It’s been some time since urbane diners remembered the northen half of the city, but this summer’s restaurant week includes eateries in Manhattan’s most populous neighborhood and several in Inwood, too.

     Three are in Lower WaHi, including Terravita on Broadway between 177th and 178th Streets.

     $30, $45, or $60 for a prix-fixe lunch or dinner. The so-called week lasts more than a couple of fortnights: from mid-July through Sunday — one day for each of the program’s thirty years.

     Back by popular demand!

     Weather permitting, the Jazz WaHi ensemble resumes playing tunes outdoors in the park.

     Take a blanket or lawn chairs, and a snack too, to enjoy Uptown musicians jamming for you.

     Free. Monday afternoons at 4 in Bennett Park in Hudson Heights on Fort Washington Avenue at 183rd Street.

     Film Works Al Fresco continues its summer season this week with the tenth of twelve movies screened outdoors.

     In Nosotros los Nobles (We are the Nobles) (2013) three spoiled children are cut off from their family fortune and forced to do the unthinkable: get jobs. Starring a young Karla Souza and featuring Gonzalo Vega in his last film role. 

     The comedy from Mexico is in Spanish with English subtitles. Pre-show musical performance begin at 7:30 p.m. Seating is limited so reserve your spot here.

     Free. Monday night at dusk (around 8:15) at The Hudson restaurant in Inwood, where Dyckman Street meets the Hudson River.

     Support your health by shopping at a farmers’ market.

     From late spring through the late autumn, the Fort Washington Greenmarket in Lower WaHi offers Mexican herbs, peppers, and greens, honey, cheese, juice pressed from ripe orchard fruit, produce grown in the rich soil of Orange County’s “Black Dirt” region, pastries and fresh bread.

     Tuesdays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Fort Washington Avenue at 168th Street.

     A New York farmers’ market offers fresh fruit and vegetables from the Hudson Valley, the Garden State and beyond.

     Over 60 and want to excercise with your crew?

     Columbia invites you for wellness walks and fitness sessions, organized around incentives and rewards for your effort.

     The weekly workouts are held indoors—on the world’s fastest indoor track. (Cleats not required.) To sign up, call (212) 305-9483.

      Free. Tuesday mornings starting from 10 to 11:30 at the Armory in Lower WaHi on Fort Washington Avenue at 168th Street.

     Fort Tryon Park has long been a place of healing and health, especially during the stress of the pandemic. Take in the majestic views of the Hudson River while boosting your mental and physical health at weekly classes with instructor Robert Martinez.

     Tai chi is a system of movements and positions believed to have developed in twelfth century China. Its techniques aim to address the body and mind as interconnected systems.

     The sunrise classes last an hour and are suitable for all levels. Wear comfortable clothing and take a bottle of water. If the weather looks doubtful, check the Fort Tryon Park Trust’s Facebook Page to find out if the event is canceled.

     Free. Wednesday mornings at 6:30 on the Linden Terrace in Fort Tryon Park. Through September 7.

     Seek body and mind balance through free yoga while overlooking the Hudson River and basking in the glow of the setting sun.

     The class is appropriate for all levels. The instructor, Stacey Linden, says she believes yoga should be practiced, not perfected.

     The 75-minute classes take place on Abby’s Lawn, which is slightly sloped with are some uneven spots.

     Take a mat, a bottle of water, and some bug spray. If rain or wet ground cancels the class, you’ll see the announcement on the Fort Tryon Park Facebook Page.

     There is no advance registration. Arrive early as capacity is limited and attendance is on a first-come, first-served basis. Every attendee must sign an NYC Parks/Fort Tryon Park Trust waiver on-site at each session, starting 6:30 p.m.

     Free. Wednesday evening at 6:45 on Abby’s Lawn in Fort Tryon Park. Through August 31.

     Lotus Music & Dance will teach you basic steps in a Bollywood dance workshop with choreographer Anshuman Konuru.

     Learn some key moves to help you groove to the uplifting sounds of Bollywood.

