Fort Tryon Park is a 67-acre gift from John D. Rockefeller Jr., handed to the city in 1935 and shaped by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., son of the man who designed Central Park. He built it to feel both wild and elegant: rugged cliffs and sweeping river views threaded with intimate, winding garden paths. The park's name comes from Fort Tryon, the British fort named for William Tryon, the last royal governor of colonial New York. But don't let the tranquility fool you. In 1776, these heights were a smoke-filled battleground: outnumbered Continental soldiers made a desperate last stand here at the Battle of Fort Washington, holding the final American position on Manhattan against British and Hessian troops. Among them was Margaret Corbin, who kept firing her husband's cannon after he fell and became the first woman in US history to receive a military pension.

You're crossing into the Middle Ages: the Met Cloisters, opened in 1938, is built from five real European cloisters, arcaded walkways and carved capitals salvaged from abandoned monasteries in France and Spain, shipped stone by stone and reassembled on this Manhattan ridge. The building began as sculptor George Grey Barnard's private collection nearby; John D. Rockefeller Jr. bought it in 1925, funded this larger museum, and donated the surrounding land that became Fort Tryon Park. Inside, look for the Unicorn Tapestries, seven wool-and-silk hangings from around 1500 and among the most famous artworks in the world. Cloisters weren't galleries originally. They were sanctuaries: four-sided covered walkways that shielded monks in meditation from the outside world. From here, the Cloisters reads less like a museum than a fortress, its heavy limestone and granite walls making it look like a piece of Europe standing guard over the Hudson.

The George Washington Bridge opened in 1931, the longest suspension span in the world at the time, and its engineer, Othmar Ammann, planned for its steel towers to be clad in concrete and stone. The Depression cut that budget, so the bare steel stayed exposed, and architect Le Corbusier called the result the most beautiful bridge in the world. Today it carries 14 lanes across the Hudson, more than any other suspension bridge, linking Washington Heights to Fort Lee, New Jersey. At its Manhattan base sits the Little Red Lighthouse, dwarfed by the bridge that nearly made it obsolete.

The Heather Garden stretches for a quarter-mile along Fort Tryon Park's western ridge, one of the oldest and largest public gardens in the city. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. laid it out in the 1930s, naming it for the Scottish heather he first planted here, though today it holds more than five hundred varieties of perennials, shrubs, and trees. By the 1980s, neglect had reduced much of it to weeds and rubble; a small team of volunteers and horticulturists spent years bringing it back, plant by plant. Something is usually in bloom here from late February through November, with the Palisades and the Hudson as a backdrop.

Washington Heights has produced serious star power. Alex Rodriguez spent his first four years on West 183rd Street before his family moved to the Dominican Republic and Miami, and when he returned to the Yankees in 2004, it felt like a homecoming: a Dominican-American kid from the Heights leading the American League in home runs and anchoring the 2009 World Series win. He's not alone. Fellow Dominican-American slugger Manny Ramirez grew up here too, and Panama-born Rod Carew, a Hall of Famer, called the area home as a young immigrant. The Heights also shaped quieter kinds of fame: sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer settled here as a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany, and decades later, Lin-Manuel Miranda grew up watching it all, turning the block parties and bodegas into In the Heights.

Officially called Jeffrey's Hook Light, the Little Red Lighthouse was built in 1880 at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, then moved here in 1921 to warn ships off a rocky point in the Hudson. It's the only lighthouse left on Manhattan Island. When the George Washington Bridge opened above it in 1931 with its own navigation lights, the Coast Guard decided the 40-foot lighthouse was obsolete and slated it for auction in 1951. Then Hildegarde Swift's 1942 children's book turned it into a beloved character, and thousands of children wrote letters and mailed in pennies to save it. It's still standing.