Harlem is a neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, long known as a major black 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 an irregular border along 125th Street, west of Morningside Avenue. Harlem's boundaries have changed over the years; as Ralph Ellison observed: "Wherever Negroes live uptown is considered Harlem."
The neighborhood contains a number of smaller, cohesive districts. The following are some examples:
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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.[1] 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.
Harlem was "a synonym for elegant living through a good part of the nineteenth century."[2] In the early years of that century, Harlem remained a place of farms, such as James Roosevelt's, east of Fifth Avenue between 110th and 125th Streets. As late as 1820, the community had only 91 families, one church, one school, and one library.[2] Wealthy farmers, called "patroons,"[2] maintained country estates largely on the heights overlooking the Hudson River. 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. An 1811 New York City planning commission opined that Harlem would not be developed for over a hundred years.[2] 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.
In the years between about 1850 and 1870, the village of Harlem declined. Many large estates, including the Hamilton Grange of Alexander Hamilton, were auctioned off as the soil was depleted and crop yields fell. The land became occupied by Irish squatters, whose presence further depressed property values.[2] The impoverished village was taken over by the city of New York in 1873.[1]
Recovery came when 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.[3] 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. In 1893, Harlem Monthly Magazine wrote that "it is evident to the most superficial observer that the centre of fashion, wealth, culture, and intelligence, must, in the near future, be found in the ancient and honorable village of Harlem."
However, 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. Presaging their later response to the arrival of black Harlemites, existing landowners tried to stops Jews from moving into the neighborhood. At least one rental sign declared "Keine Juden und Keine Hunde" ("No Jews and no dogs.").[4]
They needn't have bothered; Jewish Harlem was an ephemeral entity, and by 1930, only 5,000 Jews remained. The area now known as Spanish Harlem became occupied by Italians. Italian Harlem is now gone as well, though traces lasted into the 1970s, in the area around Pleasant Avenue. In the early 20th century, Harlem was also home to a significant Irish population, and a large group of Finns.[1]
Small groups of black people lived in Harlem as early as 1880, especially in the area around 125th Street and "Negro tenements" on West 130th Street. The mass migration of blacks into the area began in 1904, thanks to another real estate crash, the worsening of conditions for blacks elsewhere in the city, and the leadership of a black real estate entrepreneur named Phillip Payton, Jr.
Harlem experienced another real estate bust in 1904-1905; after the collapse of the 1890s, new 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.[3] Landlords could not find white renters for their properties, so Philip Payton stepped in to bring blacks. His company, the Afro-American Realty Company, was almost single-handedly responsible for migration of blacks from their previous neighborhoods,[5] the Tenderloin, San Juan Hill (now the site of Lincoln Center), and Hell's Kitchen in the west 40s and 50s.[6][7] The move to northern Manhattan was driven in part by fears that anti-black riots such as those that had occurred in the Tenderloin in 1900[8] and in San Juan Hill in 1905[2] might recur. In addition, a number of tenements that had been occupied by blacks in the west 30s were destroyed at this time to make way for the construction of the new Penn Station.
In 1907, black churches began to move uptown. St. Philip's Episcopal Church, for one, purchased a block of buildings on West 135th Street to rent to members of its congregation. During World War I, black laborers were actively recruited to leave the southern United States and work in northern factories, thinly staffed because of the war.[5] So many came that it "threaten[ed] the very existence of some of the leading industries of Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Alabama."[9] Many came to Harlem. By 1920, central Harlem was predominantly black and by 1930, blacks lived as far south as Central Park, at 110th Street. The expansion was fueled primarily by an influx of blacks from the West Indies and the southern U.S. states, especially Virginia, South and North Carolina, and Georgia. As blacks moved in, white residents left; between 1920 and 1930, 118,792 white people left the neighborhood and 87,417 blacks arrived.
Between 1907 and 1915, some white residents of Harlem resisted the neighborhood's change, especially once the swelling black population pressed west of Lenox Avenue, which served as an informal color line until the early 1920s.[5] Some made pacts not to sell to or rent to blacks.[10] Others tried to buy property and evict black tenants, but the Afro-American Realty Company retaliated by buying other property and evicting whites. They also attempted to convince banks to deny mortgages to black buyers, but soon gave up.[11]
Central Harlem was essentially entirely a black community by 1920.
