History of Harlem

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Demonstrators carrying photographs of Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan march on 125th Street near Seventh
Avenue during the Harlem Riot of 1964

[show]New Netherland series

History of New York City

Lenape and New Netherland, to 1664

New Amsterdam
British and Revolution, 1665–1783
Federal and early American, 1784–1854
Tammany and Consolidation, 1855–97
(Civil War, 1861–65)
Early 20th century, 1898–1945
Post–World War II, 1946–77
Modern and post-9/11, 1978–

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Timelines: NYC • Bronx • Brooklyn • Queens • Staten Island

Category

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Founded in the 17th century as a Dutch outpost, Harlem developed into a farming village, a
revolutionary battlefield, a resort town, a commuter town, a ghetto, and a center of African-
American culture.
 Contents
[hide]

 11637–1865
 21866–1920
o 2.1Black population increase

o 2.2Italian Harlem

 31921–1929

 41930–1945

 51946–1969
o 5.11960s race riots

o 5.2Housing stock

 61970–1989

 71990–present

 8References

 9Cited sources

1637–1865[edit]
Before the arrival of European settlers, the area that would become Harlem (originally Haarlem)
was inhabited by the Manhattans, a native tribe, who along with other Native Americans, most
likely Lenape[1] occupied the area on a semi-nomadic basis. As many as several hundred farmed
the Harlem flatlands.[2] The first European settlement in the area was by Hendrick (Henry) de
Forest, Isaac de Forest, his brother, and their sister Rachel de Forest, Franco-Dutch immigrants
in 1637.[1] in 1639 Jochem Pietersen Kuyter established the homestead named Zedendaal,
or Blessed Valley, stretched along the Harlem River from about the present 127th Street to 140th
Street.[3][4][5] Early European settlers were forced to flee to New Amsterdam in lower Manhattan
whenever hostilities with the natives heated up,[6] and the native population gradually decreased
amidst conflict with the Dutch.[1] The settlement was named Nieuw Haarlem (New Haarlem), after
the Dutch city of Haarlem, and was formally incorporated in 1660[7] under leadership of Peter
Stuyvesant.[8] The Indian trail to Harlem's lush bottomland meadows was rebuilt by black laborers
of the Dutch West India Company,[9] and eventually developed into the Boston Post Road.
In 1664, the English took control of the New Netherland colony, and English
colonial Governor Richard Nicolls established the "Harlem Line" as the southern
border patent line of the village of Nieuw Haarlem (later, the village of Harlem) running westward
from near modern East 74th Street, at the East River.[10][11][12][13] The British also tried to change the
name of the community to "Lancaster", but the name never stuck,[14] and eventually settled down
to the Anglicized Harlem. The Dutch took control of the area again for one year in 1673. [15] The
village grew very slowly until the middle 18th century, and it became a resort of sorts for the rich
of New York City.[16] Only the Morris-Jumel Mansion survives from this period.
Harlem played an important role in the American Revolution. The British had established their
base of operations in lower Manhattan, and George Washington fortified the area around Harlem
to oppose them. From Harlem, he could control the land routes to the north, as well as traffic on
the Harlem River. The New York Provincial Congress met in White Plains, as did the convention
drafting the constitution for New York State.[17] On September 16, 1776, the Battle of Harlem
Heights, sometimes referred to as the Battle of Harlem or Battle of Harlem Plain, was fought in
western Harlem around the Hollow Way (now West 125th Street), with conflicts on Morningside
Heights to the south and Harlem Heights to the north. The American troops were outnumbered,
5000 to 2000, and were ill equipped compared to their opponents, but outflanked the British and
forced them to retreat to the area around what is now West 106th Street. It was Washington's
first American victory.[18] Later that year, the British would avenge this defeat by chasing
Washington and his troops north, then turning back and burning Harlem to the ground. [19]

In 1765, Harlem was a small agricultural town not far from New York City.

