Harlem

This article is about the Harlem neighborhood in New York City. For other, less well-known places named Harlem, see Harlem (disambiguation).

Harlem is a neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, long known as a major African American cultural and business center. Although the name is sometimes reckoned as comprising the whole of upper Manhattan, traditionally Harlem is bounded by 155th Street to the north, and the Harlem River to the east; it has a somewhat erratic southern boundary with the Upper East Side, where Harlem is demarcated above 96th Street from the East River to Third Avenue, 98th Street from Third Avenue through Madison Avenue, and about 104th Street on Fifth Avenue. From Fifth Avenue to Eighth Avenue it is bounded on the south by Central Park at 110th Street, and by 125th Street west of Eighth Avenue where it meets Morningside Heights, a section of the Upper West Side. Finally, the western boundary of Harlem is the Hudson River, which additionally serves as a city, county, and state line.

In addition to the neighborhood centered around 125th Street, other neighborhoods of Harlem include Hamilton Heights, from 135th Street to 155th Street (which features the Grange, the final home of former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton), and Strivers Row/St. Nicholas Historic District (138th Street and 139th Street between 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue). Sugar Hill is Edgecomb to Amsterdam Ave from 145th to 155th Streets.

Not all of Upper Manhattan is considered Harlem. While Harlem has always historically been a large African American center, Washington Heights was formerly home to many German Jewish refugees, including Henry Kissinger. Inwood, north of Washington Heights, was formerly a vibrant Irish community. Even today Washington Heights and Inwood are predominantly Dominican rather than African-American, and a small but thriving Jewish community exists there centered around Yeshiva University.

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Four-story brownstones in Harlem, just south of 125th Street, 2004

Contents

1 History

1.1 As African American center

History

The first European settlement in what is now Harlem was by Dutch settlers and was formalized in 1658 as Nieuw Haarlem (or New Haarlem), after the Dutch city of Haarlem. The Indian trail to Harlem's lush bottomland meadows was rebuilt by the Dutch West India Company's black slaves and eventually developed into the Boston Post Road. In 1664, the English took control of the New Netherland colony and anglicized the name of the town to Harlem. On September 16, 1776, the Battle of Harlem Heights (also called the Battle of Harlem or Battle of Harlem Plain) was fought in western Harlem around the Hollow Way (now West 125th St.), with conflicts on Morningside Heights to the south and Harlem Heights to the north.

In the 19th century, Harlem was a place of farms, such as James Roosevelt's, east of Fifth Avenue between 110th and 125th Streets, now the heart of Spanish (actually Latin-American) Harlem. Country estates were largely on the heights overlooking the Hudson to the west of Harlem. Service connecting the suburb of Harlem with New York was by steamboat on the East River, an hour and a half's passage, sometimes interrupted when the river froze in winter, or else by stagecoach along the Boston Post Road, which descended from McGown's Pass (now in Central Park) and skirted the saltmarshes around 110th Street, to pass through Harlem. The New York and Harlem Railroad was incorporated in 1831, to better link the city with the suburb, starting at a depot at East 23rd Street. It was extended 127 miles north to a railroad junction in Columbia County at Chatham, New York by 1851. Harlem was developing into an extensive, somewhat ramshackle suburb.

Elevated railroads were extended to Harlem in 1880. With the construction of the els, urbanized development occurred very rapidly, with townhouses, apartments, and tenements springing up practically overnight. Early entrepreneurs had grandiose schemes for Harlem: Polo was actually played at the original Polo Grounds (later to become home of the New York Giants baseball team) and Oscar Hammerstein I opened the Harlem Opera House on East 125th Street in 1889. Fine townhouses by first-rank architects survive in the Sugar Hill section, west of 8th Avenue between 137th and 160th Streets. But by the early 1900s, Harlem's population was German, German Jewish, and Eastern European Jewish. In common with many other Jewish neighborhoods, Jewish Harlem was an ephemeral entity. By 1930, only 5,000 Jews remained, down from a 1917 peak population of 150,000. The area of Harlem by the East River, now known as Spanish Harlem, became occupied by Italians. Italian Harlem is gone as well, though it lasted longer than Jewish Harlem (traces of Italian Harlem lasted into the 1970s, in the area around Pleasant Avenue).

As African American center

The first blacks to come to Harlem came in the early 1900s, the first ones affiliated with St. Philip's Episcopal church. Before living in Harlem, most of Manhattan's blacks had lived in the neighborhoods called the Tenderloin, San Juan Hill in the Upper West Side, and Hell's Kitchen (today sometimes called Clinton) in the west 40s and 50s. By 1919 the black population of Harlem had quadrupled.

In the 1920s, Harlem was the center of a flowering of African American culture that became known as the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a time of amazing artistic production, but ironically, many blacks were excluded from viewing what they were creating. Many jazz venues, like Small's and the Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington played, were restricted to whites only.

The Apollo Theater opened on 125th Street on January 26, 1934, in a former burlesque house. The Savoy Ballroom, on Lenox Avenue, was a renowned venue for swing dancing, and was immortalized in a popular song of the era, Stompin' At The Savoy.

In the post-World War II era, Harlem ceased to be home to a majority of NYC's blacks, but it remained the cultural and political capital of black New York, and possibly black America. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Harlem was the scene of a massive rent strike by neighborhood tenants, led by local activist Jesse Gray, who became discredited after he was identified as a member of the Communist Party by witnesses testifying under oath before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Gray himself was given an opportunity to testify before the same committee, but he pleaded the Fifth Amendment every time he was asked a question regarding the Communist Party or his alleged connection to it. The rent strike collapsed soon after.

Harlem suffered riots in 1934, 1943, 1964, and 1968. Most of these stemmed from real or rumored brutality by the police. The 1968 riot followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There was essentially no private investment in the area between 1911 and 2004. The resulting neglect meant unpleasant living conditions for many, but also preserved buildings from the 1870-1910 building boom, and Harlem as a result has the finest original townhouses in New York. This includes work by many significant architects of the day, including McKim, Mead, and White, Louis Sullivan, Charles Buek, and Francis Kimball. The neighborhood has been the setting for several movies, including Across 110th Street in 1972) and the recent The Royal Tenenbaums.

After years of false starts, Harlem began to see rapid gentrification in the 1990s. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton rented office space at 55 West 125th Street after completing his second term in the White House in 2001.

Activism in Harlem

Consumer activism in Harlem ended the practice of retail shops on 125th Street refusing to hire black employees. The neighborhood is the center for the Black Muslim movement in the United States, and all that entails. The Abyssianian Baptist Church is a particularly potent organization, now possessing vast wealth as a result of its extensive real estate holdings. It advocates on behalf of its mostly lower class, black community.

Harlem has one of the highest asthma rates in the United States. This is largely due to the high Particulate matter mostly due to diesel emissions from buses and trucks. The environmental group WEACT has been integral in bringing this to the public's attention.