Employment among black New Yorkers fell as some traditionally black businesses, including domestic service and some types of manual labor, were taken over by other ethnic groups, or the industries in question left New York City altogether. The entertainment industry was a major employer in Harlem but relied on income from wealthier whites,[1] whose numbers dropped significantly after Harlemites rioted in 1935, and who stopped coming to Harlem almost altogether after a second round of riots in 1943.
There was little investment in private homes or businesses in the neighborhood between 1911 and the 1990s. However, the unwillingness of landlords elsewhere in the city to rent to black tenants, together with a significant increase in the black population of New York, meant that rents in Harlem were for many years higher than rents elsewhere in the city, even as the housing stock decayed. In 1920, one-room apartments in central Harlem rented for $40 to whites or $100-$125 to blacks.[12] In the late 1920s, a typical white working class family in New York paid $6.67 per month per room, while blacks in Harlem paid $9.50 for the same space.[13] The worse the accommodations and more desperate the renter, the higher the rents would be.[14] This pattern would persist through the 1960s; in 1965, CERGE reported that a one room apartment in Harlem rented for $50-$74, while comparable apartments rented for $30-$49 in white slums.[15] The high rents encouraged some property speculators to engage in block busting, a practice whereby they would acquire a single property on a block and sell or rent it to blacks with great publicity. Other landowners would panic, and the speculators would then buy additional houses relatively cheaply. These houses could then be rented profitably to blacks.[16]
The high cost of space forced people to live in close quarters, and the population density of Harlem in these years was stunning — over 215,000 per square mile in the 1920s. By comparison, Manhattan as a whole had a population density under 70,000 per square mile in 2000.[17] The same forces that allowed landlords to charge more for Harlem space also enabled them to maintain it less, and many of the residential buildings in Halem fell into disrepair. The 1960 census showed only 51% of housing in Harlem to be "sound," as opposed to 85% elsewhere in New York City.[18] In 1968, the New York City Buildings Department received 500 complaints daily of rats in Harlem buildings, falling plaster, lack of heat, and unsanitary plumbing.[2] Tenants were sometimes to blame as well; some would strip wiring and fixtures from their buildings to sell, throw garbage in hallways and airshafts, or otherwise deteriorate the properties which they lived in or visited.[19]
Inadequate housing contributed to racial unrest and health problems. However, the lack of development also preserved buildings from the 1870-1910 building boom, and Harlem as a result has many of the finest original townhouses in New York. This includes work by many significant architects of the day, including McKim, Mead, and White, James Renwick, William Tuthill, Charles Buek, and Francis Kimball.
As the building stock decayed, landlords converted many buildings into "single room occupancies," or SROs, essentially private homeless shelters. In many cases, the income from these buildings could not support the fines and city taxes charged to their owners, or the houses suffered damage that would have been expensive to fix, and the buildings were abandoned. In the 1970s, this process accelerated to the point that Harlem, for the first time since before WWI, had a lower population density than the rest of Manhattan. By 1987, 65% of the buildings in Harlem were owned by the City of New York,[20][21] and many had become empty shells, convenient centers for drug dealing and other antisocial activity. The lack of habitable buildings and falling population reduced tax rolls and made the neighborhood even less attractive to residential and retail investment.
The neighborhood enjoyed few benefits from the massive public works projects in New York under Robert Moses in the 1930s, and as a result had fewer parks and public recreational sites than other New York neighborhoods. Of the 255 playgrounds Moses built in New York City, he placed only one in Harlem.[22]
After years of false starts, Harlem began to see rapid gentrification in the late 1990s. This was driven by changing federal and city policies, including fierce crime-fighting and a concerted effort to develop the retail corridor on 125th Street. Starting in 1994, the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone funneled money into new developments including the Harlem USA retail complex.[21] Finally, wealthier New Yorkers, having gentrified every other part of Manhattan and much of Brooklyn, had nowhere else to go. The number of housing units in Harlem increased 14% between 1990 and 2000[21] and the rate of increase has been much more rapid in recent years. Property values in Central Harlem increased nearly 300% during the 1990s, while the rest of the City saw only a 12% increase.[21] Even empty shells of buildings in the neighborhood were, as of 2005, routinely selling for nearly $1,000,000 each. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton has rented office space at 55 West 125th Street since completing his second term in the White House in 2001.
