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Word Up started as a pop-up in 2011, operating out of a donated storefront on Broadway and 167th when the landlord advertised the space at market-rate rent, store volunteers did what any respectable startup would: crowdfund. The place is a hub for local talks and author readings, writer meetups and kids’ story hours, many reflecting the neighborhood’s Afro- Latino focus.

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Called Word Up, the shop operates more as a community library, with a deep bilingual inventory, sidewalk shelves, and a traveling cart full of free books. Independent bookstores have struggled to stay afloat downtown, but a group of volunteers has managed to keep one open on an unlikely corner up in Washington Heights. The menu is bilingual, but that day, little English was spoken.

On a sweltering Sunday just hours after last summer’s Dominican Day parade, a massive Dominican flag was raised from the restaurant’s awning, matching mini versions that fluttered from back pockets of passersby. But the main attraction is the heaping piles of rotisserie, chopped and bagged to order from behind a window by the takeout counter.

The rest of the menu covers an array of Dominican staples - cuatro golpes and mango juice for breakfast your choice of yuca, maduros, or classic rice and beans to go with an array of chicken and pork dishes tres leches to top it all off. In a neighborhood with no shortage of kitchen-savvy abuelas, the restaurant draws regular crowds of locals, newcomers, and visitors alike, a testament to the allure of New York’s most beloved bird, roasted to garlicky perfection. The tender rotisserie chickens from Malecon Restaurant are among Dominican New Yorkers’ greatest contributions to uptown, and probably to humankind. Practice your Spanish, hop the express A train north, and have a look around. A walk through the Heights today reveals a dizzying array of cultural and ethnic diversity: Dominican markets, the greenery of Fort Tryon Park and its Cloisters museum, Central American fruit stands, kosher bakeries nestled around Yeshiva University, and Chinese restaurant delivery workers zipping up and down hills on mopeds.

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Having weathered the ills of the crack and crime epidemics of the 1980s, the area continues to display a formidable resilience residents of neighboring Inwood to the north recently fought down Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposals for a new housing development feared to be a Trojan horse for displacement. And in 1965, Malcolm X was murdered at the Audubon Ballroom, on West 165th Street and Broadway. Highbridge Park, which hugs the Hudson River from West 155th Street to Dyckman Avenue, opened an officially integrated pool under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia that was long kept unofficially segregated by local Irish gangs in 1957, one month before West Side Story opened on Broadway, a white teenager was killed near the pool by gang members from Harlem during a confrontation.

The neighborhood, like others, has suffered the turbulence of northern racism.

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Professional baseball has roots in the Heights, too: The New York Giants played at the Polo Grounds near the Harlem River at 155th Street from 1890 to 1957 and the Mets in 19 and before the Yankees were the Bronx Bombers, they played at Hilltop Park (now the site of Columbia University Medical Center) as the Highlanders from 1903 to 1912. In the 1890s, the first moving pictures were broadcast at Morris-Jumel Mansion. Known for its large, affordable apartments, Dominican food, and a number of preserved pre-war buildings untouched by new development, Washington Heights has played host to several New York City firsts. The neighborhood has over the years been home to a rotating cast of newcomers: revolutionary British colonists, Greeks, Irish, German Jews after World War II, and, in the late Sixties, a surge of Latino immigrants, especially from the Dominican Republic. Once a stretch of rural countryside home to the native Munsee, modern Washington Heights, a hilly neighborhood covering much of Manhattan’s northern tip, was named for the fortification where General George Washington’s army camped to keep an eye on the advancing Redcoats.