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Harlem Information
Harlem is a neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, long known as a major African-American cultural and business center. After being associated for much of the twentieth century with black culture, but also crime and poverty, it is now experiencing something of a social and economic renaissance.
Harlem stretches from the East River to the Hudson River between 155th Street -- where it meets Washington Heights -- to a ragged border along the south. Central Harlem begins at 110th Street, at the northern boundary of Central Park; Spanish Harlem extends east Harlem's boundaries south to 96th Street, while in the west it begins north of Morningside Heights, which gives a ragged border along 125th Street, west of Morningside Avenue.
The neighborhood contains a number of smaller, cohesive districts. The following are some examples:
East Harlem
Spanish Harlem, below 116th Street
East Harlem "proper", above 116th Street
Central Harlem
Sugar Hill
Mount Morris, extending west from Marcus Garvey Park
Strivers' Row, centered on 139th Street
Astor Row, centered on 130th Street
West Harlem (west of St. Nicholas Avenue)
Hamilton Heights, around the Hamilton Grange
Manhattanville, north of Morningside Heights
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 salt marshes around 110th Street, to pass through Harlem. The New York and Harlem Railroad (now Metro North) 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. Developers anticipated that the planned Lexington Avenue subway would ease transportation to lower Manhattan, and feared that new housing regulations would be enacted in 1901, so they rushed to complete as many new buildings as possible before these came into force. Harlem at this point was mostly white and Christian. 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. The construction glut, and a delay in the building of the subway, led to a fall in real estate prices which attracted Eastern European Jews to Harlem in large numbers, reaching a peak of 150,000 in 1917. In common with many other Jewish neighborhoods, Jewish Harlem was an ephemeral entity; by 1930, only 5,000 Jews remained. 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). Blacks did not start arriving in large numbers until 1904; real estate speculation and construction started up again in 1903 and the resulting glut of housing led to a crash in values that eclipsed the late-19th century slowdown, opening the door to blacks. The number of black residents increased rapidly in the early 20th century, and Central Harlem was essentially entirely an African American community by 1920.
Today Harlem is an area where decent housing can be found at affordable (for New York standards) prices. |
