for over two and half years; the entrance was reopened in March 2008.[47]

Beginning in the 1980s, some rental buildings in the area started converting to housing cooperatives or condominiums. In recent years, Hudson Heights has been an attractive area for homebuyers who want to stay in Manhattan but who can't afford downtown prices, or who want larger homes than those in the rest of Manhattan.[41][48] The multiple co-ops and condos in the area formed the Hudson Heights Owners Coalition in 1993.[49]

Another large cooperative is the 16-story Cabrini Terrace at 900 West 190th Street,[50] the tallest building in the neighborhood. Members of the co-op's board successfully lobbied the legislature to change the law that grants tax credits for the installation of solar panels in residences to include apartment buildings, which had been excluded.[51] Cabrini Terrace inaugurated its solar panels at a ceremony on January 24, 2008.

PS 187

Mother Cabrini High School was founded in 1899; the building dates from 1930. The school was closed in June 2014; a Success Academy Charter School began operating there in September 2014.

For grades kindergarten through 8, Hudson Heights is zoned to the New York City Department of Education's P.S./I.S. 187 Hudson Cliffs; it had 796 students as of the 2016–2017 school year.[81] In 2013, 43% of the school's third grade students met state standards in English, as opposed to 28% in the entire city.[8] The School Quality Snapshot of 2016-17 showed that 51% of the school's students met the state's standards in both English and Math, which compares favorably to citywide figures of 41% in English and 38% in Math.[9]

Another public school in the extended definition of the neighborhood is P.S. 173, located on Fort Washington Avenue between West 173 and 174th Streets, which includes grades pre-K through 5. P.S. 173's state test scores show that 34% met state standards in English, as opposed to 40% citywide, and 37% met the Math standards, compared to 42% in the city as a whole.[9]

Also located in the neighborhood was the Roman Catholic Mother Cabrini High School, which closed at the end of the 2013–14 school year;[82] the building is now a Success Academy Charter School.[83]

Private schools in the general area, including nearby Inwood, include Osher Early Learning Center;[84] the Medical Center Nursery School;[85] the YM/YWHA of Washington Heights and Inwood Nursery School;[86] and the City College Academy of the Arts,[87] a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.[8]

The nearest New York Public Library (NYPL) branch is the Fort Washington branch, located at 535 West 179th Street. The three-story Carnegie library opened in 1979.[88]

The primary north–south streets in Hudson Heights are:

• Fort Washington Avenue – named after Fort Washington, the last fortified position of the Continental Army in New York before the city was taken over by the British in the American Revolutionary War.[97]
• Pinehurst Avenue – named after "Pinehurst", the estate of sheepskin manufacturer C. P. Bucking[98][17]
• Cabrini Boulevard – formerly "Northern Avenue", the street was renamed in 1938 for Mother Cabrini, who was later canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.[79]
• Overlook Terrace – which runs at the bottom of the ridge from West 190th to 184th Street, was named for the view at the top of the street, before it descends[99]
• Bennett Avenue – which runs at the bottom of the ridge east of Overlook Terrace from Nagle Avenue to West 181st Street. It was named after James Gordon Bennett, Sr., who founded the New York Herald newspaper. His name is also enshrined on Bennett Park in the heart of the neighborhood.[100]

The entrance to 250 Cabrini Boulevard, also known as 822 West 187th Street, shows the Art Deco style prominent in the neighborhood; the building also has a facade on Chittendon Avenue

Other named or co-named streets in the neighborhood include:

• Alex Rose Place (West 186th Street between Chittenden Avenue and Cabrini Boulevard) – Rose was a milliner born in Warsaw in 1898 who became president of the United Hatters, Cap & Millinery Workers Union, and was a founder in 1944 of the Liberal Party of New York. Rose was considered to be a political kingmaker, and helped Fiorello H. LaGuardia and John Lindsay to reach office as Mayors of New York City. Rose lived at 200 Cabrini Boulevard nearby.[101]
• Chittenden Avenue – named in 1911 after Lucius Chittendon, a merchant from New Orleans[16] and the owner of the land between West 185th to 198th Streets. The street runs from West 186th to 187th Street, just west of Cabrini Boulevard.[102] Since the Henry Hudson Parkway runs almost directly below it, there are no buildings on the west side of the street, which therefore provides expansive views of the George Washington Bridge and the Palisades.
• Colonel Robert Magaw Place – named after Col. Robert Magaw, a lawyer from Philadelphia who commanded the American forces in Fort Washington during the Battle of Fort Washington. The street runs for two blocks from West 181st to 183rd Streets, east of Fort Washington Avenue and west of Bennett Avenue.[103]
• Jacob Birnbaum Way (portion of Cabrini Boulevard at West 187th Street) – named after Jacob Birnbaum, a human rights advocate born in Germany, and the founder in 1964 of Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, as well as other organizations. He lived at Cabrini and West 187th Street. The section of street was named after him on October 18, 2015.[104]
• Margaret Corbin Circle and Margaret Corbin Drive – The circle is outside the main entrance to Fort Tryon Park, while the drive runs from there through the park to the Henry Hudson Parkway. Both are named after Margaret Corbin, a heroine of the American Revolution who took her husband's place in a cannon crew after he was killed,[105] and subsequently the first female pensioner of the United States. Her annual pension was a suit of clothes and cash equivalent to the cost of a half-pint of liquor.[106]
• Paterno Trivium (intersection of Cabrini Boulevard, Pinehurst Avenue and West 187th Street) – named after Dr. Charles V. Paterno, a dentist-turned-real estate developer who built the Hudson View Gardens cooperative complex, and lived in a mansion known as "Paterno's Castle", on the site of what is now Castle Village, another one of his developments. The Trivium – Latin for the meeting of three streets – was designed by architect Thomas Navin, and was designated part of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation's "Greenstreets" program in 2000. It was formally dedicated on August 4, 2001, the birth date of Dr. Paterno. It features a small garden and benches for sitting.[107][108]
• Plaza Lafayette (West 181st Street between Cabrini Boulevard and Riverside Drive) – The original name of Riverside Drive was "Boulevard Lafayette", named after the Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution, and this small plaza retains the name.[109] An overlook on the west end of the plaza features views of the Henry Hudson Parkway, the George Washington Bridge, the Hudson River, and the Palisades.