For a long time, Manhattan tourist maps routinely ended at 96th Street. Then several years ago, Harlem began experiencing a second renaissance when foreign sightseers discovered the good-time value of church gospel, and African-Americans with money began laying claim to long-abandoned brownstones. Now, city streets seem pretty well accounted for as far as 155^th Street.

But what about the areas above Harlem—Washington Heights, Inwood and Marble Hill? Except to visit the Cloisters, tourists rarely venture that far north. Even many Manhattan residents are hazy about what’s up there. What little publicity Washington Heights/Inwood has received has usually been negative—the crack epidemic of the ‘80s, the 1992 riot—sparked by a cop’s slaying of a drug suspect—or the blackout of 1999.

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.

Here’s a guide to some of the area’s hot spots:

Audubon Terrace, a complex of museums west of Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets, was built between 1906 and 1930 on the site of naturalist John James Audubon’s estate. Located here are the Numismatic Society, devoted to coins, medals and paper money; the Academy of Arts and Letters, home to an exclusive society of artists, writers and composers; and the Hispanic Society, with artwork by Goya, Velasquez and El Greco. Unfortunately, many Manhattan museumgoers avoid the terrace, claiming it’s too far (a half hour from Midtown by subway) or in a dangerous area (not true).

Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, west of Broadway in the 160’s, is one of New York’s largest hospitals. Even now, a new babies hospital and a cancer research center are being constructed.

At 166th and Broadway stands the Audubon Ballroom, a stunning piece of terra-cotta architecture. Famed as the place where Malcolm X was shot in 1965, it now houses a Columbia University biotechnology lab, a museum dedicated to the memory of the late black nationalist leader and several stores. The Audubon’s stage also hosted some of the most important R&B groups of the ‘50s and ‘60s: the Valentines, the Solitaires and the Cadillacs all performed here.

If you just want dessert, you can venture to one of the two Carrot Tops, on Broadway at either 164th Street, or at 218th in Inwood.

The upper 170’s are dominated by the approach to the George Washington Bridge and the Port Authority’s George Washington Bridge Bus Station, where buses to New Jersey terminate. After the bridge was built in 1932, the city planned to destroy the old Jeffery’s Hook Lighthouse, located beneath the bridge—until Hildegarde Swift wrote the children’s book The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge. Thousands of kids wrote letters and the lighthouse was saved. Today, it’s fully restored, but it’s hard to get to the waterfront park where it’s located.

Within Hudson Heights, the most prestigious co-op developments are the 1920s-era Hudson View Gardens and the 1930s-era Castle Village. The latter features striking views of the Palisades and the GW Bridge. If you venture onto the grounds, though, a uniformed guard might ask you to leave. Farther north, at Fort Washington Avenue and 190^th Street, stands the St. Francis Xavier Cabrini Shrine, dedicated to the first American citizen to be canonized.

East of Broadway, at 187^th and Amsterdam, stands the Washington Heights campus of Yeshiva University, Orthodox Judaism’s main institute for higher learning in the U.S. The men’s undergraduate school and the rabbinical seminary are located here. Orthodox Judaism is also represented west of Broadway—by the Breuers, a sect that originated in Germany. On the Sabbath, you can see black-hatted, bearded men and long-skirted women promenading down Bennett Avenue.

Inside Fort Tryon Park, stretching from 190^th to Dyckman Street, are the famous Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of medieval art. John D. Rockefeller, who owned the land before he donated it to the city, bought the core of the collection from sculptor George Barnard. He then built a home for it, incorporating cloisters from five French monasteries. Everybody admires the Unicorn Tapestries, depicting the hunt for the mythical beast. But my favorites are the miniature replicas of Biblical scenes that medieval craftsmen painstakingly carved from wood. Every September, the park hosts a Medieval Festival, with jugglers, jousting, music and displays of falconry.

Dyckman House, at 204^th and Broadway, dating from 1785, is the last surviving eighteenth-century farmhouse in Manhattan. As the neighborhood became more urban, the home deteriorated steadily until 1915, when members of the Dyckman family bought and renovated it, then presented it to the city as a museum. In addition to giving us a window into eighteenth-century life, Dyckman House hosts community programs, ranging from wine tastings to jazz concerts.

Inwood Park, north of Dyckman Street, is the last surviving piece of natural wilderness in Manhattan. It’s a good place to hike, climb rocks, enjoy nature, play ball or fly a kite. If you won’t venture into the woods alone, the Urban Park Rangers regularly give tours.

A stone’s throw from Inwood Park is Baker Field, where Columbia University plays its football games. Notice that big "C" for Columbia on the cliff opposite the Harlem Ship Canal. Jim Carroll and his friends used to jump off those cliffs to prove they weren’t "punks," dodging the "shit lines" of a sewer that emptied into the canal.

Just like Washington Heights, western Inwood is becoming a haven for professional musicians. Quotes printed on tiles at the 207^th Street subway station as part of a community project tell the story: "When you have one professional singer in a building, you soon have many!" and "I play my grand piano and sing my arias, and am accompanied by merengue, salsa, a saxophone, kids practicing—all in the same building!"

Finally, a word about Marble Hill. This neighborhood was once physically part of Manhattan—and still is, politically—but it’s now connected to the Bronx mainland. Here’s what happened: in 1895, the city dredged the Harlem Ship Canal south of 225^th Street to connect the Harlem and Hudson Rivers. This left Marble Hill an island until 1910 or so, when Spuyten Duyvil Creek to the north was filled in. For years, Marble Hill was a sort of working-class suburb, whose Victorian houses alternated with small apartment buildings. This changed in the ’50s, when the city built the 14-story Marble Hill projects. When I grew up there in the ’60s, it was Irish, Jewish and African-American; now, its mainly Latino and African-American. Some things never change, though—like the giant ball field where a dozen basketball, softball and handball games go on simultaneously.

Otherwise, as the song says, just "take the A train." It’s not only the quickest way to get to Harlem—it’s the best way to Washington Heights and Inwood too.

Raanan Geberer grew up in Marble Hill, has lived in three of the five boroughs, and currently lives in Chelsea with his wife, Rhea. Trained as a journalist, he currently works as managing editor of the revived Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and previously worked for Fairchild Publications and for the now-defunct Hudson Dispatch. His hobbies are playing music, gardening, working out in the gym, participating in various computer message boards, and reading about politics and religion.