There is a way of life in Inwood, a sense of place, order and community that is more than its surroundings suggest.

There are the lush parks, including the 196-acre Inwood Hill Park, the last natural forest in Manhattan, and the riverfront views. There are the streets filled with low-rise walk-up tenements.

And there is the diversity: Nearly half of the residents here are foreign born.

But there is something else. To Kate Fray, an immigrant from England who has lived in New York for a decade and in Inwood for the last four years, it is “the way we speak to each other, the way we look out for each other, the way we look after each other.”

Others speak of the Dominican culture evident in the shops and restaurants; three-quarters of Inwood’s almost 43,000 residents are Latino, and Inwood contains the highest concentration of Dominican residents in the city.