In the Heights, Sounding Out

Washington Heights, as viewed from W 187th St. Photo by Petri Krohn.

Every night, at 7 P.M., New Yorkers across the city gather at their opened windows to generate all the noise they can muster: cheers, whistles, clanking pots and pans; sounds of a grieving community’s appreciation for the essential workers and healthcare professionals staving off the novel coronavirus’ destructive wrath currently upending our city, nation, and world around us. (A few nights ago, a neighbor bellowed on his saxophone from his fire escape, launching into recently-deceased soul singer Bill Withers’ uplifting classic, “Lean On Me,” to rousing ovation. Last night, it was John Lennon’s “Instant Karma!” These are inspired moments.) Here, in Washington Heights, home of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center where the battle rages nightly, the #ClapBecauseWeCare campaign is the latest, if subtle, aural change in the neighborhood’s sonic landscape. Recently, at the end of another consecutive largest single-day increase of COVID-19 fatalities in New York City, I informed my four-year-old and two-year-old daughters—busy neglecting their dinners in favor of more playtime—that the people outside were “cheering for mommy, and people like mommy.” We joined in the noisemaking. Indeed, my wife had just left our apartment for her overnight RN shift at New York Presbyterian Hospital, a walk now complemented by the celebratory hoops, hollers, bangs, and clashes echoing through the streets of our neighborhood.

We moved to New York City some nine months ago; the first eight were already challenging enough for our family of four. I accepted a job at Columbia University, a temporary postdoctoral position that brought career advances and personal satisfaction, even if, as Governor Cuomo regularly reminds the watching world, New York is a tough place to live (and that its people, beloved New Yorkers, are innately tough because of it.) I live here now, and yeah, in the face of this unprecedented crisis, I can attest: New Yorkers are tough as hell. More important, they’re also incredibly caring and compassionate—characteristics not mutually exclusive, but complimentary, like savory and sweet compounds. From afar, we’ve all seen this city, time and again, pick itself back up in the wake of its crises; this situation is no different. In a narrative I created for people we’ve met here, I’d convinced myself, and others, that we moved here for my career prospects. Lately, it’s become clear to me that we moved here for hers: our family hero on the front lines at the epicenter of the scariest global public health crisis in well over a century. And only a few short months into her new position. 

Last fall, in my “U.S. Latinx History” undergraduate course at Columbia, I spent a few weeks discussing New York City’s storied social, cultural, and political Latinx histories in the places and spaces throughout the city, encouraging students to consider final research projects on figures and iconic neighborhoods surrounding the campus: El Barrio, Quisqueya (Washington) Heights, and Inwood, among others. As a historian, I had read of these places before—the work of Dominican-American sociologist Ginetta Candelario first introduced me to my adopted neighborhood, Washington Heights, as a grad student in Texas—but I had never seen these places until we moved here. (Literally: we moved into an apartment sight unseen.) Just before the semester started, my parents and I drove to New York City from my hometown in Houston, Texas, at the end of July 2019, a sluggish three-day haul clocking in over sixteen hundred miles with an overweight trailer in tow. (My wife and kids flew up a week later.) At the end of that drive, around 10 pm on a Sunday night, we crossed the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, New Jersey—a bridge I faintly knew from the lyrics of Eddie Palmieri’s incendiary, politically-charged 1971 concept album, Harlem River Drive—and into my new neighborhood, Washington Heights, New York City. My mom pulled up Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” on her phone; we sang along, butchering the lyrics in the great American karaoke tradition. As we snaked down Riverside Drive and into the neighborhood, we noticed the sounds and people, outside, at night. Merengue and bachata blared from portable speakers; street parties were happening. I was instantly hooked. I thought about how I had woken up that morning in a motel outside of Bristol, Tennessee—a place I only knew for the historic Bristol recording sessions of 1927; the “birthplace of country music”—and driven across a handful of Mid-Atlantic states I had not yet visited to finally arrive in my new neighborhood that was both unlike anywhere I had been before and clearly far from country music’s ancestral homeland in southern Appalachia where our day began. “Se parece a Cartagena!,” my mom exclaimed. She likened my new environs to my dad’s hometown, Cartagena de Indias, the Atlantic-Caribbean coastal port city of Colombia: people there are always out, cooking, socializing, blaring music, owning their public spaces. I agreed. The GPS took us a little further in; finally, we turned down my street. There, an elder gentleman on the sidewalk, passed out in a lawn chair some few feet from a fire hydrant blasting water to nowhere, comprised the first glimpse of my new pre-war apartment building. Indeed, we had arrived. I was a New Yorker. The open hydrant felt like a cliché, I thought, but a nice welcoming gesture nonetheless.

