#cuj

By Joey Francilus

The Hudson River shoreline of upper Manhattan in early 2015, as seen from Riverbank State Park in Hamilton Heights. Northward view of the Hudson Valley, George Washington Bridge and skyline of Washington Heights.

This is the centuries-old story of gentrification―but this time, the hipsters are coming. Let’s call this the “hipsterfication” of upper Manhattan, a trend of middle and upper-middle-class Generation Y and Millennials—mostly unmarried twenty- and thirty-somethings—dominating Washington Heights and Hamilton Heights and moving into the area at a rate of over twofold the population of childless young adults from a generation before, preceding the attacks of September 11th.

What’s emerging in the rock highland area north of the Manhattanville valley historically known as Washington Heights—an area from 135th Street to Dyckman Street, and west of St. Nicholas Avenue and the Harlem River to the Hudson River and including Hamilton Heights, is yet another New York neighborhood experiencing a major sociocultural shift as one ethnic group slowly replaces another, changing the character of the neighborhood. It's yet another movement in the constantly shifting fabric of the Big Apple and the world of people who define it.

The Highbridge Water Tower, as seen from Highbridge Park in Washington Heights, December 2014.

In the residential streets interspersed between the bustling boulevards of Washington Heights, also historically West Harlem and nicknamed “the Heights,” are new businesses sprouting up where Hispanic-owned ma-and-pas once dominated. There's no animosity between business owners, but rather a resigned indifference: the neighborhood's changing for good or naught.

At the Genesys Unisex Salon on Broadway between 148th and 149th Streets, the Dominican shop owner commands a salon of three dressers and a barber just below street level along the heavily traveled thoroughfare. The Broadway-IRT line of the New York City Subway rumbles the walls of the establishment intermittently as Spanish-language pop tunes play on the radio while she compares clientele from the past and now. 

“White people moving in isn't a bad thing,” Genesys says in Spanish to a patron in her chair. “They bring in business, whatever they are.”

The sentiment is shared by a nearby Dominican pharmacy owner across the street and is a drama Dominican Americans and other Latinos in Washington Heights know all too well.

According to U.S. Census figures, between 2000 and 2010 the number of Latinos (defined by the census as Cubans, Mexicans, and other Central, Caribbean, and South American countries once under the dominion of the Spanish empire) and non-Latino black Americans declined in the Heights by about seven- and 20 percent, respectively. During the same period, the number of non-Latino white Americans living in the area increased by nearly 230 percent.

This neighborhood, including Hamilton Heights, is home to around 205,000 people and is yet another New York neighborhood creepily altered by reverse white flight.

Westward view of West 145th Street and Riverside Drive in Hamilton Heights, May 28, 2015. Skyline of Edgewater, New Jersey, and Hudson River visible center-background.

Sustained demand for Manhattan real estate combined with northern Manhattan's historically lowest rents is leading landowners to raise their annual rents incrementally, slowly pricing out lower-income residents of the neighborhood. Real estate salespeople and developers shy from using the term at the risk of being insensitive to those left to find housing in the outer boroughs or New Jersey when pushed out. But gentrification, by definition, is occurring.

It appears in the Princeton WordNet Search defined as:

The restoration of run-down urban areas by the middle class, resulting in the displacement of low-income residents.

Rents bottoming out at around $1,000 seem ideal for the young, unattached singles that define the Millennials, a generation of Americans who were born between 1980 and 1994 and are the last to know a world without smartphones, are being lured to the Heights by cheaper rents. The $1,000 rents bring in bargain renters desiring to live in New York County without paying the $2,000 base prices for SoHo and Greenwich Village.

Real estate broker and Dominican native Ramón Montilla, 63, owns a six-story pre-war mixed-use building between West 158th and West 159th streets on Broadway, and a barbershop at the southeast corner of 159th.

“I don't run it. I just own it,” Montilla quips on a freezing January Wednesday afternoon after he drove to our meeting from his upper-middle-class, detached two-story Riverdale home in the Bronx to his office along New York's most storied boulevard.

A buzzing crowd of about 10 barbers chats at his salon adorned Dominican flags as a cohort of macho men bustle in discussions on women, work, and life. One of the barbers briefly pauses his conversation as Montilla peers in.

“¿Oye jefe, cómo estás?” a barber asks his leering boss Montilla.

“Todos bien. Gracias,” he replied, before promptly walking both of us to his window-pane office frontage a few doors down.

Three employees manage his properties. He lives comfortably, coyly copping to an income in the low seven figures which provides a comfortable living for him, his wife, and three children.

