Robert W. Snyder | Cornell University Press | 2019

Reviewed by Sam Gelman

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In 1943, a collection of newspapers, including the New York Times, published the New York City Market Analysis, which broke down the city's social and economic elements based on federal census data. In the report, the authors called New York a "city of a hundred cities," noting the various neighborhoods' vast populations, cultural diversities, and economic disparities. Robert W. Snyder's Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City takes that description one step further for its titular locale, arguing that Washington Heights is a neighborhood of a hundred neighborhoods. Snyder, who is a professor of journalism and American studies at Rutgers University, begins his history of the upper Manhattan neighborhood at the beginning, noting its original inhabitants, the Munsee, who called the area Lenapehoking (the Land of the People). Fast-forward 150 years and the land gets a new name, Washington Heights—named after the local Fort Washington. It would remain a rural zone until the early 20th century, when the completion of the George Washington Bridge and subway expansion made the area more accessible. Cheap rent and decent job opportunities made the neighborhood a draw for Jewish, Irish, and Greek immigrants, with Jews—including a substantial number of German Jews fleeing the Nazis and those attending Yeshiva University—making up three-eighths of the Washington Heights population. However, as Snyder notes, integration did not come easily to the neighborhood. The various populations "lived in urban villages organized around their own ethnic group," with Jews living west of Broadway and the Irish making their home in the northern neighborhood of Inwood. Antisemitism was common, but not as common as the racism against the Black community, who started to move north from Harlem into the Heights in the 1940s and 1950s. From there, Snyder goes through the long and tumultuous history of the neighborhood, covering the racial gang conflict over Highbridge Pool that, as Snyder argues, both the city's government and media mistook for "juvenile delinquency," the still ongoing fight over school integration, and the economic crisis in the 1970s. It was around this time that the neighborhood began to take its modern shape, with a large population of Dominicans moving in while substantial portions of the Irish and Jewish population left for the suburbs. The area continued to struggle into the 1980s, with five hospitals closing between 1967 and 1983. The city's overall drug problem of that decade also hit the Heights pretty hard, making the streets, parks, and public pools dangerous to be around after dark. But there were bright spots of collaboration between the neighborhood's various groups. As Snyder writes, "Interfaith work in Northern Manhattan wasn't always easy, but it was rewarding." Together, Dominicans, Jews, and the Irish worked together for the betterment of their community, improving education services, reclaiming control of the local playgrounds, and setting up safe-haven bars where the owners, "instead of defending it against all corners, invited the whole world… Whoever you were, you could find a place at the bar, a table for dinner, and a picture on the wall that reminded you of someone you knew." The 1990s and early 2000s brought both hope and despair. In the shadow of the crack years and just two months after 9/11, American Airlines Flight 587 between the U.S. and the Dominican Republic crashed, killing 260 people, many of them residents of the Heights. In learning about the victims' lives, New York City glimpsed a "fuller picture of the Dominican diaspora and Washington Heights… Dominicans were finally acknowledged in defining ways as immigrants—just like so many other New Yorkers." Today, Washington Heights is a safer and healthier place, no longer dealing with the economic and criminal dangers of the '70s, '80s, and early '90s. However, the "economic remaking of Manhattan for the world's leisure class" has left the neighborhood in a limbo state, with the "distribution of the full fruits of neighborhood residents' victory over what formed the urban crisis and its aftermath" remaining uncertain. However, as Snyder notes, "It would be wrong, however, to think that the history of Washington Heights boiled down to nothing more than differences and divisions. Even though people never achieved anything like 'unity,' they did find ways to work together often enough to make a significant difference in the welfare of their neighborhood." In other words, it's a place worth fighting for. To read more Straus Center book reviews, click here. You can learn more about the Straus Center and sign up for our newsletter here. Be sure to also like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and Instagram and connect with us on LinkedIn.