Eric K. Washington is an independent historian and author based in New York City. He received recent fellowships from Columbia University’s Community Scholars Program and the CUNY Graduate Center’s Leon Levy Center for Biography. His local history interests won him the Municipal Art Society’s MASterworks Award for his interpretive signage in West Harlem Piers Park, situated in the central locale of his first book, Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem. Washington also provides the keynote video narrative for Columbia’s public exhibition on that area’s historic milk industry. While at Dora Maar House, Washington works on Boss of the Grips, a biography of James H. Williams—the once-influential Chief “Red Cap” railroad porter at Grand Central Terminal—to be published in fall 2018.