“When I first went into business around 14 years ago, most of it was with Dominican clients,” Montilla recounts.

The time was around March 2002, when he received his real estate license to market in New York and New Jersey, mere months after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. Montilla says he saw an uptick in white-collar workers in the decade following the attacks beginning around 2004.

“Suddenly, people who used to live downtown don’t want to live there because they have bad memories of the towers falling. But, they still want to live in the city, they still want to be in the mix.”

Montilla went on to describe the new tenants.

“You had many more professionals moving into the neighborhood looking for a place to live. And I’m in the business to make money, so if you have five people who want the same apartment, you’re going to rent to the one who wants to pay the most.”

The history of Washington Heights is one where American ethnic minorities successively replace one another, informing the social conscience of New York City.

Westward view of the George Washington Bridge and Fort Lee, New Jersey, from Washington Heights, January 2014.

The modern “Heights” began to take shape in the mid-17th century, when the Dutch first settled in the area they called “Nieuw (New) Harlem,” named for the 11th-century Dutch municipality. The British took over the area a few short years later in 1664, renaming the fledgling farm community Lancaster until the end of the American Revolutionary War when General and later first U.S. President, George Washington won the territory for the newly-founded American colonies in 1783.

The area remained sparsely populated until the early 20th century when the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (predecessor to the modern and unified MTA New York City Subway) commenced subway service from now-closed City Hall station north to the modern 145th Street station at Broadway.

West-facing IRT subway tunnel wall at the 145th Street station underneath Broadway in Hamilton Heights, as seen from the north end of the downtown platform, 2014.

By the 1920s, a sizable population of eastern Europeans from countries like Poland and Ukraine, escaping the overcrowding of lower Manhattan, moved uptown during the Harlem Renaissance. Jews pushed out of Europe by fascist powers like Adolf Hitler, immigrated to the United States and forged a place for themselves in the Heights from the 1930s through the 1960s.

The “Space Age” of the 1960s brought in a Spanish-speaking contingent of Latinos from the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, many of whom migrated to upper Manhattan. As of late, one of Manhattan's last two Latino bastions, the other East Harlem, is becoming ever more “vanilla.”

The families of the old-money, upper-middle-class techies and hedge-fund managers are now seeking a life away from the suburbs they knew as children, markedly moving to the previously undesirable, working-class neighborhoods in northeast Brooklyn and northern Manhattan in a spike that started since the mid-2000s.

What brought Dominicans to Manhattan is what brings ethnic groups from across the world to the most densely populated land parcel in the United States: dreams of better living. Manhattan’s always been the most desirable borough to live, America's economic hub. 

Washington Heights still remains an important political stronghold for middle- and working-class Dominicans and for socially progressive local politicians. Latin restaurants emanate spicy cuisine of the Dominican Republic at diners like the Punta Cana Restaurant at 159th Street and Broadway. Down the street, at 157th Street near Edward M. Morgan Place and Broadway, is a sort of hub for Latino Manhattanites, who hustle for every dollar and where Spanish is the dominant commercial language.

A steak and onion sandwich at Punta Cana Restaurant in Washington Heights, January 2014.

Since the 1960s, the population of Dominicans living in Manhattan neighborhoods north of 110th Street in the Heights grew tremendously in number.

The domestic housing boom of the mid-2000s widened the income gap throughout the nation and was exemplified in Hamilton Heights and Washington Heights. The neighborhoods were routinely redlined by major U.S. banks as havens for drug crime after the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act from the 1970s and through the early 1990s.

As incomes for Wall Street brokers in downtown increased exponentially between the 1980s and the mid-2000s, and with real estate in downtown, midtown, and around Central Park always at a premium, a relatively higher availability of housing inventory combined with relatively low prices when compared to most of Manhattan made the Heights highly desirable.

Northeastward view of West 155th Street at Hooper Fountain, Edgecombe Avenue, Harlem River Driveway, and St. Nicholas Place on Coogan’s Bluff and toward East Harlem, at the north-south boundary of Washington Heights and Hamilton Heights, February 2015.

These folks with higher incomes move into the neighborhood at time when a 2012 study by the Urban Studies Journal finds Latinos like Dominicans, who currently make up somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of the population of Hamilton Heights and Washington Heights, are not immigrating to urban cores as they historically have, but instead migrating away from them.

“Whereas before most of the clients were like me, from my country, now I’d say one out of every 10 people my landlords rent to are Dominican,” Montilla conjectured.

