The northern border of Washington Heights/Inwood is Spite the Devil Creek (Spuyten Duyvil). There are about eight churches in the area that surely do just that at every worship day.
After a lifetime of frustrating the devil and all his ways, a resident can then take the trip to the southern border of the community to check into Manhattan’s only active cemetery to settle in for the trip to Heaven. The cemetery has a large Episcopal church (a branch of Trinity Wall Street) and a large crypt where they sometimes offer jazz sessions.
Surrounding the cemetery like guards of the righteous are a Russian Orthodox sanctuary, a Hispanic Catholic church and school, an African American AME church with a Hispanic congregation, and three other churches. In the bad old days, neighbors tell us that they regularly observed that some ne’er-do-wells got through the phalanx of heavenly guards. Some criminals would hide out in the cemetery, and one Trinitarios gang would hold ceremonies there.
Winding up our journeys through Washington Heights/Inwood, we went by one of the old gang headquarters, on 174nd Street, for Jonathan “Sweet Pea” Feliz of the Trinitarios. The compact mastermind and his own Dominican gang are gone after a massive pickup by a joint federal-city effort. This happened right about the time we were preparing to launch A Journey through NYC religions. We knew some of the gangsters by face. Now, there are still plenty of drug dealers visibly around, but the gang HQ seems to have moved (or is much less obvious). Gentrification is affecting gangs too!
Like the rest of Manhattan, Washington Heights/Inwood, which together make up Community District 12, is changing. Gentrification and even extreme gentrification is making their way up the 412 blocks of Amsterdam Avenue from the bottom of Manhattan to the top at 220th Street. Gentrification seems to have picked up speed around 2011 or 2012, particularly in Washington Heights. The population is growing by about .7% per year.
In 2017, there were 221,929 people inserted into a space that from above can look like a big impression of a sandal with horizontal and vertical striations, being the streets, going across and down the top of Manhattan.
In 2019, we completed the first-ever census of religious sites on those streets of Washington Heights/Inwood. We are still updating our database and will share with you some of the leading-edge results never before published!
We will publish an INTERACTIVE JOURNEY WASHINGTON HEIGHTS/INWOOD STORY WALL with Key Stats flashcards and Story-telling Maps.
For some of our other leading-edge INTERACTIVE JOURNEY STORY WALLS see:
JOURNEY BUSHWICK BROOKLYN ♥ Featuring 21 stories, KEY STATS and Story-telling MAPS
JOURNEY FLUSHING QUEENS ♥ Featuring 11 stories, KEY STATS and Story-telling MAPS
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