In the 1920s, Harlem was the center of a flowering of black culture that became known as the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a time of amazing artistic production, but ironically, blacks were sometimes excluded from viewing what their peers were creating. Some jazz venues, including most famously the Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington played, were restricted to whites only. Others, including the Renaissance Ballroom and the Savoy Ballroom, were integrated.
Though this period of Harlem's history has been romanticized, the 1920s were the time in which the neighborhood became a slum, and some of the storied traditions of the Harlem Renaissance were driven by poverty, crime, or other social ills. For example, in this period, Harlem became known for "rent parties," informal gatherings in which bootleg alcohol was served, and music played. Neighbors paid to attend, and thus enabled the host to make his or her monthly rent. Though picturesque, these parties were thrown out of necessity. Further, over a quarter of black households in Harlem made their monthly rent by taking in lodgers, who sometimes brought bad habits or even crime that disrupted the lives of respectable families. Urban reformers campaigned to eliminate the "lodger evil" but the problem got worse before it got better; in 1940, 40% of black families in Harlem were taking in lodgers.[23]
The high rents and poor maintenance that Harlem residents suffered through much of the 20th century was not merely the product of racism by white landlords; though precise statistics are not available, wealthier blacks purchased land in Harlem[5] and even by 1920, a significant portion of the neighborhood was owned by blacks.[3][24]
In 1928, the first effort at housing reform was attempted in Harlem with the construction of the Paul Lawrence Dunbar Houses, backed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. These were intended to give people of modest means the opportunity to live in and, over time, purchase houses of their own. The great depression hit shortly after the buildings opened, and the experiment failed. They were followed in 1936 by the Harlem River Houses, a more modest experiment in housing projects.[3] And by 1964, nine giant public housing projects had been constructed in the neighborhood, housing over 41,000 people.[18]
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 1920s and 1930s, between Lenox and Seventh avenues in central Harlem, over 125 entertainment places operated, including speakeasies, cellars, lounges, cafes, taverns, supper clubs, rib joints, theaters, dance halls, and bars and grills.[25]
Though Harlem musicians and writers are particularly well remembered, the community has also hosted numerous actors and theater companies, including the New Heritage Repertory Theater,[1] National Black Theater, Lafayette Players, Harlem Suitcase Theater, The Negro Playwrights, American Negro Theater, and the Rose McClendon Players.[26] In 1936, Orson Welles produced his famous black Macbeth at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem.[27] Grand theaters from the late 19th and early 20th centuries were torn down or converted to churches, and Harlem lacked any permanent performance space until the creation of the Gatehouse Theater in an old pumping station on 135th Street in 2006.[28]
In the post-World War II era, Harlem ceased to be home to a majority of NYC's blacks,[29] but it remained the cultural and political capital of black New York, and possibly black America. The character of the community changed in the years after the war, as middle class blacks left for the outer boroughs (primarily Queens and Brooklyn) and suburbs. The percentage of Harlem that was black peaked in 1950, at 98.2%.[30] Thereafter, Hispanics and, more recently, white residents have increased their share.
Black Harlem has always been religious, and the area is home to over 400 churches.[31] Major sects represented include Baptists, Methodists (generally operating under the name African Methodist Episcopalian, or "AME"), Episcopalians, and Roman Catholic. The Nation of Islam and splinter black muslim groups maintain mosques in Harlem, and the Mormon church established a chapel at 128th Street in 2005. Many of the area's churches are "storefront churches", which operate out of an empty store, or a building's basement, or a converted brownstone townhouse. These smaller organizations may have congregations of only 15 or 20 people, but there are hundreds of them.[32] Judaism, too, maintains a presence in Harlem, including The Old Broadway Synagogue, Temple Healing from Heaven, and Temple of Joy. There is also a non-mainstream synagogue of black Jews known as Commandment Keepers, based in a synagogue at 1 West 123rd Street.
Since 1965, the community has been home to the Harlem Boys Choir, a famous touring choir and education program for young boys, most of whom are black. The Girls Choir of Harlem was founded in 1988. Manhattan's contribution to hip-hop stems largely from the artists who have Harlem roots, including: Kurtis Blow, P. Diddy, Cam'ron and various Dipset members and affiliates, Big L, Ma$e, DJ Kay Slay, Cannibal Ox, Immortal Technique, Black Rob, Loon, and G-Dep. Harlem is also the birthplace of popular hip-hop dances such as the Harlem shake, toe wap, and Chicken Noodle Soup.