“A lot of the Dominicans move to the outer boroughs now, it’s cheaper. I have a client who I’m renting a three-bedroom apartment in Jersey for $700 a month. You can’t get a bathroom for that much anymore in Manhattan. A studio these days goes for at least $1000.”

Neighborhoods in suburban boroughs like the Bronx and upper Queens are experiencing marked increases in the number of Dominicans and other Latinos who were priced out of living in Manhattan living in outer boroughs, some of the highest intercity migration rates throughout the city.

Eastward view of the Bronx skyline, as seen from Highbridge Park in Washington Heights, February 2015.

Catherine Rosario, 26, an Upper West Side hairdresser, grew up in a working-class street near West 168th Street in Washington Heights.

“My parents bought our building about 10 years ago,” says Rosario during a break from styling clients hair at a Morningside Heights hair salon. She makes a steady income as a beautician which covers her living essentials like phone, clothing, and other personal effects. Her family emigrated from the Dominican Republic with her over a decade ago.

Growing up with fellow Dominicans around New York Presbyterian–Columbia University Medical Center, and at hot spots like the 24-hour Punta Cana Restaurant and the childhoods summers at Fort Tryon Park, caused her to forage for a way to stay in the place she’d always call home. But by the time she hoped to rent her first apartment in 2009, the price exceeded her housing budget.

Dominican Americans demonstrating on Duarte Square at Broadway, West 169th Street and Audubon Avenue in Washington Heights, April 9, 2015.

“Before, you could rent a studio in the area for $750 just four, five years ago [in 2008 and 2009]. Now, you can't get anything for under $1,200,” Rosario said.

The New York State Comptroller backs her claim, with base rents of around $730 dollars around 2005 rising by nearly 70 percent to around a 2010 median average rent price in the area generally from a base price of between $900 and $1,000 per month.

Luxury real estate firm Brown Harris Stevens estimates a studio between Riverside Drive and Broadway north of 135th Street through the West 140s and West 180s going for $1,600 per month in early 2014, and StreetEasy.com averaging a February 2014 monthly rent for an 800 sq. ft. apartment in the Heights at a ceiling of $1,800.

Rosario makes enough money to cover her incidentals and hopes to move out of her family's first-floor apartment. But she personifies what many Millennial twenty-somethings are experiencing, and what sociologists are calling “emerging childhood”—delay in the accomplishing of major life goals, mainly moving out of one’s parents’ home permanently.

Next door to the aforementioned Genesys’ salon is a new, a hip coffee shop attracting a regular and eclectic clientele of artists, Columbia grad students, writers, actors, and just people hanging out and getting caught up on the latest local news with a newspaper and online, or watching the latest Netflix hit show, “House of Cards.”

Realtors Andrew Ding and Karen Cantor saw some potential in vacant basement storefront between 148th and 149th Street in late 2011, decidedly creating The Chipped Cup coffee shop.

By April 2012, the two Bohemian Realty agents opened up shop, becoming a popular niche coffee shop where none existed up and down Broadway for at least 20 blocks either way.

Northward view of St. Nicholas Avenue at West 147th Street toward Donnellan Square in the Sugar Hill historic district of Hamilton Heights, January 2015.

“Prior to [Andrew and I] renovating it, it was pretty gross. Like, if you had seen it, it was this dark, cavernous, in rubbles place, and, no one wanted it, and I was like, ‘what?’ I just saw potential in it, especially in the outdoor space. And I like fact that its a little tucked away, you have to go downstairs. It’s like a secret, but it's tucked away. only the locals really know about it. it's for this community. so, I was like, ‘I could do something with this space.’ ... so I talked with the landlord and asked if I could do something here and he was like ‘okay.’”

Cantor mentions opening horror stories, and how the 'Cup' shared coffee with Harlem Public, a nearby restaurant that opened within weeks of Ding and Cantor in the summer of 2012. Both owners report steady business as steady clientele has made it a go-to spot for local residents. On a given weekday evening, patrons may overhear an actor talk about their latest role in Broadway's “Motown: The Musical,” a budding musician debuting his latest tune at an open mic, or a group of girlfriends meeting up for artisanal lattes.

“People throw around this word ‘gentrification’ and it's just bullshit,” quips Ding.

Southwestward view of stairs up to the escarpment at Jackie Robinson Park near West 147th Street, toward the Sugar Hill district of Hamilton Heights, January 2015.

“When I first moved to the neighborhood in 2009, there were just hair salons and bodegas but there were no places to hang out, just everyone cooped up in their apartment. So [Karen and] I worked out a deal with the landlord I work for at the time to conceive of a place where people in the community could just come and hang out,” Ding explained.

