Community History
Manhattan north of 155th Street holds four centuries of city history — and far older stories than that. This page is a community project: a starting sketch of where we've been, built to grow with the memories, photos, and corrections of the people who live here.
Before 1600
Lenapehoking
Long before the grid, this land was part of Lenapehoking, home to the Lenape people, who fished the rivers, farmed the lowlands, and sheltered in the rock caves of what is now Inwood Hill Park. The park still holds the last natural forest and salt marsh in Manhattan — the closest thing we have to the island as the Lenape knew it.
1600s–1700s
Farms, forts, and revolution
Dutch and English farming families settled the uplands — the Dyckman Farmhouse (c. 1784) still stands on Broadway as Manhattan's last colonial farmhouse. In November 1776, the Battle of Fort Washington was fought across these hills; Margaret Corbin, the first woman to receive a U.S. military pension, fought at the spot that now bears her name at Fort Tryon. The Morris-Jumel Mansion (1765), Manhattan's oldest surviving house, served as Washington's headquarters.
1800s
From countryside to city's edge
Through the nineteenth century this remained the city's green countryside — estates, orchards, and the naturalist John James Audubon's farm near 155th Street. At the century's end the Harlem River Ship Canal (1895) cut across the island's northern tip, and when the old riverbed was filled in 1914, Marble Hill found itself attached to the mainland — physically in the Bronx, legally and proudly part of Manhattan to this day.
1900s–1930s
The subway builds a neighborhood
The IRT subway reached Washington Heights in 1906, and apartment houses followed by the block — much of the district's Art Deco streetscape dates to this boom. The George Washington Bridge opened in 1931; Fort Tryon Park and The Cloisters, gifts of John D. Rockefeller Jr., opened at the decade's end; and the United Palace (1930), one of the city's five great 'Wonder Theatres,' rose on 175th Street.
1930s–1950s
A refuge uptown
Washington Heights has always been a landing place. Irish and Greek communities put down roots early in the century, and in the 1930s and '40s thousands of German and Austrian Jewish families fleeing Nazism made the neighborhood 'Frankfurt on the Hudson.' Institutions that anchor the district today — Yeshiva University, Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center — grew alongside these communities.
1960s–today
El Alto Manhattan
From the 1960s onward, families from the Dominican Republic transformed Washington Heights and Inwood into the heart of the Dominican diaspora — El Alto Manhattan — filling the district with businesses, music, and civic life, and sending the first Dominican-Americans to elected office in the country. The neighborhood's story reached Broadway in 'In the Heights.' Landmarks carry heavier memories too: Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom on 165th Street in 1965. Today's CB12M — advocating for parks, housing, small business, and city services — is part of this long, unfinished story.
This history belongs to you
Did your family arrive in the Heights in the '40s, the '70s, or last year? Do you have photographs, programs, menus, or memories of the neighborhood? We want this page to be written by the community it describes. Share your story and we'll work with you to add it.
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