Out of nowhere, the arts started booming in Washington Heights and Inwood. Now, as an artistic community it feels like we are on the verge of great things.

At least that’s the narrative that I’ve repeated to myself as momentum has built year-by-year.

I found out last Friday, February 10, that’s only half the story.

It was a funny day. A meeting that morning seemed to confirm all the work that the arts community has expended over the years to, for lack of a better term, put ourselves on the city’s cultural map. That was followed a couple of hours later by a second meeting that put everything into a new perspective and reminded me of the fragile connections that any community endeavor is built upon.

The first meeting was billed as “Café with the Artists” and hosted by NoMAA. The idea was to meet with local elected officials and Kate Levin, the city’s commissioner of Cultural Affairs, to talk about how to better advocate for Northern Manhattan’s artists and continue to stoke economic development uptown.

There was a good turn out on both sides of the microphone. State Senator Adriano Espaillat, Assembly Member Guillermo Linares, and City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez were the electeds. About 50 artists and arts organizations of all stripes were the audience.

Rodriguez movingly described how we need to educate our young people about arts and cultural, using as an example how his five-year-old daughter has now been to more museums than he ever visited before adulthood.

Espaillat spoke forcefully about the need to brand this neighborhood, with its existing and growing population of artists, as an arts destination, and the need for the city to help spread the word about what’s happening up here. For too long, he said, downtowners have mistaken large sections of Northern Manhattan for the Bronx.

Paramount, he said, was creating a central location – a hub, he called it – that visitors would gravitate to and then learn about other area points of interest. (For years he advocated for just such a performing arts center, called Casa Duarte, that was to be located on the far west end of Dyckman Street.)

This piqued the interest of many in the crowd who dream of converting the historic Coliseum theater at the corner of W. 181^st Street and Broadway – closed since October – into a film/performing arts center. Espaillat said he remembered watching James Bond films at the Coliseum when it was still a single screen theater.

This philosophy – build an arts center and they will come – has passed for conventional wisdom in the arts community for years. During Q&A the audience echoed these ideas back. Affordable arts spaces, several speakers said, are Northern Manhattan’s number one need. Veronica Liu, who co-founded Word Up community bookstore, put it in perspective. Since opening the doors in June, the store has hosted over 500 performers on its humble stage. That’s a whopping number. And it doesn’t even count the legions of open mic performers. Clearly there is a demand for an arts space.

Commissioner Levin, however, reframed the issue of space. Reminding the audience how “fierce” the real estate market is in Manhattan, she said that instead of expending tremendous amounts of energy on creating that one magnetic destination it was more valuable to develop as many great activities as possible. The quality of the art, she said, is more important draw than the real estate.

Levin also countered the prevailing argument that in order for the arts community to flourish we need a central destination. SoHo, she reminded us, didn’t develop a central hub but rather numerous “spokes” that each attracted a different audience.

Levin’s point was very good. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t continue to work for an arts center, we are and we will. But in the meantime we need to continue to produce great artwork, continue to provide audiences with many reasons to visit Northern Manhattan, whether those visitors come from out-of-town or just down the block.

Essentially this was the thinking behind the creation of the Uptown Arts Stroll, which NoMAA took over when it was founded five years ago. Since we have no single destination to showcase all of our artists, we promote dozens of locations where art can be found during June and encourage cultural consumers to visit a bunch of them.

And NoMAA is on the cusp of being able to do even more. It was selected as one of over 120 finalists out of 2,000 applicants for ArtPlace, a private-public collaboration of nine of the nation’s top foundations; eight federal agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts; and six of the nation’s largest banks. Using the arts to foster economic development has always been part of NoMAA’s mission. NoMAA just completed the application and will find out in May if it is picked. That would come with a nice chunk of change for programming and marketing as well as recognition: ArtPlace wants its grantees to be models that other communities around the country can follow.

Clearly there is a lot going on. Like I said, it feels like we are on the verge of something big uptown.

All of this was going through my mind, served as the backdrop, for my meeting on Friday afternoon.

