George Washington really did sleep here, during the Revolutionary War. He is far from the only well-known resident of Washington Heights and Inwood, however. World-class athletes, jazz musicians, and at least one Tony winner have called the neighborhoods home during the past few centuries.
Although Washington Heights was named after him, the first president’s stint as a resident lasted just five weeks or so, in autumn 1776. While general of the Continental Army, Washington camped out in the area with his troops, taking over the summer villa of Roger Morris, a British colonel and Tory who left as the war was heating up. Now a museum known as the Morris-Jumel Mansion, the former villa is the city’s oldest remaining house. At first the location, on Manhattan’s second highest lookout point, brought Washington good luck: The Continental Army beat the British during the Battle of Harlem Heights. That luck turned, however, during the subsequent Battle of Fort Washington, and the rout forced Washington and his troops to leave.
An 1898 print showing George Washington’s bedroom in the Morris-Jumel Mansion. Image: New York Public Library/public domain/Wikimedia
In 1833 another statesman, former vice president Aaron Burr, moved into the former Morris residence when he married Eliza Jumel, the widow of the wine merchant who had bought the house in 1810. The Burr-Jumel marriage was not a happy one—it is believed that he married Jumel primarily for her money—and they separated after just four months, with Jumel filing for divorce three years later. Today Burr is best known for killing the nation’s first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, in an illegal duel. The duel forms closes out the Tony Award-winning musical “Hamilton”; Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s author/lyricist/composer, wrote two of the songs in Burr’s former bedroom in the Morris-Jumel Mansion. That is not the only link between Miranda and Northern Manhattan, by the way. Miranda grew up in Inwood and won his first Tony, for best original score, for 2008’s “In the Heights,” which takes place in Washington Heights.
Eliza Jumel was no less intriguing than Burr. Something of a real-estate magnate and an art collector, she invited the wife and children of Solomon Northup to live in her home in 1842. Northup, a freeborn African-American who was kidnapped and enslaved for a dozen years, wrote the memoir “Twelve Years a Slave.”
A year before the Northups moved into the Morris-Jumel Mansion, John James Audubon bought a 20-acre estate for his family along the Hudson River between what are now 155th and 158th Streets. Audubon, who had by this time won acclaim for his “Birds of America,” lived here until his death in 1851. He was buried in the graveyard of the Church of the Intercession at 155th Street and Broadway.
A few blocks north of the former Audubon estate, at the corner of West 160th Street and Edgecombe Avenue, is an apartment building that has been home to numerous musicians. When 555 Edgecombe Avenue opened in 1916, only white tenants were allowed. After this policy changed in the early 1940s, the building became home to jazz performers Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Lena Horne, Andy Kirk, and Sonny Rollins. Actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson lived here as well, and after his death in 1976, the building was named the Paul Robeson Residence, though many preferred to continue calling it the Triple Nickel. Musical talent was not a requisite to living here, however; among the building’s other well-known residents was boxer Joe Louis.
The Paul Robeson Residence, better known as 555 Edgecombe Avenue, was home to numerous jazz musicians including Count Basie and Duke Ellington, as well as to Robeson himself. Image: Beyond My Ken/Wikimedia
Louis was hardly the only athlete to have called Washington Heights and Inwood home. The legendary Lou Gehrig, who among other accolades was the first Major League Baseball player to have his number retired by his team, moved to Amsterdam Avenue near 173rd Street with his family when he was seven. Another baseball Hall of Famer, Rod Carew, moved to Washington Heights with his family from Panama when he was 14. Meanwhile Inwood was home to one of the National Basketball Association’s most outstanding players, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Known at the time as Lew Alcindor, he played hoops for his Catholic high school, Power Memorial Academy, setting a city record for number of points scored.
Abdul-Jabbar makes a few fleeting appearances in “The Basketball Diaries,” the first of two memoirs by Jim Carroll. A poet and the titular leader of the Jim Carroll Band, Carroll remains best known for his early memoir, which recounted growing up in Inwood as a high school athlete turned heroin addict. Although Carroll later moved downtown and then to California, he returned to his childhood home on Isham Street, living there till his death from a heart attack in 2009.
Alumni of George Washington High School (now the George Washington Educational Campus) on Audubon Avenue include Nobel Laureate Henry Kissinger, baseball Hall of Famer Rod Carew, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, singer/actor Harry Belafonte, and actor Ron Perlman. Image: Beyond My Ken/Wikimedia
The roll call of one-time residents of Northern Manhattan does not stop there. Stan Lee of Marvel Comics fame grew up on Fort Washington Avenue around the same time that future opera singer Maria Callas was doing so on 192nd Street. Henry Kissinger’s family fled the Nazis to relocated to the German-Jewish enclave of Washington Heights in 1938, when he was 15. And as evidence of Northern Manhattan’s enduring appeal, fellow German-Jewish immigrant Dr. Ruth Westheimer still lives in the three-bedroom Washington Heights apartment where she has resided since 1956.