Since the arrival of blacks in Harlem, the neighborhood has suffered from unemployment rates higher than the New York average (generally more than twice as high),[33] and high mortality rates as well. In both cases, the numbers for men have been consistently worse than the numbers for women. Infant mortality was 124 per thousand in 1928 (twice the rate for whites).[34] By 1940, infant mortality in Harlem was 5% (one black infant in twenty would die), still much higher than white, and the death rate from disease generally was twice that of the rest of New York. Tuberculosis was the main killer, and four times as prevalent among Harlem blacks than among New York's white population.[34] A 1990 study reported that 15-year-old black women in Harlem had a 65% chance of surviving to age 65, about the same as women in India. Black men in Harlem, on the other hand, had only a 37% chance of surviving to age 65, about the same as men in Angola.[35] Infectious diseases and diseases of the circulatory system were to blame, with a variety of contributing factors including the deep-fried foods traditional to the neighborhood, which may contribute to heart disease.
Harlem has one of the highest asthma rates in the United States. Increased risk of asthma may be brought about by high particulate matter from the diesel emissions of buses and trucks, which levels are higher in Harlem than elsewhere in New York City.[36]
Not surprisingly, as a neighborhood with a long history of marginalization and economic deprivation, Harlem has long been associated with crime.
In the 1920s, the Jewish and Italian mafia played a major role in running the whites-only nightclubs in the neighborhood and the speakeasies that catered to a white audience. Mobster Dutch Schultz controlled all liquor production and distribution in Harlem in the 1920s.
Rather than compete with the established mobs, black gangsters concentrated on the "policy racket," also called the Numbers game, or "bolita" in Spanish Harlem. This was gambling scheme similar to a lottery that could be played, illegally, from countless locations around Harlem. According to Francis Ianni, "By 1925 there were thirty black policy banks in Harlem, several of them large enough to collect bets in an area of twenty city blocks and across three or four avenues."[37]
By the early 1950s, the total money at play amounted to billions of dollars, and the police force had been thoroughly corrupted by bribes from numbers bosses.[38] These bosses became financial powerhouses, providing capital for loans for those who could not qualify for them from traditional financial institutions, and investing in legitimate businesses and real estate. Remarkably, one of the powerful early numbers bosses was a woman, Madame Stephanie St. Clair.
The popularity of playing the numbers waned with the introduction of the New York State lottery, which has higher payouts and is legal, but the practice continues on a smaller scale among those who prefer the numbers tradition or who prefer to trust their local numbers bank over the state.
1940 statistics show about 100 murders per year in Harlem, "but rape is very rare."[23] By 1950, essentially all of the whites had left Harlem and by 1960, the black middle class had gone. At the same time, control of organized crime shifted from Jewish and Italian syndicates to local black, Puerto Rican, and Cuban groups that were somewhat less formally organized.[37] At the time of the 1964 riots, the drug addiction rate in Harlem was ten times higher than the New York City average, and twelve times higher than the United States as a whole. Of the 30,000 drug addicts then estimated to live in New York City, 15,000 to 20,000 lived in Harlem. Property crime was pervasive, and the murder rate was six times higher than New York's average. Half of the children in Harlem grew up with only one parent, or none, and lack of supervision contributed to juvenile delinquency; between 1953 and 1962, the crime rate among young people increased throughout New York City, but was consistently 50% higher in Harlem than in New York City as a whole.
Injecting heroin grew in popularity in Harlem through the 1950s and 1960s, though the use of this drug then levelled off. In the 1980s, use of crack cocaine became widespread, which produced collateral crime as addicts stole to finance their purchasing of additional drugs, and as dealers fought for the right to sell in particular regions, or over deals gone bad.
