When I was In the Heights
Me and Washington Heights have some history.
Since I mistakenly posted my Father’s Day story last Sunday, probably because I have a lot of mixed feelings about my father, I’ll tell you about In the Heights, which I saw last night. Both about the movie and my life in the actual Washington Heights.
Seeing In the Heights was a thrill--my first actual movie in a real theater in over a year. Even more thrilling was the fact that the movie theater near me is open again under new management AND is charging $7.99 for all tickets. The place is still shabby and needs some TLC but the seats were comfy and the popcorn was delish.
I had high hopes for the movie but I found my attention drifting in between musical numbers. Lots of energy and enthusiasm, and some great music, dancing and production numbers but no hummable songs. Not much plot and what there is doesn’t make much sense. It’s way too long at 2 ½ hours. Cut a half hour or even an hour and it could have worked.
But I’m giving it a pass because Washington Heights and I have so much history—it reminds me of better times in my own life.
The main character is Usnavi, a bodega owner in the Heights who inherits a property on the beach in the Dominican Republic that’s been destroyed in a hurricane. His dream is to build his own beach bar there. We never find out why exactly.
His girlfriend Vanessa is a nail technician (that’s what manicurists are called these days) who wants to design clothing. Her dream is escaping from Washington Heights and moving downtown. Why isn’t her dream to get a scholarship to Pratt or one of the design schools in New York City? Instead, when she runs out of fabric she rummages through the design school’s dumpster.
A secondary character, Nina, wants to escape the hood. She’s going to Stanford even though it’s in California and she keeps protesting how attached she is to her Washington Heights community. Didn’t anyone tell her Columbia is just as good and it’s a couple of subway stops away. It’s not like she has a scholarship. Her father has to sell his business to pay the tuition. She doesn’t want to return to school because she’s been racially profiled, but her father insists. None of it makes sense.
The movie is organized around a blackout that never happened—at least not at that time in Washington Heights.
The worst offense is the sanitizing of Washington Heights. No one in the movie even smokes pot, much less gets in trouble with the law despite the ubiquity of stop and frisk at the time. It was actually filmed on location, sans overflowing garbage cans and drug dealers.
I take this personally because have a personal attachment to the neighborhood. I was born there though my parents moved when I was still a baby. I hung out there when I was in college in the 60s and lived there for a few years after I got married in the late 80s.
The lyrics of In the Heights would put you on the A train to 181st St. But you’d wind up in the wrong place—a white, residential area, an enclave of Orthodox Jews, not the hood. Admittedly the A train sounds way more poetic than the #7 train, and it rhymes with “maintain” in the next line, but it’s still the wrong stop. I should know. When I lived there in the late 80s, I took the A train to 181st St. regularly. When I was foolish enough to take the train that does go the Hispanic neighborhood—the #7 to 181st—I had to walk home through a war zone, often to the accompaniment of gunfire in the background. New York was the wild West in those pre-Giuliani days.
The heyday of Washington Heights, before gentrification and rampant crime, was the 1960s when I hung out there as a college girl. At the time it was Puerto Rican not Dominican, and the smell of chicharonnes tempted me from every street stand. I don’t remember the piraguas—cups of shaved ice with syrup poured over them-- that Lin Manuel Miranda’s character sells in the movie. I preferred the much more delicious Italian ices sold from pushcarts.
I was introduced to El Barrio by a friend from City College--a male version of Nina in the movie--David Diaz. David, who dreamt of being a journalist, was the only child of a hardworking, but very poor, Puerto Rican single mom. He came of age at a golden time in New York City when tuition was free at City College and anyone could get an education. We met at college and bonded over a mutual appreciation for getting stoned on the South Campus Lawn.
David’s buddies were an oddball bunch of Puerto Rican street kids from Washington Heights who hung out and smoked pot—a lot of pot-- and partied, either in someone’s apartment or in the park. They pulled pranks, committed petty theft and pretended to be badder than they actually were. Along with smoking pot, sex was a favorite recreation. No one had cars—or guns for that matter. It was a much more innocent time.
David gained street cred by bringing me and my friends-- a bunch of pretty, Jewish college girls to hang out with his Puerto Rican homies. We gained a taste for marijuana—David personally introduced me to it—and a taste for the Washington Heights street life which was just as vibrant as in the movie, though a lot seedier.
We relished the chance to see how the other half lived. Our conclusion was they were having a lot more fun than we were. We’d been raised by straightlaced Jewish families with 50s values and we were ready for excitement and adventure with bad boys.
I got myself a good-looking Puerto Rican boyfriend named Ray who introduced me to the joys of sex and petty larceny accompanied by marijuana. My friend Laura wound up in a genuine love affair with Tony, a smart, funny skinny little Puerto Rican guy with an antic energy and talent for outrageousness, who delivered the Daily News for a living. He would travel downtown to her apartment, where she lived with her mom, and climb in through her ground floor window at 3am. This star-crossed love affair ended when scholarly Laura went off to medical school—the first woman in her medical school class in fact—while Tony kept delivering papers until he got fired because the newspaper business wasn’t great even back then.
My Washington Heights idyll ended badly. My parents had gone away for a week and left me in their spectacular house in New Jersey—the one I wrote about last week. I wanted to impress my Washington Heights gang with my fancy digs so had a weekend party and invited Ray and the gang. I had no idea they were riffling the house. When my parents got home, they found they’d been robbed and got the story out of me about the party. They were livid, and rightly so. Ray denied all responsibility, but I knew it was him. David denied knowing anything about it and I believed him. David was always a straight arrow.
I left the street life in Washington Heights for political activism at City College and would have become a journalist as well if women’s lib had happened a few years earlier. I worked at NBC news in my twenties but was stuck as a secretary. David got to live his dream. He got another degree, apprenticed at a few newspapers and went on to become an on- camera reporter for NBC in New York for 25 years, winning awards for his 9-11 coverage before going on to teach journalism at City College. I don’t know whatever happened to Ray and Tony.
In the Heights was far from perfect, but I’ll give it a B+ anyway. It reminds me of my youth so I will watch it on HBO Max to catch all the lyrics I missed in the theater. And look for some of the landmarks I might recognize. Kudos to Lin Manuel-Miranda for making his movies available to stream. It’s hard to believe that In the Heights was only his first musical, Hamilton his second.
He’s our homegrown bard—the Shakespeare of El Barrio. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.