The intersection of W 207th St and Post Ave, in Inwood. Photo by Payton Chung.

Since the steady stream of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and other Latinx groups into the area from the early 1960s forward, Washington Heights has long since been a Spanish-speaking stronghold in the upper reaches of Manhattan, despite demographic shifts as of late. Before that, the area welcomed immigrants from Ireland, Eastern and Western Europe, and Greece, a mixed multicultural cauldron on the northern border of Harlem. On any given day in a particular Broadway block near my home, old-school Puerto Rican plena, new-school Dominican bachata, and classic New York salsa fill the air from the storefronts and boomboxes lining the city’s sidewalks. A Mexican taqueria, nestled between a discount clothing store and a local bodega, plays regional Mexican banda on overhead speakers. A block over, a cellphone accessories vendor pumps out sixties-era Colombian cumbias from his street cart. It’s a Latin musical-cultural sensory delight. Lately, however, the incessant whir of ambulance sirens and helicopters pouring over our now-emptied streets has radically altered the Heights’ Latin American sono-spatial character, an eerie reminder of COVID-19’s darkly presence coursing through the city. Further, it’s a reminder of the ongoing and impending vulnerabilities of the city’s myriad small businesses and informal economies with little to no recourse in a shutdown economy; the very lifeline of an immigrant community.

As the pandemic clamped down on New York, and as we stumbled into our virtual classrooms, most students fled far and wide across the country and around the world to hunker down with loved ones. One student went back home to Seattle, trading one hot spot for another; another to Hong Kong, attempting to attend our Zoom class meetings which now take place around midnight her time, bless her heart (JC: I insist, don’t worry about it! We’ll work it out.) This semester, I’m teaching “Black/Brown History of Rock and Roll”—it’s as fun and intriguing as it sounds, if occasionally challenging as my first time to teach it. Sadly, we had to cancel some of our extracurricular activities, including a few guest talks and our planned tour of the Apollo Theater on the last day of class, though we continue to engage with readings and class assignments remotely. This week and last, we engaged the most prescient units on Black/Brown Rock and Roll here in New York City: we talked about the cultural intersections of Black and Brown New Yorkers from Harlem to Brooklyn to the Bronx; of mambo, doo-wop, R&B, soul, rock, boogaloo, Afro-Latin genres, and hip-hop; we chatted up Fania Records, New York’s “Latin Thing,” and the master narratives of salsa music; we talked uptown and downtown, inner boroughs and outer boroughs, and on and on. When I planned the course schedule, I couldn’t have imagined I’d be teaching this class at a time when the city was undergoing its worst crisis since 9/11, but the New York-focused units couldn’t have come at a better time: we held court on the great cultural histories of Black and Brown New Yorkers, and their musics, at a socially-safe distance over broadband connections. It was different, sure, but it was therapeutic. 

As we honed in on New York in the middle 1970s—a historiographical literature vast, deep, and still mostly shaped by tales of economic turmoil, urban blight, and references to sportscaster Howard Cosell’s most famous utterances about a burning-down Bronx—one student observed how so much great musical-cultural phenomena emerged in this dark period from the city’s otherwise progressive arc. We all concurred, bucking the narrative and acknowledging historical social inequity, and new opportunities, at the heart of these cultural developments. The origins of hip-hop, punk rock, jazz-fusion, and salsa—some of the most innovative pop musical forms of the past century—have rightful (yes, at times contested) birth claims to this time and place in New York City history, just ask Will Hermes if you don’t believe me. I asked the class about what then might happen in the aftermath of our moment, reminding them that the New York they’ll one day return to will not be the same one they left—this is especially true of the still-vulnerable Black and Brown communities already suffering the worst of current conditions. It’s a rhetorical question left unanswered, though we’ll all find out together, sooner or later. It’s also a reminder for the validity and relevance for a class like this, conceived in the premise of the overlooked contributions of nonwhite Americans from our prevailing narratives of national identity and national culture, particularly in the face of immense challenges and unprecedented ruin.

