By the time Miranda was growing up, the neighborhood had long been considered a refuge for immigrants in search of the American dream. But when it was first developed in the 1800s, it was the area that wealthy New Yorkers called home. Regal estates, like that of famed naturalist John James Audubon, took advantage of the area's rolling hills and waterfront views. In addition to the neighborhood's physical beauty, it drew interest for its historical significance, having been the site of Fort Washington, a strategic point of defense in the Continental army's efforts to protect New York from the British during the Revolutionary War.

By the year 1900, the face of Washington Heights began to change. As affluent families moved their estates south--developing alongside today's Fifth Avenue and the Upper East Side--Washington Heights became an enclave for immigrants from Europe. The Irish, escaping the Great Potato Famine, settled in the neighborhood after the Lower East Side proved inhospitable. A few decades later, German Jews, fleeing anti-Semitism in the wake of the Nazi regime's rise to power, arrived in Washington Heights in such numbers that the neighborhood became known as "Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson." Later, immigrants from Greece, whose population in New York peaked in the 1960s, settled there.

But as these groups gained steadier footing in the city, they began trading in Washington Heights for more attractive real estate, creating the opportunity for a new wave of immigrants, this time from Latin America, to call the area their own. As documented by the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, roughly 4,000 Puerto Ricans migrated to the United States, each year, between the years of 1946 and 1956. As Europeans moved out and Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans and soon after, Dominicans, moved in, the neighborhood transformed into a largely Latino barrio, a characteristic that has held on through today.

Usnavi and Vanessa dancing in the streets of Washington Heights

Locals call Washington Heights "Little Dominican Republic." Pictured here is a scene from the film adaptation of In the Heights. (Macall Polay)

Robert Snyder, a historian at Rutgers University, says that Dominican immigrants made such a deep impact on the area because they were quick to set up hometown associations, political organizations, sporting clubs and restaurants. What was particularly unique about the Dominican community, according to Snyder, was that, with the advent of air travel, they were also able to travel back home, send kids to their grandparents for the summer, and check in on businesses that were still based in the D.R., the Dominican Republic.

"They put one foot in the D.R. and one foot in N.Y.C.," says Snyder, of the particular proximity that helped Dominicans set up a community whose sounds and smells--the ubiquity of Spanish, the presence of the Dominican flag, the botanicas selling fragrant incenses--were things that Dominicans brought along with them to New York.

Like the Cubans, the Mexicans, and the Puerto Rican immigrants that came before them, the Dominican community of Washington Heights arrived "looking to make their mark," adds Ramona Hernandez, a sociologist and the director of the City College of New York's Dominican Studies Institute. It was their determination to resist, combined with their "energy, that desire, that willingness to do whatever it takes to make it to progress," she says, that lent a type of permanency to the area.

Small residential buildings, capable of housing multiple families within a single apartment, were characteristic of the neighborhood. With five or six floors each, these small buildings reminded Dominicans of the casitas back home, says Hernandez, who explains that those buildings were also what enabled so many Dominicans to actually concentrate in the same place. Upper Manhattan, including Washington Heights, possesses the largest population of Dominicans in all of New York.