Crossing Broadway - by Robert W Snyder

About the Book

In the 1970s, when the South Bronx burned and the promise of New Deal New York and postwar America gave way to despair, the people of Washington Heights at the northern tip of Manhattan were increasingly vulnerable. The Heights had long been a neighborhood where generations of newcomers--Irish, Jewish, Greek, African American, Cuban, and Puerto...

Book Synopsis

Robert W. Snyder's Crossing Broadway tells how disparate groups overcame their mutual suspicions to rehabilitate housing, build new schools, restore parks, and work with the police to bring safety to streets racked by crime and fear. It shows how a neighborhood once nicknamed "Frankfurt on the Hudson" for its large population of German Jews became "Quisqueya Heights"--the home of the nation's largest Dominican community.

The story of Washington Heights illuminates New York City's long passage from the Great Depression and World War II through the urban crisis to the globalization and economic inequality of the twenty-first century. Washington Heights residents played crucial roles in saving their neighborhood, but its future as a home for working-class and middle-class people is by no means assured. The growing gap between rich and poor in contemporary New York puts new pressure on the Heights as more affluent newcomers move into buildings that once sustained generations of wage earners and the owners of small businesses.

Crossing Broadway is based on historical research, reporting, and oral histories. Its narrative is powered by the stories of real people whose lives illuminate what was won and lost in northern Manhattan's journey from the past to the present. A tribute to a great American neighborhood, this book shows how residents learned to cross Broadway--over the decades a boundary that has separated black and white, Jews and Irish, Dominican-born and American-born--and make common cause in pursuit of one of the most precious rights: the right to make a home and build a better life in New York City.

Review Quotes

Crossing Broadway is a traditional community study and also a beautiful narrative. It will be of interest not only to professionals who engage with the urban landscape but also to those who work with oral histories on many levels.... At once both comprehensive and compelling, Crossing Broadway gains much of its traction by illuminating the individual ways in which residents developed their devotion to their community, demonstrating successful methods for improving public life. Hearing directly from the immigrants and their children makes them real; it touches our hearts and makes them open, truly a great measure of the success of any book.

-- "Oral History Review"

Crossing Broadway is an engaging, compelling, insightful study.... There is a good deal here about pride of place, how people struggle and get along and get by day to day in sometimes adverse circumstances, and about how communities are built, and rebuilt, by determined individuals. The book sets a high standard for sensitivity, depth, and excellence in urban community studies.

-- "New York History"

Drawing on research studies, oral histories, and contemporaneous reporting, Snyder'swell-paced narrative projects the neighborhood's serial make-overs against the backdrop of Gotham's turn from postwar industrial and corporate colossus to a place where manufacturing jobs, white people, and corporations seemed to depart all at once. Historians of the city will find much to think about in this stylish, well-researched, and balanced popular history.

-- "Journal of American History"

Robert Snyder provides an intimate portrait of the urban experience. And like all urban histories of the twentieth century, we know that this will end in crisis. Yet Washington Heights lets Snyder move block by block as this transformation comes. Perhaps most telling is Snyder's own backstory; Washington Heights was the neighborhood of his parents who, though they left the neighborhood for the suburbs, still spoke highly of the place.

-- "Reviews in American History"

Snyder's deftly handled descriptions of upper Manhattan are so richly embroidered, and so well researched, that he circumvents the hazards of a mere parochial accounting of his subject. Clearly, he looks kindly on the tenacity with which residents and others have fought crime, poor schools, gangs, landlord neglect, and myriad other urban travails.

-- "Journal of Urban Affairs"

About the Author

Robert W. Snyder is Associate Professor of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of Transit Talk and The Voice of the City and co-author of Metropolitan Lives. Formerly the editor of Media Studies Journal, he also worked at Newsday, the journalism review More, the Tarrytown Daily News, and Channel 13/WNET, the public television station of New York City. Snyder served as a consultant and interview source for National Public Radio's Sonic Memorial project on September 11 and the World Trade Center, which won the Peabody Award.