After work today, I joined Andie in her three-bedroom apartment hunt in my neck of the woods. The first, on Cabrini near the upper 190th Street station on the A train, was too small. Another grubbier place further downtown was also too tiny and claustrophobic to boot, with very high ceilings and a distinct lack of windows. The broker, Meg, grew up on Arden in Inwood, which made me glad I didn’t rag on the neighborhood too much.
In discussing the gentrification of Upper Manhattan, she kept starting sentences with, “Back when I was growing up here,” which made me want to say something like, “You mean last week?” because she appeared to be in her mid-20s. She seemed to be nervous about showing us around, unable to unlock the door of the one apartment in less than 10 tries, and mousily shuffling through scraps of paper in her binder trying to find the address of another place she thought Andie would like when we should have told her not to bother.
She had a curiously impassioned defense about the infamous murder rates in Washington Heights in the ’80s and ’90s: the mafia, not fully sold on the wonders of New Jersey marshlands for disposing of corpses, had been using Fort Tryon Park as a dumping ground, she told me, and, apparently, murders are tallied where the body is found, not where the murder took place, so WaHi got a bad rap back in the day. O.K., maybe, though it seemed a little too much information for a real estate broker to be revealing, as talk about murders and crime rates typically don’t do much in the way of assisting a sale.
Afterwards, Andie and I had dinner at The Heights. The rooftop eating area was full but we were seated in the center of the giant second-floor picture window overlooking Broadway, the famous red neon sign of Tom’s Restaurant visible through the trees. My chicken timpano was billed as lasagna-like but was really a salmagundi of tortillas, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream, shredded chicken, and other staple Mexican ingredients. It was fresh and hearty though not what I’d expected.
The Heights Bar & Grill
- 2867 Broadway
- (212) 866-7035
- Meal 38 of 52: chicken timpano ($10.95), chips and salsa ($3) and a margarita ($7).