181st Street and Fort Washington Avenue is a convenient cultural trisection transposed on the concrete intersection. Mamushkas pushing Bubbie carts hobble past a tall woman speaking Spanish with her kids, and a group of hipsters donning American Apparel torn jeans and cowboy boots.
Poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar might call these different characters ships that pass in the night, but it’s the middle of the day in Upper Manhattan, and a Starbucks and the Fort Washington Collegiate Church across the street seem engaged in a zeitgeist staring contest. The A train stops right at this corner of Washington Heights or “Hudson Heights,” as developers would have us call it. When you emerge from the darkness, Jin’s Supermarket is to your right, the Russian grocery is across the street, and a Zagat’s top restaurant is down the block.
Public transportation isn’t the only thing that stops at this corner; the Yeshiva University shuttle comes here too. The dispatch comes from Belfar Hall, which you can see if you tilt your head back past the church. It is the monolith protruding from the earth, the tallest building in any direction.
Based in Washington Heights since 1929, Yeshiva University is a cornerstone educational institution of modern Orthodoxy. One might assume that by 2005, almost 80 years after its founding, YU would be integrated into the surrounding community. One would be wrong.
“I think the separation between YU and the rest of Washington Heights is blatant,” said YU sophomore Joshua Balderman, When the two communities do mix, Balderman said, the interactions often take on a negative hue.
In response to the segregation and occasional flare-ups, Ruth A. Bevan, YU Professor of Political Science, requires students in one of her classes to go outside and procure a newspaper. “When they find out that the closest newsstand is off of Amsterdam and 181st,” she said, “They balk.”
Indeed, the landscape changes after two blocks in every direction from the heart of the YU campus. Bodegas and clothing stores hawking two t-shirts for five dollars, line the street. Fruit vendors call out, “Fresh fruit!” in a number of languages—one of them, fortunately for the students, English.
The boundaries between YU and the surrounding Dominican community are imagined but rigid. During the summer, though, when students head back home to Teaneck, Baltimore, and other Jewish hubs, YU’s artificial borders disappear. Instead of students lounging on metal benches, the local community takes advantage of the shade under the college trees. Such commingling ends as soon as the school year begins. During those sweltering months the protective façade of YU is exposed.
With the desire “to bridge the gap between various Washington Heights Communities,” Balderman founded the YU Community Club. He aims to “create a communal atmosphere that seems to be lacking [at] present.”
He explained the group’s current initiatives, which include visiting non-Jewish nursing homes and working to rehabilitate dilapidated community open spaces, like public parks. The group attempts to bring Jews to non-Jewish communities and vice versa.
“In general, students are apathetic or feel too busy to get involved,” Balderman explained. Though the organization has only just been formed, it is unique in its approach to the outlying community. Instead of pursuing “tolerance,” Balderman is after true cooperation. Despite “major cultural and language barriers,” he said, “I think if we work together these communities could both be affected in a positive way.”
Positive relationships would certainly be a nice change. Last semester alone, three students were mugged around the university area. “Not once, not twice, but thrice!” read a Commentator headline in regard to the muggings. And on the other side of the tracks, an underground video released last year around Purim spotlighted a contingent of the Jewish community with similar hostility.
On film, an interviewer asked a group of local Hispanic students what they think about the university. As the students yelled, “YU sucks!” in unison, the bottom of the screen featured a caption that read, “Future Beren Campus Security Guards.” The directors, who apparently related to the community strictly through how it could serve them. exhibited no awareness that identifying local students only as potential campus workers is demeaning. Does its intention of being a humorous Purim video legitimate irreverence and offense?
Balderman is likely to say no. Through his work building ties between the communities, Balderman says the problem of disrespect runs deep, and that of apathy even deeper. “Some students claim to be constantly overwhelmed with classes and course work,” he said. He highlights the willingness to spend time deprecating the outlying community but not building ties with it.
Ultimately, it might just be food that connects the two elements of the neighborhood. The recently opened Ari’s Deli, just two blocks from Yeshiva University, geographically straddles the division in communities. In her article for the YU Commentator, Miriam Segura discussed the Deli’s opening. “Food, in the context of Ari’s Deli,” she wrote, “also attains the more philosophically elevated purpose of bridging cultural, and socio-economic, and age barriers.”
At least economically speaking, Ari’s Deli and the Hispanic-run bodega next door exemplify the neighborhood’s potential symbiosis. Shoppers at the deli are encouraged to buy potato chips and soda at the bodega, a move that effectively forces students past their comfort zones.
Written in both Spanish and English, Ari’s menu appeal to both communities, while a kids’ hot dog special is clearly fighting for the neighborhood children (unless Yeshiva University students have a secret desire for kids’ food). The music played in the deli speaks to this diversity, playing everything from classic rock to classic Klezmer. The thumping blasts of Hispanic music coming from cars blazing by provides the variety.
As both communities reach out to one another, students like Balderman hope that the ships passing in the night will start scraping hulls on a regular basis. With the increasing numbers of white hipsters in “Hudson Heights,” the demographic lines of the neighborhood are being radically redrawn.
Hipsters, though, can’t drive away deep tension and wariness. One YU student, for instance, recently described the couple blocks between Yeshiva University and Bennet Avenue as “The Hispanic Obstacle Course.”
When faced with such cynicism from his peers, Balderman reflected, “I know that I sound a bit naïve. Maybe idealistic is the word, but I think it’s important to dream big.”