Both owners say their admittedly hip establishment is welcome in the community. Karen, who created the design of the shop, goes so far in appreciating customers to the point of including silhouette portrait of select regulars framed along opposing walls of the shop. Both say they don't expect those who frequent Dunkin’ Donuts to come to our coffee shop and vice versa.

“We know our targeted audience, and those people want just a little bit more than that,” Ding said. “Just look at Harlem Public, people want the same amenities you can get in Midtown, SoHo, the Lower East Side, and it was only a matter of time before a business like ours sprang up.”

Cantor loves the hub the shop has become, though she has one reservation.

“That's the history of coffee shops, you look back to France, the artists and writers all congregated there and philosophized, and all these great ideas came out of coffee shops. I don't know if that still happens [here] because everyone's on their computers in their own bubbles, but we'll see.”

Ding is honest in his assessment of the development of northern Manhattan.

“[Development] of uptown is just a matter of supply and demand. There's only so much cheap, available land in Manhattan, and Uptown's the final frontier, for good or bad.  You see it from the rent increases, just look at the numbers, Uptown has experienced the highest rent spikes in Manhattan.”

The Church of the Intercession in Washington Heights, February 2015.

Small businessman Johnny Castillo is something of a jack-of-all-trades. He operates a modest storefront business on Broadway and 150th Street, catering to a mostly Dominican clientele at the northern end of Hamilton Heights. Castillo has been in business at the location since 2008, offering an assortment of services ranging from a wall of six computers offering a local library-of-sorts for Internet access, and tax preparation and accounting.

“It’ll get busy soon with tax season,” Castillo remarks. After moving to America from his native Dominican Republic in 2006, he initially lived in the Heights but moved within three years as annual rent increases made it financially intolerable and causing him to move to Kingsbridge in the Bronx.

“I’m not missing any of the action [by] not living in Manhattan,” the entrepreneur said on a cold January afternoon as he sat at his leather chair and desk in his leather chair peering out of his modest, three-meter wide storefront.

Castillo initially lived in Washington Heights paying a rent of around $800 for him, his stay-at-home wife, and daughter. As the rent crept up to around $1000, Castillo had enough and moved to Kingsbridge. The trends acknowledged by Montilla repeated in Castillo's story and that of the many Hispanics being priced out of the neighborhood they called home for decades.

Westward view of the southwest corner at St. Nicholas Avenue and West 172nd Street in Washington Heights, March 2015.

In the years since the first election of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the city has experienced an explosive growth in the number of well-paid yuppies.

The population of the nation’s wealthiest and their families in Manhattan, the millionaires and billionaires of the so-called “one-percent,” increased by about 20 percent between 2000 and 2010, numbering around 400,000 of the island’s 1.6 million residents in 2013, according to The Nation magazine. The billionaire businessman Mayor Bloomberg, worth around $30 billion in 2013, passed several city ordinances, jobs, and incentives for entrepreneurs to move into the city by promising tax-free start-up costs for their first decade in business in New York City.

The demand for housing caused many middle-class families, who previously could afford to live in some rough-and-tumble areas as far south as Hell’s Kitchen and north as Inwood and Marble Hill, to find housing elsewhere around the city.

Another factor affecting housing prices in Washington Heights is the overarching influence of Columbia University, the largest single employer and landowner in upper Manhattan at over 15,000 employees.

An eastward view of College Walk at Columbia University in Morningside Heights, November 2014.

Since Columbia moved to their third and most recent campus at Morningside Heights at the turn of the 20th century, the Colonial college had a stake in the real estate of uptown. Originally intending to build the new campus near the current site of City College near 135th Street, the school settled on properties between 113th Street and 120th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.

Since the early 1900s, the expanding “Academic Acropolis” and housing demand from its students, faculty, and other workers are another contributor to rising rents in the Heights as the promise steady, annual income gives landowners more cause to have sustained rent increase that is not expected to go down anytime soon.

The University's most recent land grab dates to the 1960s. Then, major student protests in 1968 led then University President Grayson L. Kirk to delay plans and resign in disgrace. As of late, President Lee C. Bollinger, potentially realizing the damage of another troublesome decided against this and created a “Community Benefits Agreement” in 2010 upon constructing Columbia Manhattanville Jerome L. Greene Science Center.

The Butler Library at Columbia University, as seen from the steps of the Low Library in Morningside Heights, November 2014.

The agreement guarantees, among other things, that the majority of hires for the 125th Street project reside in the nearby West Harlem neighborhood and to work with the local business owners to minimize potential economic impacts the new facilities expected to open during the fall of 2015.