The Manhattan Times

Lighting up Northern Manhattan

by Daniel P. Bader

Winter’s longer nights provide the perfect canvas for Northern Manhattanites to display their holiday lights. Individual businesses – and some working in concert – help set a festive mood for shopping with lights and other decorations. Throughout the community residents provide beacons in the darkness by ornamenting their windows, doorways and fire escapes. It’s a time honored tradition, but one that may have been scaled back in recent years.

Inwood resident and Manhattan’s Peak blogger Zaida Grunes remembers stories about a Northern Manhattan where nearly every window blazed bright.

“My son’s grandmother is an Irish-American,” Grunes said in an e-mail response to questions. “She was born in the Heights and moved to Inwood when she was 18 (early 1960s). She loves to tell us stories about when she was growing up here. She said decorating your windows used to be a major event. Every passing year families would get more creative with lights, garland, anything shiny and eye-catching.”

Grunes is hoping to bring some of that luster back to Inwood with a campaign she calls “Inwood Shines Bright!”

“After hearing her story, I imagined what Inwood would have been like at that time and envisioned a scene that made me very, very happy. What an amazing Festival of Lights that must have been!” she said.

Grunes, who turned her lights on after Thanksgiving, was disappointed to see that her lights were the only ones within eyeshot.

“People on Twitter busted my chops for starting so early. Over the next week I kept looking around realizing that I was the only one on our block. Where did our holiday cheer go? It was time to bring it back,” Grunes said.

Besides spreading the word to her online neighbors, she’s posting bilingual fliers around Inwood encouraging residents to light up their windows.

If fewer windows are as festive as they were in yesteryear, a constant source of holiday cheer in recent years have been the seasonal lights along the W. 181st Street shopping corridor overseen by the Washington Heights Business Improvement District (BID).

Each year the BID rents the lights right after Thanksgiving and they typically stay up until after Three Kings Day.

“It’s part of our contract, it’s one of the things the BID is supposed to do,” said BID Executive Director George Sanchez. “It’s an attractive way of highlighting the district.”

Sanchez said the lights program has been running since before he started in 1999.

Before 2004 the lights used to be multi-colored, or illuminated bell-shaped red and green shades, but since then they’ve been all white.

The 22 light ropes with LED technology cost around $700 each to rent, and the 10 “shooting star poles” each cost $400. To Sanchez it’s worth it.

“I love driving down 181st Street at night,” he said. “It really adds a welcoming and warm appearance.”

Besides the cost, lighting up the streets is more difficult than it seems. The BID has to make sure the contractor is properly licensed and has had to make upgrades to the street lights to meet city codes before tapping them for power.

Rising high above the Heights, decorated windows in the Bridge Apartments can be seen almost anywhere in the neighborhood.

Mike Diaz, an actor and comedian, puts up lights whenever he has a party regardless of the season.

“I tell people, follow the lights,” he said.

“I can see them now,” he added walking and talking on his cell phone around W. 168th Street.

“It’s kind of cool how it’s a decoration but you can see it from all over.”

The area around Bennett Park will be a little brighter this year too.

Below the star hung on the façade of Hudson View Gardens, the park is the site of this year’s giant menorah, which was first lit on Dec. 15.

This is the fifth year the menorah has been lit in Northern Manhattan, said Chabad of Washington Heights co-director Elisheva Kirschenbaum.

“The tradition of Chanukah is to spread light because it was a very dark time,” she said.

The eight-night celebration recalls a miracle in Jewish history when one day’s worth of oil burned in a menorah for eight days and nights during the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem.

The giant menorah, Kirschenbaum said, celebrates that event.

“The miracle happened with light,” he said. “The way to publicize Chanukah is by light.”

Farther south, merchant group Broadway United Businesses and Community League of the Heights switched on the lights along the Broadway malls between W. 157th Street and W. 170th Street. The two groups, along with their sponsors, celebrated the lighting with a countdown around a Christmas tree on Dec. 3 in Ilka Tanya Payan Triangle Park on Broadway near W. 157th Street.

Despite these public lightings, imagine what Northern Manhattan would look like with lights in every window.

For Grunes any decorations will do, for any reason.

“This community project is not just about Christmas only, it’s about celebrating our community, and sharing our spirit through lights – however your family interprets that vision,” she said.