The neighborhood is located on a plateau[1] on top of a bluff overlooking both the Hudson River on the west and the Broadway valley of Washington Heights on the east.

[notes 1] One definition has it bounded by the Hudson River to the west, Broadway to the east, 173rd Street to the south, and Fort Tryon Park to the north,[5][6][7][8] but another would limit the neighborhood to the top of the high ridge which physically separates it from the rest of Washington Heights.

In 2018, The New York Times defined it as being bordered by 173rd Street in the south, Bennett Avenue in the east, the northern boundary of Fort Tryon Park in the north, and the Hudson River in the west.

Just to the north of Hudson Heights, in what is now Inwood Hill Park, the Lenape tribe exchanged the island for items worth about 60 Dutch Gilders in a deal with Peter Minuit in 1626.

[3] In the 18th century, only the southern portion of the island was settled by Europeans, leaving the rest of Manhattan largely untouched.

Among the many unspoiled tracts of land was the highest spot on the island, which provided unsurpassed views of what would become the New York metropolitan area.

Fort Washington had been established as an offensive position to prevent British vessels from sailing north on the Hudson River.

[14] On July 9, 1776, when New York's Provincial Congress assented to the Declaration of Independence, "A rowdy crowd of soldiers and civilians ('no decent people' were present, one witness said later) ... marched down Broadway to Bowling Green, where they toppled the statue of George III erected in 1770.

The cliffs that are now Fort Tryon Park held the mansion of Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings, a retired president of the Chicago Coke and Gas Company.

[15] The beginning of this section of Washington Heights as a neighborhood-within-a-neighborhood seems to have started around this time, in the years before World War II.

In 1989, Steven M. Lowenstein wrote, "The greatest social distance was to be found between the area in the northwest, just south of Fort Tryon Park, which was, and remains, the most prestigious section ...

The further north and west one went, the more prestigious the neighborhood..."[21] During World War I, immigrants from Hungary and Poland moved in next to the Irish.

[23] In the years after World War II, the neighborhood was referred to as Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson due to the dense population of German and Austrian Jews who had settled there.

[26] The newspaper became known as a "prominent intellectual voice and a main forum for German Jewry in the United States," according to the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. "It featured the work of great prominent writers and intellectuals such as Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Stefan Zweig, and Hannah Arendt.

"[27] In 1941 it published the Aufbau Almanac, a guide to living in the United States that explained the American political system, education, insurance law, the post office and sports.

The paper nearly went bankrupt in 2006, but was purchased by Jewish Media AG, and exists today as a monthly news magazine.

[30] When the children of the Jewish immigrants to the Hudson Heights area grew up, they tended to leave the neighborhood, and sometimes, the city.

"[36] In 2011, Curbed New York published on article which used Hudson Heights as an example of "How to Gentrify a Neighborhood", the first step of which was "Create a nickname to separate the area from its crime-riddled past.

[43] The 2010 census determined that the population of the neighborhood, using the larger definition of its boundaries, south to West 173rd Street, to be 29,000, with 44% being non-Hispanic whites, and 43% Hispanic.

[8] Nearly every structure was built before World War II – which in New York real estate parlance is referred to as pre-war – many of them in the Art Deco style.

Members of the co-op's board successfully lobbied the legislature to change the law that grants tax credits for the installation of solar panels in residences to include apartment buildings, which had been excluded.

Public places in Washington Heights, Inwood and Marble Hill host impromptu galleries, readings, performances and markets over several weeks each summer.

Bennett Park hosts the annual Harvest Festival in September and the children's Halloween Parade – with trick-or-treating afterwards – on All Hallow's Eve.

In the middle of the neighborhood itself, there is a small shopping area at West 187th Street between Cabrini Boulevard and Fort Washington Avenue.

[54] Nearby to Hudson Heights lies the United Palace, a church, live music venue, and non-profit cultural center located at 4140 Broadway between West 175th and 176th Streets.

[69] The Roman Catholic patron saint of immigrants, Mother Francesca Saverio Cabrini, is entombed at her shrine near the northern end of Fort Washington Avenue.

[79] Washington Heights is also the home of Khal Adath Jeshurun (KAJ or "Breuer's"), the German-Jewish Ashkenazi congregation established in the late 1930s.

[93]Beneath the bridge, at the east stanchion, is the Little Red Lighthouse, where a namesake festival is held is in the late summer, and where a 5.85-mile (9.41 km) recreational swim finishes in early autumn.

[118] A musical that began performances in 2007, In The Heights, takes place on 181st Street and Fort Washington Avenue, and was written and produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda who grew up in northern Manhattan.

[119][120] The same year, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a novel by Junot Díaz, referred to Anglo women carrying yoga mats in the neighborhood as a harbinger of gentrification; the book won the Pulitzer Prize for letters in 2008.