     Pack your enthusiasm, a picnic and a bottle of water for this dance party in Uptown’s gem of a park. (Remember, no glass or alcohol in the park.)

     The one-hour class is sponsored by the Fort Tryon Park Trust.

        Free. Thursday evening at 6:30 in Fort Tryon Park on the Café Lawn. Rain cancels. 

     The film series Our Bodies, Our Labor screens five stories of reproductive rights in the Americas.

     July 28 Self-Managed Abortion

     August 11 Criminalization of Pregnancy

     August 18 Forced Sterlications of Latina Women and People

     Thursday nights at 8 at at 570 West 159th Street in Lower WaHi.

     Learning to photograph, says U.S. Army veteran Anny Mariano, provides “the constant reminder that there is beauty and art all around me, even in the darkest of times.”

     Mariano and 21 other veterans who participated in workshops with the Josephine Herrick Project from 2018 to 2022 showcase their work in At Ease: Photographs by Military Veterans in New York.

     For the photographers, the camera became a way of finding new avenues of self-expression and relating to the world around them. Filtered through their experiences and seen through their lenses, New York—even at its most frenetic—becomes a place of peace.

     Book your visit here.
     $10. At the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Lower WaHi in Roger Morris Park. Through September 11.

    The Inwood greenmarket is a year-round neighborhood favorite.
    People of all ages, backgrounds, and tastes gather each Saturday to meet and greet their friends and neighbors and do their weekly shopping. Even on the coldest, darkest winter Saturdays, loyal Inwood shoppers come out because they know they can’t get products like this anywhere else.
     A core group of 15 farmers attends every week of the year, and during the peak of the season, five more join to round out the offerings with the summer’s bounty.

     The collection of food scraps for composting and used textiles for recycling is on hiatus during the pandemic.
     Saturdays from 8 to 3 on Isham Street between Seaman Avenue and Cooper Street. Open year-round.

     Join professional photographer Michael Palma Mir for a landscape photography workshop.   

     Learn techniques on how to best capture the abundant flora and fauna of Fort Tryon’s Broadway expanse, with its glacial pothole, geology, grotto and glorious gardens. 

     Take your camera and a full water bottle.

     Free. Saturday morning at 10; meet at the entrance to the park at Broadway and Arden Street. 

     Enjoy the combination of flowers and music when the Bacchanalia Baroque Ensemble performs an hour-long concert in Uptown’s private garden, which is open to all.

     Free. Saturday afternoon at 1 in the Riverside-Inwood Neighborhood Garden on Broadway at the confluence of Riverside Drive and Dyckman Street.

     Join the Q & T Community for their monthly open mic night, a celebration with storytelling, music, poetry, art, and everything in between. All are welcome.

     This is an explicitly LGBTQ+ space, which means that we expect people to respect each other’s various modes of expression, pronouns, and showing up.

     Hosted by Memphis Washington. Light refreshments and safer sex materials will be provided. 

     Free. Saturday evening from 5 to 8 at Word Up Community Book Shop in Lower WaHi on Amsterdam Avenue at 165th Street. Monthly on the third Satutday.

     Relax and restore with a morning of yoga and meditation at a private Uptown garden.

     All levels are welcome for a one-hour class led by Kai. Take a mat and some water.

     Free. Sunday morning at 9 at the Riverside-Inwood Neighborhood Garden at 236 Dyckman Street at the confluence of Riverside Drive and Broadway.

     New York City is the site of ancient earth-shaking and earth-shaping events.

     The bedrock that anchors the city’s skyscrapers tells a story of a place going back more than a billion years. The island of Manhattan is built on three strata known as Manhattan Schist, Inwood Marble, and Fordham Gneiss.

      Get to know your ground beneath your feet on this trek with the Urban Park Rangers. Wear comfortable shoes and take a bottle of water.

      Free. Sunday afternoon at 1 in Inwood Hill Park; meet at Seaman Avenue and Isham Street.

     When the temperature is hotter than normal, the city opens its cooling centers so you can spend the day in air conditioning.

     If you don’t have a cool place to stay during a heat wave, check this map or call 311 to find the nearest cooling center.

