COVID Crisis, Floods, Power Cuts: City Accused Of Ignoring Uptown

NORTHERN MANHATTAN, NY — After three days of sweltering heat in New York City earlier this month, power to 2,000 residents of Washington Heights went out.

It was the only area in Manhattan to see a major power outage.

Nine days later, a torrential downpour left the neighborhood and Inwood flooded, viral videos showed straphangers wading through waist-high water to get to trains.

Again, the rest of the city went largely unscathed.

While people on Twitter were shocked to see the video of individuals wading through the murky water at the 157th Street 1 train station, nearby residents and community leaders knew that the station has a long history of flooding.

True to its name, Washington Heights sits on a hill, causing the low-lying train stations at 157th Street and 168th Street to regularly flood when a heavy rainstorm hits.

The problem is, some say, that the city considers Uptown Manhattan as an afterthought.

Some subway system ya got there. This is the 157th St. 1 line right now. @NYCMayor @BilldeBlasio pic.twitter.com/xyfTAUPPNu
— Paullee (@PaulleeWR) July 8, 2021

“We need City and Federal funding for our crumbling infrastructure. The reason we are seeing so much flooding, especially in underserved communities, is because the City has not been adequately investing in our infrastructure and waterfront resilience," Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez, who represents Northern Manhattan, told Patch.

"There should be no reason why our subways and roads are flooding every time it rains.”

Rodriguez uses the word "underserved," but other residents of Washington Heights and Inwood say the neighborhoods' recent battles with Mother Nature are just another example of Uptown getting "thought of last" in the grand scheme of Manhattan.

"Washington Heights is a neighborhood that's frequently been thought of last," said Franchesca Feliz, a lifelong resident and the creator of the storytelling platform Uptown Girl Productions.

"We get resources last, as an afterthought. Our beautiful but underserved community had one of the highest rates of COVID-19 infections in Manhattan, but yet when the vaccines began to roll out at the Armory, there were no Spanish-speaking folks there to help our people out."

Since the city began tracking COVID-19 rates by ZIP code in the fall of 2020, Washington Heights and Inwood have consistently posted the highest virus positivity rates in Manhattan, even at times recording some of the highest numbers in all five boroughs.

During the week of January 2021 when NYC first opened city-sponsored vaccine distribution sites, ZIP codes in Washington Heights and Inwood had three of the four highest COVID-19 rates of any in Manhattan.

Yet, in the city's initial rollout of 23 vaccination sites on Jan. 10, not a single one of them was above 136th Street in Manhattan.

Eligible residents on the Upper East Side at the time could choose from one of three vaccine sites they could walk to in their neighborhood. The UES has an average COVID-19 positivity rate of 2.98 percent for the week of Jan. 2-8, according to the city.

• Read More: COVID-19 Vaccination Desert In Wash Heights Despite High Rates

However, Inwood and Washington Heights, with their zero vaccine sites, had an average positivity rate of 8.125 percent for the same time period.

Things did not necessarily get much better when a vaccine center did come to Washington Heights.

After the city opened a vaccine site at The Armory on Jan. 14, a bombshell report on Jan. 26 by the CITY found that it was people from outside the neighborhood getting the appointments and on days that volunteers or reporters observed the site, they found it was mainly white people getting vaccines and that the site had no Spanish translators despite its location in a 70 percent Latino community.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, The New York Times has reported on how the virus has been "twice as deadly for Black and Latino" people in New York City compared to white residents, and that Latino New Yorkers had the highest antibody rates of any demographic of city residents.

The CITY article caused near-immediate changes to prioritize eligible residents from Washington Heights, Inwood, and the Bronx.

"Yes, we're part of Manhattan and Manhattan had overall the lowest rates of COVID, but not all of Manhattan is the same. It took, in some regards, the city time to address that and when we're dealing with such a serious issue like COVID, that time has major health impacts and can be life or death," Uptown resident David Friend told Patch.

"It was really slow on the uptake by the city. The neighborhood is working class and filled with essential workers and a lot of undocumented people, so the very people who couldn’t stop working or work remote in many cases, or who weren’t able to access unemployment benefits, had to find side jobs, and there wasn’t a recognition of the severity of how that would impact the high COVID rates in the community," Friend continued.

Also, at the beginning of the year, over 400 eateries in Manhattan were named as participants in the first round of New York City Restaurant Week.

Not a single restaurant in Washington Heights or Inwood — neighborhoods with more than 200,000 residents and dozens, if not hundreds, of eateries — made it to the list. The omission again raised questions about the city's outreach effort to Washington Heights and Inwood.

"We in no way think it was intentional, but it just goes to show how our community continues to be left behind," Jeff Garcia, president of the New York State Latino Restaurant Bar & Lounge Association, told Patch at the time.

"To be honest, owners everywhere are overwhelmed with everyday operations and survival, and so we'll give folks the benefit of the doubt that it was just an oversight. However, we hope to be included in the future."

Friend says that the authorities in New York City do not always bother to look into the details of what's going on Uptown.

“It’s an ongoing issue. Anyone that has lived in the area for some time, it’s hard not to recognize it," Friend told Patch. "But I think with some of the things that happened in the last couple years, particularly in regards to COVID, this constant dynamic, whether it’s the borough level, the city level, or the powers to be, ignoring or not bothering to look into the details of what’s going on Uptown."

“Whether that’s language outreach or just the topography, the topography of Inwood and Washington Heights is just completely different than most of Manhattan, so when it comes to infrastructure, there has to be an understanding of that," Friend said.

He pointed to one particularly glaring example of the city overlooking infrastructure in Northern Manhattan.

A street sign that misspells Nagle Avenue near the Dyckman Street 1 station.

“The street sign is misspelled, they misspelled Nagle. That is just so indicative to me about how completely out of touch the city is with this part of Manhattan. ‘You can’t even bother to spell the street right?’ Can you imagine if anyone misspelled Broadway or Bennett?" Friend asked.

The Department of Transportation did not immediately respond to Patch's question about the misspelled street sign.

Feliz, who was born and raised in the largely Dominican community of the Heights, points to her frustration about the way mainstream media talks about the neighborhood from time to time.

"Despite many challenges: low-income, health disparities, displacement, etc, the New York Times is writing an article about the neighborhood, calling it “the last bastion of affordability” — breaking down what the schools, prices, 'vibes,' and what east and west of Broadway is like, inviting folks from other neighborhoods to move in," Feliz said.

"I guess the silver lining is that this would bring more resources — sad that it takes others not from our 'hoods to get noticed.”