Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933-82, Its Structure and Culture

10. A "Changing Neighborhood"

CHAPTER 10 Beginning in the 1960s and intensifying in the 1970s, a crisis hit the German-Jewish community which thrust generational conflict into the background. This crisis was caused by large-scale demographic changes in the character of Washington Heights which turned it into a "changing neighborhood." The size of the German-Jewish community fell by over 50 percent in the twenty years between 1960 and 1980. This crisis put the continued existence of the community into jeopardy, but as crises often do, it helped foster greater unity among those who remained in the neighborhood. It also accentuated trends that have given the community a highly unusual internal social and demographic structure . The reasons for the demographic decline of the GermanJewish community are threefold. First, the increased prosperity of many members of the second generation led them to move tosuburban , or more prestigious urban, areas, where some of them bought houses. In the suburbs their children could grow up amidst trees and lawns, rather than having to play in the streets among the apartment buildings or in blacktop playgrounds in city parks. Second, many members of the immigrant generation had died. Finally, there was a wholesale change in the ethnic composition of Washington Heights, with a substantial inmigration of Hispanics and (to a lesser extent) blacks and a proportionately substantial decline in the white non-Hispanic population. Ger212 A "Changing Neighborhood" A "Changing Neighborhood" man Jews took part in the "white flight" though not in a particularly rapid manner. The decline in the social status of Washington Heights and the change in the makeup of its population was a remarkably long and drawn-out process. As early as 1951, Stock could refer to the neighborhood's "now rather shabby gentility," and, in 1954, a study by the Protestant Council of New York called Washington Heights "a downhill residential area."1 At various points in the process almost from its very beginning until today, there were attempts to curb or reverse the decline, often accompanied by optimistic appraisals of the neighborhood's future.2 In 1960, perhaps a critical date, Lendt stated that the neighborhood was not yet blighted by widespread slums.3 However, he felt that this state would not long continue, since many sections east of Broadway were "on the threshhold of irreversible deterioration." As was common in other neighborhoods undergoing "ethnic succession," the changes began in some sections ofWashington Heights long before others. The German Jews inhabiting the southern sections of Washington Heights (including the former center of the "Fourth Reich" around 160th Street) were already beginning to move away in the late 1950s and to fear for the future of their institutions. By way of contrast, those further north, even ten years later, felt themselves to be still in a period of expansion.4 Because, at first, the changes were confined to the south and east of Washington Heights, the white residents treated them as an expansion of neighboring Harlem, rather than as a move of nonwhites into Washington Heights. The conventional southern border of Washington Heights was moved from 135th Street to 145th Street, 155th Street, and even further, until, after 1960, this type of distortion of perception no longer was possible. The inmigrating population was far from uniform. Besides the contrast between English-speaking blacks and the far more numerous speakers of Spanish, there were divisions in the latter group itself. Although the older residents of the community referred to the Hispanics indiscriminately as "Puerto Ricans," Puerto Ricans were outnumbered as early as 1965 by other Spanish speakers in Washington Heights, notably by middle-class Cubans and poverty-stricken Dominicans.5 By the 1980s the Dominicans were clearly the largest Hispanic group.6 Their presence is made noticeable by shop signs referring to the Dominican Republic(LaNueva Quisqueya, etc.), by 213 FRANKFURT ON THE HUDSON institutions, and by the widespread graffiti referring to Dominican politics in the eastern sections of Washington Heights. Washington Heights is now the site of the annual festival of Trinitaria Day in honor of those who fought for the independence of the Dominican Republic. This festival attracted an estimated four hundred thousand people to the Amsterdam Avenue area near Yeshiva University in 1984.7 In 1960 the area south of 158th Street had a black and Hispanic majority, and there were substantial black and Hispanic populations in the adjacent areas of southern and eastern Washington Heights (Health Areas 4...