The success of the Broadway musical Hamilton and its cast album are having an unexpected—but perhaps inevitable—impact on the Manhattan real estate market.
According to the real estate website DNAInfo.com, the show has sparked a boom in the neighborhood surrounding Alexander Hamilton's home on West 141st Street (now a museum, Hamilton Grange), which is referred to in the script with the repeated line ”it's quiet uptown” in the song of the same title.
The neighborhood, which has been known as Hamilton Heights for more than a century, lies between the Upper West Side and Washington Heights, the former neighborhood being the setting of the musical West Side Story and the latter being the setting of Lin-Manuel Miranda's earlier musical In the Heights.
Hamilton Heights has a street slashing through it, Hamilton Place, also named for the Founding Father. The neighborhood of low-rise brownstones and apartment buildings has gone through many changes in ethnic makeup over the decades. It's currently predominantly Latino and is undergoing gentrification.
The website reported, ”Hamilton’s legacy in the area was the hot topic at the kickoff event last weekend for the Real Estate Board of New York’s 2016 Uptown Open House Expo, where Kevin Draper of New York Historical Tours discussed that the Founding Father selected the hilly terrain in Northern Manhattan to build his 32-acre estate for many of the reasons people today are flocking to these neighborhoods: for more space and for views.”
Draper is scheduled to address the topic again April 17, at an Expo open house event called “Hamilton in the Heights,” which the site reported, “will also include a menu that would have been popular during the era of the fledgling democracy.” Where will the talk be held? At a three-bedroom apartment at 790 Riverside Drive—which is on the market for $1.875 million.