I’d heard about the Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood long before I moved to New York City.
The thing that struck me about it was that Inwood wasn’t the the hippest name for a New York neighborhood. It couldn’t be reduced to a cool nickname like The Heights or the Village, and I’d never seen it portrayed on any of the millions of TV shows that take place in New York.
But I was about to learn three major lessons: my notion of New York City had been narrowly shaped by television, there’s much more to the city beyond Times Square, and I wasn’t going to be living inside some sitcom that didn’t acknowledge the extremely high cost of renting an apartment in NYC. Matt and I needed a real neighborhood, an affordable one, to call home.
So how did we end up living at the northernmost tip of Manhattan? Growing up in Central New York, my rosy teenage dreams always portrayed me living in an apartment with a stoop outside near a smoky bar that held nightly spoken word poetry sessions and served cheap, watered-down cocktails. (You see what I mean by how narrow my view of New York was).
That’s not Inwood, in fact, that’s not anywhere except maybe a long-gone era, or even a fantasy, of life in New York.
Our path to living here began in an unlikely place. Though we didn’t move to Inwood until 2009, the seed of an idea was planted several years prior to that, back when we were still living abroad.
In 2006, Matt and I were celebrating the end of our first year of teaching in Istanbul, Turkey. We were on a 7-day “Blue Cruise” aboard a small wooden yacht with a group of friends, sailing in the clear blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
A friend and fellow teacher that joined us had invited his sister and brother-in-law along on the trip. The couple lived in New York City and described their neighborhood as being the farthest north you could go in Manhattan without hitting the Bronx.
At the time, Matt and I had no plans to move to New York. After two years of teaching in Istanbul, we were heading to Vietnam for a new year-long teaching position. After that, who knew? We had vague plans to move back to the states but couldn’t figure out where.
Matt’s roots were in California and my entire family was in upstate New York, giving us the vast nation in between to choose from.
The year in Vietnam sped by and we were no closer to knowing where we wanted to live. New York City was on the table but…even after living in Istanbul and Ho Chi Minh City, New York was formidable. The thought of getting jobs, finding an apartment, and carving out our lives amidst 8 million other people was intimidating.
Our time in Vietnam came to an end. We buckled under our abundance of options and made our choice in the most passive of ways: Matt was offered a job in North Carolina. We thought, “Well, what else have we got going on?” and moved into a tiny temporary apartment in downtown Greensboro.
North Carolina looked great on paper. Winters are short and mild. It’s a fast-growing state economically-speaking, and after three years abroad (and a couple of years in California before that), it felt nice to be relatively close to my family in upstate New York.
But…
We found out pretty quickly that small-town living wasn’t for us. Before North Carolina, I think I fancied myself as such a flexible person. I figured I had been around the world and could take anything that was thrown my way.
But I couldn’t get used to North Carolina. I felt out of sorts all the time. Whenever I spoke, my voice sounded too loud to my own ears, my vowels too flat. North Carolina was lovely in many ways, and we met lots of nice people, but I just couldn’t picture building a life there.
We lasted ten months before throwing in the towel and making the leap to New York, a city I’d dreamed of living in since I was 15 years old. After almost a year of living in a place I didn’t want to be, the intimidation of moving to New York melted away and turned into excitement.
Knowing where we wanted to live for the long-term, really for the first time in our marriage, was a weight off our shoulders. But there was still the overwhelming decision of where in the city to locate ourselves. I knew that people had been pouring into Brooklyn in droves, but my lifelong love for the city began and ended in Manhattan, which also happens to be an island of skyrocketing rents.
I recalled that Turkish cruise we took, and that nice couple’s description of their Upper Manhattan neighborhood. We arranged to have coffee with them on our first scouting trip and were surprised by how much they loved Inwood. Shortly after that, Matt was offered a job at a college in Westchester and our problem of where to live was pretty much solved.
Driving to Westchester from Inwood would be an easy commute for him. And as a huge bonus, rent was lower and apartments were larger compared to apartments on the Upper West Side, Harlem, and even nearby Washington Heights.
And as it turned out, there’s so much happening here. As a predominantly Dominican community, Spanish is the first language. There’s a excellent Dominican food here, as well as a wide range of restaurants serving lots of different cuisine. It’s also a family-oriented neighborhood with outdoor recreation, free summer movies, and parks that kids and adults use in every season as their backyard.
Once the pressure of choosing a neighborhood was off, I had no doubt that moving to New York City was the right choice. The moment we crossed the George Washington Bridge with our U-Haul, the city—and Inwood—became home.