Washington Heights Guide

A fast, static guide to Washington Heights, NYC — roughly West 155th Street to the Dyckman edge of Inwood. Restaurants, cafes, bakeries, bars, shops, services, and landmarks, plus notes on smaller areas and on people and events tied to the neighborhood. Listings, areas, and people are Markdown files. Adding one is a new file and a commit.

The site is Astro with fully static output, TypeScript, and no UI framework. A bad listing fails npm run build.

Local development

Requires Node.js 22.23.4 or newer (see .nvmrc).

npm install
npm run dev

Open the URL Astro prints (usually http://localhost:4321).

Dev shows entries marked example: true or draft: true, with a banner. The EXAMPLE places, the EXAMPLE area, and the EXAMPLE person are fiction: example.com URLs and 555 phone numbers where a listing has them. They are not real places, sections, or people.

Build

npm run build

That runs astro check and then astro build. Output is the dist/ folder.

example: true and draft: true entries are left out of this build. Category, area, and people pages still exist so the first real file has somewhere to land.

npm run preview

Serves dist/ locally.

To preview a production build that still includes the placeholder entries (do not deploy this):

npm run build:examples

Deploy on Vercel

The project is deployed as a static site on Vercel.

1. Import this repository in Vercel.
2. Framework preset: Astro.
3. Build command: npm run build.
4. Output directory: dist.
5. Node.js 22.23.4 or newer.
6. Set the SITE environment variable to the public origin, with no trailing slash, for Production (and Preview, if you want those URLs to match). Example: https://washingtonheightsguide.com.
7. Leave INCLUDE_EXAMPLES unset.

No vercel.json and no adapter. Astro’s static output is the whole site. Canonical URLs, Open Graph tags, robots.txt, and the sitemap are baked in at build time, so change SITE and rebuild when the domain changes.

The default origin, when SITE is unset, is https://washingtonheightsguide.com.

The footer newsletter signup uses Buttondown's standard HTML subscription form and points to buttondown.com/washingtonheightsguide. The public username is configured in src/components/SiteFooter.astro; never put account passwords or API keys in the site.

Listing format

One place, one file:

src/content/listings/<slug>.md

The filename is the slug and the URL. src/content/listings/fort-washington-cafe.md becomes /places/fort-washington-cafe/.

Filename rules:

• Lowercase letters, numbers, and single hyphens: fort-washington-cafe.md
• No spaces, underscores, or uppercase
• The file sits directly in src/content/listings/, not in a subfolder
• Keep the slug stable after publish. Renaming the file changes the URL

Copy templates/listing.md rather than inventing the shape. After the first npm run dev or npm run build, Astro writes a JSON Schema to .astro/collections/listings.schema.json. The template points at it for editor hints.

Frontmatter is YAML between --- lines. The schema is strict: an unknown key fails the build. Use true and false, not yes and no. When you set priceLevel, quote it because of the dollar signs. Omit optional keys you do not know. Do not leave them empty, and do not guess.

Required fields

Field	What to put
name	Page title. Placeholder listings must contain the word EXAMPLE. A real listing must not.
description	Search and social summary. 40–170 characters. This is not the verdict.
category	restaurant, cafe, bakery, bar, shop, service, or landmark. Use landmark for a park, museum, or other place that is not one of the other categories.
cuisine	Required for restaurant, cafe, bakery, and bar. What they are known for serving, such as Coffee or Dominican. Omit on shops, services, and landmarks unless it truly applies. It also becomes a tag page.
address	Street address only. The site adds New York, NY.
crossStreets	Nearest crossing, such as W 181st St & St. Nicholas Ave.
lastVerified	Date you checked the address, hours, and that it was open. 2026-10-01. Not in the future.
verdict	One-line opinion, 12–160 characters. Shown under the name. Not for sale.

neighborhood defaults to Washington Heights when omitted. example, draft, sponsored, and pick default to false.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