The Old Neighborhood

by Sarah Loft

Title

The Old Neighborhood

Artist

Sarah Loft

Medium

Photograph - Digitally Painted Photograph

Description

This was photographed in the northern reaches of the Washington Heights area of Manhattan, New York and digitally "painted" and aged.

Per Wikipedia: Washington Heights is a New York City neighborhood of over 150,000 inhabitants (2010) in the northern reaches of the borough of Manhattan. It is named for Fort Washington, a fortification constructed at the highest point on Manhattan island by Continental Army troops during the American Revolutionary War, to defend the area from the British forces. Washington Heights is bordered by Harlem to the south, along 155th street, Inwood to the north along Hillside Avenue, the Hudson River to the west and the Harlem River and Coogan's Bluff to the east.

Washington Heights is on the high ridge in Upper Manhattan that rises steeply north of the narrow valley that carries 133rd Street to the former ferry landing on the Hudson River that served the village of Manhattanville. Though the neighborhood was once considered to run as far south as 133rd Street, modern usage defines the neighborhood as running north from Hamilton Heights at 155th Street to Inwood, topping out just below Hillside Avenue.

The wooded slopes of Washington Heights seen from a sandy cove on the Hudson as they were about 1845 are illustrated in a canvas by John James Audubon's son, Victor Clifford Audubon, conserved by the Museum of the City of New York.

Fifteen blocks from the northern end of Washington Heights, in its Hudson Heights neighborhood near Pinehurst Avenue and 183rd Street in Bennett Park, is a plaque marking Manhattan's highest natural elevation, 265 ft (80.8 m) above sea level, at what was the location of Fort Washington, the Revolutionary War camp of General George Washington and his troops, from whom Washington Heights takes its name.

The Battle of Fort Washington, which occurred on November 16, 1776, saw Fort Washington fall to the British at great cost to the American forces; 130 soldiers were killed or wounded, and an additional 2,700 captured and held as prisoners, many of whom died on prison ships anchored in New York Harbor. The British renamed it "Fort Knyphausen" to honor the German general who had led the successful attack, and held it for the remainder of the war. The progress of the battle is marked by a series of bronze plaques along Broadway.

The series of ridges overlooking the Hudson were sites of villas in the 19th century, including the extensive property of John James Audubon.

In the early 1900s, Irish immigrants moved to Washington Heights. European Jews went to Washington Heights to escape Nazism during the 1930s and the 1940s. During the 1950s and 1960s, many Greeks moved to Washington Heights; the community was referred to as the "Astoria of Manhattan." By the 1980/90s, the neighborhood became mostly Dominican.

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Featured in the ABC group, June 2017.

Featured in the No Place Like Home group, July 2018.

Uploaded

May 31st, 2017

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