In 1981, 6,500 robberies were reported in Harlem. The number dropped to 4,800 in 1990, perhaps due to an increase in the number of police assigned to the neighborhood. Over the next ten years, with the end of the "crack wars" and with the initiation of aggressive policing under mayor Rudolph Giuliani, crime in Harlem plummeted. In 2000, only 1,700 robberies were reported. There have been similar changes in all categories of crimes tracked by the New York City Police Department.[40] In the 32nd Precinct, for example, in Central Harlem, between 1993 and 2004, the murder rate dropped 68%, the rape rate dropped 70%, the robbery rate dropped 60%, burglary dropped 81%, and the total number of crime complaints dropped 62%. The crime rate in Harlem in 2005 was comparable to that in wealthy neighborhoods in other American cities, such as Santa Monica, California.[41][42]
The NAACP became active in Harlem in 1910 and Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1916. The NAACP chapter there soon grew to be the largest in the country. However, the earliest social activism by blacks to change the situation in Harlem itself may have been the ultimately successful campaign to force retail shops on 125th Street to hire black employees. Boycotts were originally organized by the Citizens' League for Fair Play in June 1934 against Blumstein's Department Store on 125th Street. The store soon agreed to more fully integrate its staff, which emboldened Harlem residents. Protests continued under other leadership, including that of preacher and later congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., to change hiring practices at other stores, to hire more black workers generally, or to hire members of particular protesting groups.[43]
Activist A. Philip Randolph lived in Harlem and published the radical magazine The Messenger starting in 1917. It was from Harlem that he organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. W.E.B. DuBois lived and published in Harlem in the 1920s, as did James Weldon Johnson and Marcus Garvey.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Harlem was the scene of a series of rent strikes by neighborhood tenants, led by local activist Jesse Gray, together with the Congress of Racial Equality, Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, and other groups. These groups wanted the city to force landlords to improve the quality of housing by bringing them up to code, to take action against rats and roaches, to provide heat during the winter, and to keep prices in line with already-existing rent control regulations. (According to the Metropolitan Council on Housing, in the mid-1960s, about 25% of the city's landlords charged more for rent than allowed by law.)[44]
Many groups mobilized in Harlem in the 1960s, fighting for better schools, jobs, and housing. Some were peaceful and others advocated violence. By the early 1960s, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had offices on 125th street, and acted as negotiator for the community with the city, especially in times of racial unrest. They pressed for civilian review boards to hear complaints of police abuse, a demand that was ultimately met.
The influence of the southern nonviolent protest movement was muted in Harlem. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the black leader most respected in Harlem,[45][46] but at least two dozen groups of black nationalists also operated in New York. The most important of these by far was the Nation of Islam, whose Temple Number Seven was run by Malcolm X from 1952 - 1963.[47] Malcolm was assassinated in the Audobon Ballroom in Washington Heights in 1965, and the neighborhood remains an important center for the Black Muslim movement in the United States.
From the mid-20th century, the terrible quality of local schools has been a source of distress. In the 1960s, about 75% of Harlem students tested under the grade levels in reading skills, and 80% tested under grade level in math.[48] In 1964, residents of Harlem staged two boycotts to call attention to the terrible quality of local schools. In central Harlem, 92% of students stayed home.[49] In 1977, Isiah Robinson, president of the New York City Board of Education, was quoted as saying that "the quality of education in Harlem has degenerated to the level of a custodial service."[1] As of May 2006, Harlem is the heart of the charter schools movement in Manhattan; of the 25 charter schools operating in Manhattan, 18 are in Harlem.[50]
In the aftermath of riots in Harlem during the summer of 1964, the federal government funded a pilot program called Project Uplift, in which thousands of young people in Harlem were given jobs during the summer of 1965. The project was inspired by a report generated by HARYOU called Youth in the Ghetto,[51] and HARYOU was given a major role in organizing the project, along with the National Urban League and nearly 100 smaller community organizations.[52]
In 1966, the Black Panthers organized a group in Harlem, agitating for violence in pursuit of change. Speaking at a rally of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, Max Stanford, a Black Panther speaker, declared that the United States "could be brought down to its knees with a rag and some gasoline and a bottle," the ingredients of a Molotov cocktail.[53]
Residents of Harlem rioted in 1935, 1943, 1964, 1968, and 1995. Most of these riots stemmed from real or rumored brutality by the police. However, the 1968 riot followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the 1995 riots were organized by black activists against Jewish shopowners on 125th street.
Today, the Abyssinian Baptist Church is a particularly potent organization, wealthy as a result of its extensive real estate holdings. It advocates on behalf of black and poor New Yorkers.