     There are several in Uptown, including:

     Hudson Heights Moriah Center, 90 Bennett Avenue

     Fort George WaHi Star NSC, 650 W. 187 Street, open until 2:30 pm. Friday; closed weekends

                                YM &YWHA, 54 Nagle Avenue, open until 4:30 p.m.

     Sherman Creek Dyckman Community Center, 3782 Tenth Avenue, open until 11 p.m.

     The centers’ closing times vary.

      Among the things WaHi is famous for is the noise. Lots of it!

      But does it seem eerily quiet now? You may not miss the auditory assaults, but the sounds of people mingling and waiters serving are becoming memories.

      Refresh yours with the New York Public Library’s new online album: Missing Sounds of New York. It probably won’t win any Grammys, but each track uses a combination of sounds to create familiar canvases on which mini stories are placed: a glass breaking in a bar, a dance performance on the subway, an overly enthusiastic baseball fan.

      It’s free and it’s available from the library. (No need for a library card!)

Postponed by the heat wave

    Head down to Audubon Terrace for an afternoon of live music and art for all ages and explore the exhibitions American Travelers and Art as Solidarity.

     Kids can decorate vases with the artist Andrea Arroyo, with inspiration from the eighteenth-century Talavera from Puebla, make paper flowers, and enjoy a soulful performance by singer Claudia Valentina Montes.

    Free. Saturday afternoon from 2 to 4 on the terrace at the Hispanic Society of America, on Broadway at 175th Street.

     Summer is here!

     See what’s in bloom at the Heather Garden, our Uptown floral extravaganza.

     Open daily in Fort Tryon Park near the entrance at Margaret Corbin Circle in Hudson Heights.

      Each summer since 2015, the Higher Ground Festival brings Northern Manhattan artists together for performances to Uptown audiences.

      The outdoor shows run over a week in August in locations across Hudson Heights and Inwood.

      The festival usually takes place in August, but the organizers have announced no dates this year. They don’t answer emails have haven’t updated their social media since May. If this year’s festival takes place, we’ll post it here.

     The High Bridge—New York City’s oldest standing bridge—is a landmark that connects walkers and cyclists with Manhattan and the Bronx.
     The High Bridge is a path from the neighborhoods of Washington Heights to Highbridge across the river, and is accessible from both boroughs.
     Free. Daily from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Enter from Highbridge Park, in Lower WaHi on Amsterdam Avenue in the 170s.

     Famous and up-and-coming artists perform at Eliot’s weekly sessions and her free concerts are legendary among jazz aficionados.

     Join her live—in her home for Parlor Jazz.

     Free. Sunday afternoons at 3:30 at 555 Edgecomb Avenue, Apartment 3F, in Lower WaHi at 160th Street.

     Film Works Al Fresco continues its summer season this week with the eleventh of twelve movies screened outdoors.

     Summer of Soul; or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised (1992) is the documentary about the legendary 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival which celebrated African-American music and culture and promoted Black pride and unity. Marking the directorial debut by Questlove, it won Best Documentary at the 94th Academy Awards and the 2021 Sundance Grand Jury Prize.

     In English with Spanish subtitles. Pre-show musical performance begin at 7:30 p.m. Seating is limited so reserve your spot here.

     Free. Monday night, August 22, at dusk (around 8:15) at The Hudson restaurant in Inwood, where Dyckman Street meets the Hudson River.

      Formed in 2018, the Leadlights encsemble performs chamber music with a modern twist. Its summer concert series, Rising in the Heights, plays out on Upt0wn sidewalks.

     August 24  The Timothy James Robinson Jazz Trio and NYPL librarian Jennie Mayfield reading Little Melba and her Big Trombone, by Katheryn Russell-Brown.

     August 31 Hip-hop artist Randy Mason (rescheduled from May due to the weather).

     September 30 Morgan Boyle, an NYPL librarian, reading Coquí in the City, by Nomar Perez.

     Free. Wednesday evening at 5 at the Word Up Community Bookshop in Lower WaHi on Amsterdam Avenue at 165th Street.