Over the years I had heard about a group called Arts Interaction that was active uptown in the 1980s. It was defunct by the time I came onto the scene in 2002 but its presence could still be detected, particularly on the outside of Community Board 12’s offices on Haven Avenue at W. 168^th Street where the word “gallery” was still stenciled on the window. I had heard great things about its leader, the indefatigable Joseph Hintersteiner, but he passed away in 1995.

In all my adventures in Northern Manhattan I had never met an artist who had been part of the group.

During a casual conversation with Steve Simon (even if I were to list all the affiliations he’s had in relation to Northern Manhattan it would not add up to a full accounting of the impact his work has had uptown so let’s just label him “Community Board 12 member” and leave it at that) a couple of weeks ago he said that he could get me in touch with one of the founders of Arts Interaction, which, oh by the way, used to have an office in the same space that NoMAA currently occupies.

I was excited to finally have a connection to the past. Hearing that the group had also been headquartered at the Cornerstone Center on Bennett Avenue was downright spooky.

That was only the first of what would be a series of parallels between Arts Interaction and NoMAA.

Steve helped me get in touch with Heather Schweder, who graciously took my call early in the week and agreed to meet me at NoMAA on Friday.

Between my work at the Manhattan Times and all the arts stuff I’ve done uptown I’ve met hundreds, if not thousands, of local residents. But somehow I had never crossed paths with Heather.

After speaking with her for only a few minutes about events that were over 30 years old, it was obvious that Heather’s passion for arts building hadn’t diminished. Her memories were fresh, detailed, confident.

Arts Interaction was created in 1978 from a City Spirit Grant from the NEA to help foster the local arts community and drive economic development in Washington Heights and Inwood. She was one of two people hired to run the program for the two years before the grant ended.

The group’s first order of business was to create a public awareness campaign to promote Northern Manhattan and its cultural resources. They had to overcome the belief that Inwood was part of the Bronx.

One of the campaign tools was signage on area buses that highlighted uptown treasures like the Cloisters, the Dyckman House, and the incomparable array of ethnic food that can be found here.

They also took reporters on tours to introduce them to the neighborhood, which resulted in stories in the New York Times, New Yorker, and Daily News.

Another initiative was to get the arts into local classrooms, particularly though a collaboration with the Cloisters.

To find out what local artists and audiences wanted, Arts Interaction held an arts congress, which resulted in programming for the next two years. Economic development was one of the goals, and it helped spark the creation of the Washington Heights Inwood Development Corporation, which still runs the Medieval Festival every October.

When the future of the Coliseum theater was threatened, Arts Interaction held a fundraiser on the stage, a vaudeville show, that attracted the likes of Cab Calloway, who performed. Arts Interaction advocated that the Coliseum be turned into an arts space. Other community members wanted it to be a parking garage. Eventually the Coliseum’s single magnificent screen was subdivided into several smaller theaters, now shuttered and facing an uncertain fate.

When the grant ran out Arts Interaction became a completely volunteer driven organization. It established a desk at the office of Community Board 12 where it also had a gallery, active for over 10 years. Hintersteiner was elected president and was the driving force behind it for many years. But Arts Interaction faded away after he died.

Heather, who has had a long career as a writer and researcher, said that she remained active in Arts Interaction for a few years as a volunteer but parenting and professional obligations continually pulled her further away from its activities. Heather has continued to live in Washington Heights. While she did attend an open studios day during the Stroll a year or two ago she has not been aware of NoMAA’s activities, or the uptown arts scene in general.

The story of Arts Interaction is a story of a community pulling together, bootstraps and all, to create a better place to live. It has strong echoes to how the last 8 years have unfolded for the contemporary arts community.

Let’s inventory the parallels:

• NEA grant
• Public awareness campaign to establish the fact that there are cultural treasures to behold in Northern Manhattan
• Office space at Cornerstone Center
• A popular movement to save the Coliseum theater and possibly use it to house much needed arts space
• The strong support of Community Board 12, which was instrumental in producing the first few Uptown Arts Strolls
• The goal of channeling the arts for economic development

What do you make of this?

