Washington Heights figured prominently in the Revolutionary War. Fort Tryon Park once held a fortress that was originally named by the British for a colonial governor; when the Americans captured it, they renamed it Fort Washington. In the 1840s, the Hudson River Railroad (now Amtrak) was built along the river, and several now-vanished stations brought the area closer to Midtown. Soon, wealthy businessmen built their country estates here.

During the period 1904-07, the subway came to Washington Heights/Inwood, and most of the estates were broken up to make room for apartment houses. The demographics didn’t change for at least 50 years—middle-class apartment houses west of Broadway, walk-up buildings largely populated by working-class Irish families on the east side. In the ’30s, German Jews fleeing Hitler turned much of western Washington Heights into "Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson," although some buildings still discriminated against Jews through the ‘50s. After the war, Puerto Ricans moved into the southern part of the area, and for a time there was tension between the various ethnic groups.

Heights/Inwood residents of all backgrounds suffered in the plague of heroin that swept the neighborhood in the ’60s. For a first-hand account, read Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries. Carroll’s stories—stringing a wire between two trees in Fort Tryon Park to trip up the police motorcycle, buying "brown heroin" that turned out to be Ovaltine—are both funny and tragic.