Uptown Haze is one of a dozen names for the same New York plant — the clone-only Haze that ran Harlem and Washington Heights and got called Piff, Cuban Black Haze, Frankie, Church, and The Cough depending on the block. The lineage runs back to Northern Lights #5 crossed with Haze out of Nevil Schoenmakers' late-1980s Dutch work.
Airy spears, a relentless cerebral lift, and a fourteen-week finish that explains why almost nobody grows it commercially anymore.
Where It Comes From
The chain starts in the Netherlands. In the late 1980s Nevil Schoenmakers, who founded The Seed Bank of Holland, set out to tame Original Haze — a plant that could run twenty weeks — by crossing it into the compact Northern Lights #5. Those seeds went out by the thousand.
What happened next is street history rather than breeding records, and it is worth saying so plainly. Anonymous Cuban-American and Dominican growers in Miami selected a phenotype from Nevil's seed that could handle Florida humidity despite needing close to four months to finish.
Through the 1990s that flower moved north up the I-95 corridor into Washington Heights, where a figure remembered as White Boy Kev and the La Marina Boyz turned it into a brand — a fourteen-week plant with real trafficking risk attached, priced around $500 an ounce.
Uptown in Harlem and the Heights, the name for it was Piff, or Uptown Haze. The Church nickname came from the church-incense note the plant is known for. There is no breeder's logbook behind any of this, and there was never going to be one.
The Cross
There is no single breeder to credit. Uptown Haze is a collaboration between a Dutch breeder, the Florida underground, and New York distribution, and the growers who did the selecting were never named.
Structure is old-school sativa: long, airy, loosely stacked spears rather than dense modern nugs, often unremarkable to look at. Flowering runs ten to twelve weeks and up, which is exactly why it fell out of commercial rotation once dessert hybrids arrived with eight-week finishes.
Preservation work exists, and it is serious. Piff Coast Farms, working with Garden Greens in Vineland, New Jersey, sells seed and flower built on New York haze and diesel material — Frankies Incense, Uptown Class, Uptown Purps, Harlem Dreams (Blue Dream crossed with Piff), and a run of Blockwork Haze crosses.
What It Left Behind
Its footprint is cultural rather than competitive. Piff became New York shorthand for top-shelf, and it stayed that way for two decades in a market that had no legal shelves at all.
The current Haze revival across New York and New Jersey is built directly on preserving this plant, which is a rare outcome — most legacy cuts get talked about and quietly lost. Consumers commonly describe a creative, long-running lift with little of the body weight modern hybrids carry, and some report real mental pressure at larger amounts. Respect that if you are sensitive to it.
The High Rise Take
Uptown Haze is the NYC Piff family under one of its many names: Northern Lights #5 crossed with Haze, carried by street history rather than paperwork, and worth finding if the long-flowering sativa lane is yours. Super Lemon Haze is the accessible next stop, or browse the High Rise strain library.