Part of me feels like it is evidence that we are on the right track, confronting headlong the issues that Arts Interaction identified 30 years ago.

But part of me can’t stop feeling like this is somehow a cautionary tale. There were only a handful of years – 8 at the most – between the end of Arts Interaction and the first Uptown Arts Stroll in 2003. How could Arts Interaction have just disappeared so quickly? How did it leave no footprint? Would our contemporary arts community be further along had we been about to build upon the foundation of Arts Interaction?

It reminds me of how fleeting community can be, the traditionally transient nature of Northern Manhattan’s population.

History is important to a community’s understanding of itself. In the last few weeks three different Northern Manhattan natives, all of whom I deeply respect, each surprised me because they did not know some vital element about their neighborhood.

The first had never been to the Hispanic Society of America, where many masterpieces of Spanish painting reside, until NoMAA staged the opening reception of the Uptown Arts Stroll there a few years ago.

The second had never heard of the Morris-Jumel Mansion, where General George Washington planned the early battles of the Revolutionary War, until I mentioned I’ll be doing a photo exhibit there in March.

The third didn’t know that John James Audubon, the naturalist and painter, had an estate in lower Washington Heights and is the reason so much of the neighborhood is named Audubon this or Audubon that.

This is one of the reasons that I’ve worked so hard on the arts uptown. It can highlight things that we didn’t know we have in common, serving as a language that pulls us together rather than being another obstacle that pushes us apart.

Knowing that 30 years ago another group of Northern Manhattanites had the same vision that we do now makes me feel like we are on the right path, that perhaps this community has art in its DNA. Yet we need to be mindful of how easily the present slips away into the past, leaving you with names on street signs and landmarks but no understanding of why these people were significant, no way to grasp their contribution to the community.

I feel like we are doing it right this time, that we are creating a narrative that is remembered and the institutional connections to carry it forward.

I can’t stomach the idea of having to educate another generation of New Yorkers that Inwood is not the Bronx.

Read Luis Miranda, Jr.’s column in the Manhattan Times on the meeting with Kate Levin and the history of NoMAA here.

Strangely enough, I had never photographed a track event there.

On Saturday, February 11 I shot the beginning of the 105^th Millrose Games. It was the first time the event had been held at the Armory after 86 years at Madison Square Garden. Judging from the reaction of the crowd – and how close you are to the thundering action – this will be a good fit for some time.

One of the things I love about event photography is that no matter how many weddings or celebrations you cover, each one is a unique experience with the opportunity to make singular images.

Take the bat mitzvah party I photographed for the Cohler-Esses family a few weeks ago. It had some of the same ritualized elements from every other bat mitzvah I’ve ever been to. It was even held at Congregation Ansche Chesed on W. 100th Street, where I have photographed numerous times over the years.

But the photographs from the Cohler-Esses party still look distinct from all the others I’ve done over the years. I think it is because each event gathers a different group of people, each attendee contributing a slightly different personality to the overall experience. Expressive faces always stand out in a crowd.

The Cohler-Esses party was characterized by exuberant dancing – everyone got into the act, young and old alike. The customary hora dance and chair raising gave me no indication that there would be hours of dancing to follow. It’s like all the attendees were practicing to be contestants on “Dancing with the Stars.”

At the center of it was the girl of honor, Ayelet who kept on rocking, popping, and heel-kicking, all the time smiling from ear to ear.

Last March I was out in Vegas with some friends I hadn’t seen in many years. Being one of the two East Coasters on the trip, I was awake every morning around 5 a.m. And bored. On Saturday I decided to check out the sunrise on the strip.

We were staying at the Wynn, which is right on the edge of the modernized section of town. Outside the hotel I found the sun gloriously reflecting off the tower of the Trump casino, bouncing around creating some crazy shadows. I held the camera to my eye for a couple of minutes waiting for something to happen. That’s when this dude entered the frame. I couldn’t tell if his night was ending or his day was beginning. He was heading toward the older section of the strip, adding another layer to his story.

