Washington Heights became Washington Heights in the middle of the nineteenth century, when rich New Yorkers began to build estates on the dramatic high points of Manhattan far from the tumult of downtown docks and slums, the slave market on Wall Street. The naturalist John Audubon watched birds from his mansion on the once-wooded rise where my grandmother lives now. It must have been easy, in the quiet, to forget the brutal din of his father’s sugar plantation in Haiti, where he spent his earliest years pampered by enslaved women. Now, when I climb to catch the river’s blink and shine along the soaring ramparts of Fort Tryon Park—the old driveway of the gas baron C. K. G. Billings’s estate—it’s tempting to feel as if my love for the land absolves the circumstances of my access to it, an imperial illusion.
The illusion doesn’t last. My friend Pedro says he knew, growing up in the Heights, that the neighborhood’s grand architecture was not built with him or his people in mind. Now he’s an urban historian at Harvard. The cold gaze of history can’t kill the vibe of a blunt on High Bridge at moonrise, but it lays the psychic foundations for an inner city constructed over and against the fickle forms of brick and stone that house us without making us at home. The term “inner city” has never provided an accurate map of racialized urban poverty—what’s inner about a geography that drifts with the people it stigmatizes?—but I’ve always found it vaguely spiritual, as if the city carries a secret close to its heart, and only poor people are privy to it.
The precarious topography of Washington Heights—sharp ridges, hilltop streets—seems to mirror the precarity of our place in the built environment. From this vantage point it’s possible to glimpse the human city’s end, where the Hudson and the Harlem rivers meet, making a muddle of their colonial names. Is this what Bachelard means by “cosmicity”? I keep trying to make his terms work for me. He says that in memory people are “never real historians, but always near poets.” I’m not sure which I want to be—historian or poet—when I map my way through the uptown streets as I remember them, as my mother remembers them, as they stretch behind and before us beyond memory’s reach.