In a time like ours, it’s hard to keep pace with the constant and overbearing sickness and death gripping our city and the world over. As I type this, elder Black and Brown musicians and artists in New York—and New York expatriates significant to the city’s cultural histories—are succumbing to COVID-19 in rapid succession. In late March, Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibangu passed away after contracting the disease, a key player in Fania Records’ evolving salsa revolution in the middle 1970s, whose breakaway 1972 hit single, “Soul Makossa,” solidified Africa’s rhythmic imprint on the evolution of funk music. (Though not a New Yorker, his appearance with the Fania All-Stars on their famous Live at Yankee Stadium 1973 concert/LP was key to the genre’s stylistic development. “Soul Makossa” was also an essential DJ spin at David Mancuso’s famed Loft parties in Lower Manhattan during the early seventies, the origins of disco club culture in North America.) Puerto Rican-born and Spanish Harlem-based singer/arranger Joe Acosta, whose affiliation with New York’s Ghetto Records, one the city’s many non-Fania Latin record labels of the 1960s and 1970s, pioneered salsa and Latin Soul music at the sono-cultural nexus of African-American R&B and Afro-Caribbean instrumentation. Acosta, along with other Latin music pioneers of that golden 1960s-1970s “Nuyorican” era in NYC, including Andy Gonzalez of Grupo Folklorico y Experimental Nuevayorquino, as well as Tony Rojas of the TNT Band, all recently succumbed to the disease as well. Recently, one of rap music’s most critical late-seventies pioneers, Rodney Stone (aka, Lil’ Rodney Cee), part of South Bronx’s group of streetwise rhyming emcees, the Funky Four Plus One, was recently hospitalized after testing positive for COVID-19. These are people from New York neighborhoods (or of New York affiliations) whose musical inflections continue to reverberate through every aspect of contemporary Latin, R&B, and pop music, and of pop cultural trends more broadly, that we know today. The list of victims in the worlds of arts and music, sadly, goes on. (And by the time you read this, it will have gone on further.)

Despite misinformation from the White House, the novel coronavirus knows no racial, ethnic, national, or class boundaries—a sobering reminder of the inane arbitrariness surrounding the social constructions that have always been, and will continue to be, exploited for division and conquest. Of course, social constructions have real consequences in the past and as they do in the present: poor and working-class New Yorkers cannot “escape” the virus to second homes or short-term rentals elsewhere; many nonwhite Americans have alarmingly reduced access to quality healthcare and suffer greater from pre-existing conditions (an unfortunate combination); Black and Brown Americans are already suffering the greatest COVID-19 losses throughout the nation, etc. 

The sounds of Washington Heights, this elevated northern portion of the island named for the Revolutionary War-era camp of General Washington, is today much more emblematic of the working-class, multiracial, and immigrant vision of the United States depicted in the theatrical works of a Lin-Manuel Miranda production (minus the choreographed dancing and rap-singing). Still, many of us start to wonder as the hits keep coming here and across the five boroughs: how many of these shuttered mamá-y-papá businesses will open back up after the damage is done? As we mourn our losses, mitigate damages, and just try to survive, our windows stay open to the streets: I can still hear the roaring motorcycles, Spanish-speaking vecinos, and booming car stereos blasting the new and old sounds of New York street rap, from Pop Smoke’s “Welcome to the Party” to Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones (Pt. II),” in defiance of the deafening silence—songs I heard just today from passing vehicles in the span of a late-morning’s coffee. With any luck, and with the continued advocacy from the city’s grassroots activist tradition, the city may once again look and sound like it did before following substantial recovery. If we can imagine a world which returns to order after the worst of what the novel coronavirus has to offer—maybe, I dare to dream, without all the harmful baggage we’re learning to do without, like perpetual fossil fuel consumption—one could further envision the return of one of the greatest immigrant cities in the world, too. Until then, you can hear us banging on our cookware and sticking our heads out our windows at 7 P.M. each night as the fight rages on, imagining that day when we can go outside, stroll about freely, and engage in the wonderful quotidian New York stuff we were just getting acquainted with not too long ago. 

Alex La Rotta is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of History and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, where he teaches U.S. Latinx History and Black/Brown History of Rock & Roll.

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