Not sure what got me thinking about this photo. It might be because I’m close to finalizing plans to meet up with the gang this summer in Denver, or that I just watched the movie “Swingers” for the thousandth time. Or maybe it’s that line from “Ocean’s 11″: “Ted Nugent called: he wants his shirt back.”

With apologies to Christopher Auger-Dominguez, DJ Boy, and Paul Lomax, I believe the best photograph taken of me in recent months is this one, snapped by none other than Helen, my three-and-a-half old daughter.  I had just started playing with a new D700 with a 50mm and she demanded to get to play with it also. It’s been a long time since I’ve looked that relaxed and, yes, happy in a photo. I wonder what she’d charge to assist me on my next shoot.

The Washington Heights Business Improvement District is publishing another in a series of special sections in the Manhattan Times that is focused on the “I ♥ 181 St” campaign that we cooked up a year ago. With Valentine’s Day just around the corner we had the perfect tie-in for me to ask people what they love about the commercial strip. (Pick up the Manhattan Times on Wed., Feb. 8 to read all the responses.)

I probably did my first man in the street interview 18 years ago for The Montclarion in Oakland, CA. Couldn’t tell you how many I’ve done since then – 200? 300? – although only a handful of them have been for the Manhattan Times.

I’ve always enjoyed doing the interviews, the opportunity to interact one-on-one with the public. Being in the trenches.

It’s been awhile since I’ve done one, but it was easy to fall back into the routine. You have to hook a passerby’s attention with as few words as possible, get them to pause long enough for a quote and photo. It’s important to not sound like you’re selling something. And you can’t get angry when they ignore you. I long ago learned to always say something nice to the people who just walk by. That way I don’t end up saying something nasty.

The thing that’s changed over the years is that so many more people are plugged in to their music players and cell phones in public. That actually makes the job easier since those are the people who are generally less likely to stop to have a conversation with a stranger. Headphones are like a sign that says “don’t bother me.” They weed themselves out, saving the interviewer time.

Today was easy. The spring-like weather didn’t hurt. I had 10 good conversations (including one person who declined to be photographed) in about an hour.

I love the fact that you never know who you’ll meet. I could have spent hours talking to the last person I interviewed, Julia Martinez (who is pictured above). After she told me what she loves about W. 181^st Street I asked what her job was. I wasn’t sure what kind of answer I’d get because she had told me her English wasn’t very good and I wasn’t sure if she was retired.

Taxi driver, she said, adding that she prefers to drive at night since that’s when there is less traffic so you can pick up more fares.

“I make more money at night,” she said.

I would have never guessed that in a million years. Another reason to love W. 181^st Street.

Then came the first email from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council: my application to The Fund for Creative Communities had been accepted. That took the sting off the lost Springsteen tickets. Then a couple of hours later the second email arrived: I was also receiving funding from the other grant the LMCC oversees, the Manhattan Community Arts Fund Award. That’s enough to make me ask, “Bruce who?”

I’m very excited about the grants, very excited about the project. I won’t know how much money it will total until mid-February, but it will go a long way towards funding the project that I started last year called, for now, “Message Delayed.”

Here’s the concept: during the Juan Pablo Duarte Foundation Carnaval street festival on St. Nicholas Avenue in June 2011, I photographed 50 passersby, both people I knew and people I didn’t know. Each one of them posed holding a dry erase board where they had written their answer to this question: “What’s on your mind?” I did the same thing later in the summer during a festival on Dyckman Street, bringing the total number of portraits to 75.

The photographs will be printed (probably on canvas) and exhibited this summer during the Uptown Arts Stroll at the June 2 Carnaval and then for the rest of the month at the Washington Heights Business Improvement District.

This concept isn’t new. I have always been fascinated by how photography and text work together. One of my first photographic inspirations was Jim Goldberg’s “Rich and Poor” book where his subjects wrote what they thought directly on the photographs. I used that technique when completing my senior thesis in anthropology at UC Santa Cruz.

