WASHINGTON HEIGHTS — A new book delves into the complex history of Washington Heights and its uncertain future as a stronghold for working and middle-class New Yorkers.
"Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City," by author Robert Snyder, looks into the neighborhood's transition from being nicknamed "Frankfurt on the Hudson" because of its large German Jewish population to its current designation as home to the country's largest Dominican community.
Snyder, a sometimes-journalist and current professor of American Studies at Rutgers University, planned to discuss his work at a reception hosted by Coogan's Restaurant on Sunday from 4 to 6 p.m. All sales of books at the event will benefit the volunteer-run bookstore and community center Word Up.
For the book, Snyder pulled together research, oral histories and current reporting to tell the story of the neighborhood from the Great Depression through the current day. In it, he tackles World War II, the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, the crack epidemic of the 1980s and the neighborhood’s later rebirth.
The author said he always felt a connection to the Heights.
“I spent the first year of my life there with my parents, who lived very happily in Washington Heights from 1952 to 1956,” he said. “I grew up in North Jersey listening to my parents' stories of their old neighborhood that they loved very, very much.”
Snyder came back in 1989 to report on the crack epidemic that raged through parts of Upper Manhattan. At the time, he could only imagine a dark future for the neighborhood.
However, Snyder maintained his membership at a local synagogue, and in 2003 friends from there encouraged him to revisit the area.
“I came back in 2003 to see that the neighborhood had transformed,” he said. “There was a new local paper, new small businesses, a growing arts community, and many of these initiatives seemed to have come from the ground up.”
Snyder’s main focus in the book is the rebuilding that has taken place over the last few decades, a process he said brought together disparate communities to rehabilitate housing, build new schools, restore parks and decrease crime.
The book's name is a tribute to that work, which required communities to cross the neighborhood’s central artery — Broadway — that divided people across racial, cultural and socioeconomic borders for decades.
"Crossing Broadway" also looks at the Heights' future as a bastion for working and middle-class New Yorkers. Snyder said many of the people who helped the neighborhood through its most difficult years are now being squeezed out due to rising rents and the income gap. This time, he said, the solutions will require more than local efforts.
“As much as local people worked heroically in Washington Heights, a lot of the solutions, like income equality and housing protections, are out of their grasp,” he said.
“They need help at the city level, the state level and even the global level. There’s a need to shape new policies to help people.”