      If you like outdoor geometry, get on the street for sunrise and sunset when the shadows line up with the streets.

      The “Manhattanhenge” effect works Uptown on days different from the rest of the island’s.

      To see the sun line up with the streets in Hudson Heights (on 181st Street in the photo), where the street grid is aligned differently from most of the borough, get out on April 18; it’s also on August 26 in Hudson Heights Henge. Fort George Henge is on the same dates as Manhattan, and Inwood Henge is on January 23 — the grid there is so katy-wompus that the sun aligns when it is due “south.”

     The effect works below 174th and above 174th if you go east of Broadway (for sunrise: sunset views may be blocked by buildings to the west). So if you want to see Manhattanhenge, as it’s dubbed, hope for clear skies on May 30 and June 12.

     Hudson Heights Henge: Friday, August 26, at dawn and dusk.

     You can look for the dates in all the city’s neighborhoods on this map from Carto.

     Love quiz games? Love nature? You can have both!

     Join the Urban Park Rangers as they lead a quiz game hike through the picturesque trails of Inwood Hill Park, asking fun-filled questions along the way that touch on park history, ecology, and everything in between.

      Free. Saturday afternoon, August 27, at 1 in the park; meet at Seaman Avenue and Isham Street.

     What are the greatest threats to freedom of expression in the United States today?

     Find out at an event on censorship, surveillance, and freedom of expression with Heidi Boghosian, author of I Have Nothing to Hide, and Andy Lee Roth, co-editor of Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2022.

     Boghosian and Roth will lead a discussion of how censorship and surveillance undermine freedom of expression—and what we can do to counter these threats.

     Drawing on their most recent books, Boghosian, a data privacy expert, and Roth, a sociologist who studies news, critically examine a handful of basic ways that censorship and surveillance intertwine to limit public debate, fuel intolerance, and amplify pressures to conform. The event will be moderated by Veronica Santiago Liu, founder of Word Up Community Bookshop / Librería Comunitaria.

     Sign up here.

     $5 donation. Saturday evening, August 27, at 6 at the bookstore in Lower WaHi on Amsterdam Avenue at 165th Street.

     Film Works Al Fresco continues its summer season this week with the final of twelve movies screened outdoors.

     After being mistaken for a government agent by a group of foreign spies, a New York advertising executive goes on the run in North by Northwest (1959) and falls for a woman whose loyalties he begins to doubt. This late-period Hitchcock classic laid the groundwork for countless action thrillers to follow.

     In English with Spanish subtitles. Pre-show musical performance begin at 7:30 p.m. Seating is limited so reserve your spot here.

     Free. Monday night, August 29, at dusk (around 8:10) at The Hudson restaurant in Inwood, where Dyckman Street meets the Hudson River.

     Soprano Maria Brea and pianist Felix Jarrar perform a selection of opera repertoire in a setting unmatched in all Manhattan: the Grand Foyer of the United Palace Theater.

     They will be joined by Teresa Castillo, soprano, and Josh Collier, tenor, in an hour-long program that will range from an original composition by Jarrar to popular arias by Mozart, Bellini, and Puccini. The main event is Brea’s take on Ophelia’s “Mad Scene” in Hamlet. 

     Brea, a WaHi resident, is using the performance to prepare for Plácido Domingo’s Operalia: The World Opera Competition, in October. 

     Free. Tuesday night, August 30, at 7:30 at the United Palace in Lower WaHi on Broadway at 175th Street.

     The 181st Street A train station will close five weekends between July 15 and October 24 so the MTA can replace rails, switches and signals. Uptown service will terminate at 168th Street.

     Straphangers can switch there to shuttle buses from 9:45 p.m. Friday through 5 a.m. Monday.

     Beginning Friday night, September 9, around 9:45. Also starting Friday for the weekends of October 15 and 22.

     Celebrate the harvest moon and Tsukimi, a Japanese festival.

     UP Theater brings back its curated open mic with a special edition, dedicated to UP’s own Tara Mooney.