Rebuilding took decades, and infrastructure was improved much more slowly than was
happening in New York City proper. [20] The village remained largely rural through the early 19th
century and, though the "grid system" of streets, designed downtown, was formally extended to
Harlem in 1811, it does not seem that anybody expected it would mean much. The 1811 report
that accompanied the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 noted that it was "improbable that (for
centuries to come) the grounds north of the Harlem Flat will be covered with houses." [21][22]
Though undeveloped, the area was not poor. Harlem was "a synonym for elegant living through a
good part of the nineteenth century."[22]The village remained largely farmland estates, such as
[Conrad] Van Keulen's Hook, orig. Otterspoor, bordered north of the Mill Creek (now 108th
St., orig. Montagne Creek at 109th St.), which flowed into Harlem Lake, to the farm of Morris
Randall, northwest on the Harlem River, and westward to the Peter Benson, or Mill Farm.[23] This
former bowery [of land] was subdivided into twenty-two equal plots, of about 6 to 8 acres
(32,000 m2) each, of which portions later owned by Abraham Storm, including thirty-one acres
(east of Fifth Avenue between 110th & 125th St.) were sold by Storm's widow Catherine in 1795
to James Roosevelt (great grandfather of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1760–1847). This
branch of the Roosevelt family subsequently moved to the town of Hyde Park, but several of
Roosevelt's children remain interred in Harlem.[24]
As late as 1820, the community had dwindled to 91 families, a church, a school, and a library.
Wealthy farmers, known as "patroons",[22] maintained these country estates largely on the heights
overlooking the Hudson River. Service connecting the outlays of Harlem with the rest of the City
of New York (on the southern tip of the island of Manhattan) was done via steamboat on the East
River, an hour-and-a-half 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 Harlem and Westchester County, starting at a depot at East 23rd Street, and extending
127 miles (204 km) north to a railroad junction in Columbia County at Chatham, New York by
1851. Charles Henry Hall, a wealthy lawyer and land speculator, recognized the changes that
this railroad would make possible in Harlem and began a successful program of infrastructure
development, building out streets, gas lines, sewer lines, and other facilities needed for urban
life.[25] Piers were also built, enabling Harlem to become an industrial suburb serving New York
City. The rapid development of infrastructure enabled some to become wealthy, and the area
became important to politicians, many of whom lived in Harlem. New York mayors Cornelius Van
Wyck Lawrence and Daniel Tiemann both lived in Harlem in this period. For many in New York
City, Harlem was at this time regarded as a sort of country retreat. [25][26] The village had a
population of poorer residents as well, including blacks, who came north to work in factories or to
take advantage of relatively low rents.
Between 1850 and 1870, many large estates, including Hamilton Grange, the estate
of Alexander Hamilton, were auctioned off as the fertile soil was depleted and crop yields fell.
Some of the land became occupied by Irish squatters, whose presence further depressed
property values.[22]
125th Street station on the IRT Broadway – Seventh Avenue Line.

1866–1920[edit]
During the American Civil War, Harlem saw draft riots, along with the rest of the city, but the
neighborhood was a significant beneficiary of the economic boom that followed the end of the
war, starting in 1868. The neighborhood continued to serve as a refuge for New Yorkers, but
increasingly those coming north were poor and Jewish or Italian. [26] Factories, homes, churches,
and retail buildings were built at great speed. [27] The Panic of 1873 caused Harlem property
values to drop 80%,[27] and gave the City of New York the opportunity to annex the troubled
community as far north as 155th Street.[28]
Recovery came soon, and row houses (as distinct from the previous generation's free-standing
houses) were being constructed in large numbers by 1876. Development accelerated in part in
anticipation of elevated railroads, which were extended to Harlem in 1880. With the construction
of the "els", urbanized development occurred very rapidly. Developers anticipated that the
planned Lexington Avenue subway would ease transportation to lower Manhattan. Fearing that
new housing regulations would be enacted in 1901, they rushed to complete as many new
buildings as possible before these came into force. [29] Early entrepreneurs had grandiose
schemes for Harlem: Polo was played at the original Polo Grounds, later to become home of
the New York Giants baseball team. Oscar Hammerstein I opened the Harlem Opera House on
East 125th Street in 1889. By 1893, even row houses did not suffice to meet the growing
population, and large-scale apartment buildings were the norm. [30] In that year, 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, also in that year, the construction glut and a delay in the building of the subway led to a
fall in real estate prices which attracted immigrant Eastern Europe Jews and Italians to Harlem in
accelerating numbers. There had been a Jewish community of 12 in Harlem in 1869 [31] that grew
to a peak of almost 200,000 in about 1915.[32] Presaging their resistance to the arrival of blacks,
existing landowners tried to stop Jews from moving into the neighborhood. At least one rental
sign declared "Keine Juden und Keine Hunde" (No Jews and no dogs).[33] Italians began to arrive
in Harlem only a few years after the Jews did. By 1900 there were 150,000 Italians in Harlem.
[32]
Both groups moved particularly into East Harlem.
The Jewish population of Harlem embraced the City College of New York, which moved to
Harlem in 1907. In the years after the move, 90% of the school's students were Jewish, [34] and
many of the school's most distinguished graduates date from this period. Both the Jewish
and Italian Mafia emerged in East Harlem and soon expanded their operations to the entire
neighborhood.[35] West 116th Street between Lenox and 8th Avenue became a vice district. [36] The
neighborhood also became a major center for more conventional entertainment, with 125th
Street as a particular center for musical theater, vaudeville, and moving pictures. [37]
The Jewish presence in Harlem was ephemeral, and by 1930, only 5,000 Jews remained. As
they left, their apartments in East Harlem were increasingly filled by Puerto Ricans, who were
arriving in large numbers by 1913.[38] Italian Harlem lasted longer, and traces of the community
lasted into the 1970s in the area around Pleasant Avenue.
Black population increase[edit]
Main article: African Americans in New York City