But I am introducing a couple of twists to the “Message Delayed” project. First: no one has seen these photographs, outside of the LMCC grant review committees. None of them has appeared online. These photographs, taken digitally, will only exist for public viewing as prints. The subjects will be invited to come to this year’s festival to see their portrait and read what they were thinking about a year ago. Thus the title: “Message Delayed.”

Second: I’ll set up the photo booth again during this year’s Carnaval and photograph anyone who stops by. In 2013, I’ll exhibit all the photographs from both years. The people who are photographed both years will have their photos displayed one on top of the other; you’ll be able to lift the newer photograph to see the older one behind it. In this way the project begins to simulate a real life photo album, or more precisely, a real life Facebook page (which is why I purposely asked people: “What’s on your mind.”)

One of my goals since I arrived in Northern Manhattan 13 years ago was to use photography to foster community. The place we live, Northern Manhattan, is divided along many lines: language, culture, geography, economics. My photographic projects – views from the rooftops of local buildings, portraits of local artists, “Message Delayed” – are designed to encourage people to think about where they live and who their neighbors are in a new way.

“Message Delayed” will essentially create a community out of people who simply happened to be at the same place at the same time. Once they come back to see their photograph in the show they will have the opportunity to learn what else they have in common. And if they come back year after year to have their photo taken, they will almost be like family.

At the end of the introduction to my “Northern Manhattan as Muse” exhibit, on view at NoMAA until Fri., Feb. 10, I wrote about how I came to photography through anthropology, which led directly to journalism. But after 20 years, “I can no longer see the boundaries between the art, the anthropology, and the journalism in my photography. The more these lines blur, the better.”

This project is one more step toward blurring those lines.

Hard to believe it’s already been a month since the inaugural “Deep in the Heights” house party rocked Inwood. Tonight’s the third Thursday of January so the 55 crew has orchestrated another “cheek to cheek” affair kicking off at 11 pm and heading straight toward the morning sun at Negro Claro on 10^thAvenue.

For the record I made it to the first party in December, armed only with a 50mm, f/1.4 lens. I left the flash in the bag and followed the ambient light. That’s all it took to capture the night’s sexy colors and commotion.

Hat’s off to Maury Matos and the cool kids for keeping the party going, but this time I’ll be asleep long before the two-stepping starts.

For instance, the annual Murphy family portrait at Christmas. This is the third year we’ve rounded up everyone just before dinner for a photograph on the stairs, the only place where we can fit the close to 50 folks (and growing number of wee-little folks) who show up at my in-laws for the party.

I count 48 people in the photo this year, including those who made their first appearance: the babies Maggie, Liam, and Kieran and, strangely enough, me. This is the first year I remembered to bring my tripod and remote shutter release.

Amazingly, everyone old enough to know what the word “smile” means did so at the same time, although who knows what funny faces Debbie and Anthony are making behind Jerry’s back. Mental note: next year we put them in the front row.

Some of the artists who I included in the exhibit have been creating artwork inspired by Northern Manhattan for decades, including Natasha Beshenkovsky and Sky Pape. Others who were born here, like M. Tony Peralta, started being shaped by the neighborhood from the jump.

All these artists, as well as several others, will join me at an Artists Talk at NoMAA on Wed., Jan. 18 from 6-8pm to share insight into how Northern Manhattan influences our creative process.

Also committed to participating are: Jonathan Ullman, Hector Canonge, Jon Michaud, Bob Braswell and Mino Lora of People’s Theatre Project, and Tony Serio.

Andrea Arroyo, who curated the exhibit, will moderate.

You are welcome to drop in and join what will likely prove to be a lively discussion. The gallery will also be open in case you want to see the exhibit with fresh eyes and several hundred fewer attendees crowding the room.

Date/Time: Wednesday, January 18 from 6-8pm.

Location: NoMAA Gallery at the Cornerstone Center, 178 Bennett Ave near W. 189th Street, 1 block west of Broadway.