     Her unique comedic voice and free spirit will be honored with performances by some of her—and your—favorite uptown creatives.

     Saturday, September 17, at a time and place to be announced later.

     Get off Netflix and back into a real theater.

     Movies at the Palace are back, screening the favorite films of 2,000 Uptowners who cast their ballots in the winter.

     This month’s film is Black Panther.

     Free. Sunday, September 18, around noon at the United Palace in Lower WaHi on Broadway at 175th Street.

     Made famous in The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, the shorekeeper at Jeffrey’s Hook invites you to a party.

     Celebrate Manhattan’s only remaining lighthouse with readings of the famous children’s book, fishing clinics, live music, food and art vendors, Urban Park Ranger presentations, and the chance to climb to the top.

     Free. Saturday, October 8, from noon to 4 in Fort Washington Park.

     Mixing traditional lyricism with modern reggaeton, Sebastián Yatra brings his romantic lyrics to Uptown on his Dharma tour.

     The Colombian singer and songwriter began as a pop artist, recording ballads when he started.

     $66.15 to $462.10. Saturday night, October 8, at 8 at the United Palace in Lower WaHi on Broadway at 175th Street.

     When the Mavericks come to town, they will flip on its head their usual approach of country & rock. This time they’re including salsa, ska, norteño, mariachi and more, with twangy guitars to boot.

     Up to $180.45. Friday night, October 21, at 8 at the United Palace in Lower WaHi on Broadway at 175th Street.

     UP Theater presents an award-winning, one-woman show that depicts a young woman at the intersection of heartbreak, mental illness, identity, and, oh yeah, a pandemic.

     Created and performed by Ellie Brelis.

     Saturday, November 5, at a time and place to be announced later.

     A yearly gathering on Thanksgiving will remind you of the Lenape people and the blessings of their land we now call home.

     A short ceremony honors our duty to Mother Earth and our responsibility to the forest, the river, and each other.

     Free. Thanksgiving morning at 9 at Shorakkopoch Rock in Inwood Hill Park. From the intersection of 214th Street and Indian Road, follow the path that runs along the water; the boulder is on the far side of a large, open field.

     You loved it on the radio (and podcast).

     Now come and experience Uptown’s holiday classic live and in person. UP Theater presents the Richard Diamond Christmas Show, featuring the hard-boiled detective who mixes noir and the holidays and still comes out alive.

     December on a date and at a time and place to be announced later.

     An older punk rocker looking back at the hard knocks and glory days of the band that propelled her to fame (sort of) reveals herself in UP Theater’s fourteenth mainstage production.    

     The Best Punk Band in Conway, Missouri: An Oral History of Pressley Cox and the Fallout Five combines story-telling techniques. By Kirby Fields.

     In May on dates and at times and a place to be announced later.

     Only in New York ...

     One day late in most springs, The Great and Glorious Grand Army of The Bronx comes together to claim the neighborhood of Marble Hill which, the group suggests, belongs to the only borough on the mainland on the basis that it was annexed by Bronx Borough President James Lyons in the 1930s.
     Care to fight back? Everyone is welcome, even hecklers.
     Free. A Saturday morning in May, with a meet-up typically in a bar. Check back in the spring so you can join the forces or prepare defenses.

     Join the cast, crew, and friends of UP Theater to celebrate their thirteenth birthday.

     The evening features food, drink, raffles and honoring the Upstanding Person of the Year.

     In May on a date and at a time and place to be announced later.

     The annual Drums Along the Hudson began in 2002 as a traditional Pow Wow to celebrate Native American heritage and culture, and also to commemorate the Lenape people who first inhabited Inwood Hill Park, or Shorakapok (“edge of the water”).

     The twentith anniversary event features dancers and drummers from around the world, combining Native American heritage, culture and art with the diversity of New York City. Activities include a Tree of Peace planting, international cuisine, Native American storytelling, a Pow Wow and crafts.
     The event has attracted a growing audience, numbering from 400 in the first year to over 8,000 in pre-Covid years.
     Free. A Sunday in early June in Inwood Hill Park at Indian Road and 218th Street.