These buildings on West 135 Street were among the first in Harlem to be occupied entirely by blacks; in
1921, #135 became home to Young's Book Exchange, the first "Afrocentric" bookstore in Harlem. [39]

Marcus Garvey in 1925

Black residents have been present in Harlem continually since the 1630s, and as the
neighborhood modernized in the late 19th century, they could be found especially in the area
around 125th Street and in the "Negro tenements" on West 130th Street. By 1900, tens of
thousands lived in Harlem.[40] The mass migration of blacks into the area began in 1904, due to
another real estate crash, the worsening of conditions for blacks elsewhere in the city, and the
leadership of black real estate entrepreneurs including Phillip Payton, Jr. 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 in 1904 and 1905 that eclipsed the late-19th century slowdown.
[29]
Landlords could not find white renters for their properties, so Philip Payton stepped in to bring
blacks. His company, the Afro-American Realty Company, has been credited with the migration
of blacks from their previous neighborhoods,[41] the Tenderloin, San Juan Hill (now the site
of Lincoln Center), Minetta Lane in Greenwich Village and Hell's Kitchen in the west 40s and 50s.
[42][43]
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 [44] and in San Juan Hill in 1905[22] 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 original Penn Station.
In 1907, black churches began to move uptown. Several congregations built grand new church
buildings, including St Philip's on West 134th Street just west of Seventh Avenue (the wealthiest
church in Harlem), the Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street and St Mark's Methodist
Church on Edgecombe Avenue. More often churches purchased buildings from white
congregations of Christians and Jews whose members had left the neighborhood, including
Metropolitan Baptist Church on West 128th and Seventh Avenue, St James Presbyterian Church
on West 141st Street, and Mt Olivet Baptist Church on Lenox Avenue. [39][45] Only the Catholic
Church retained its churches in Harlem, with white priests presiding over parishes that retained
significant numbers of whites until the 1930s.[46]
The early 20th-century Great Migration of blacks to northern industrial cities was fueled by their
desire to leave behind the Jim Crow South, seek better jobs and education for their children, and
escape a culture of lynching violence. During World War I, expanding industries recruited black
laborers to fill new jobs, thinly staffed after the draft began to take young men. [41] So many blacks
came that it "threaten[ed] the very existence of some of the leading industries of Georgia,
Florida, Tennessee and Alabama."[47] Many settled in Harlem. In 1910, Central Harlem was about
10% black. By 1920, central Harlem was 32.43% black. The 1930 census showed 70.18% of
Central Harlem's residents as black[48] and lived as far south as Central Park, at 110th Street.
[49]
The expansion was fueled primarily by an influx of blacks from the southern U.S. states,
especially Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, who took trains up the East Coast.
There were also numerous immigrants from the West Indies. 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,[50] 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.[41][51] Some made pacts not to sell to or rent to blacks.
[52]
Others tried to buy property and evict black tenants, but the Afro-American Realty Company
retaliated by buying other property and evicting whites. Some even attempted to convince banks
to deny mortgages to black buyers, but soon gave up those efforts.[53]
Soon after blacks began to move into Harlem, the community became known as "the spiritual
home of the Negro protest movement."[54] 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. 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. Du Bois lived and published in
Harlem in the 1920s, as did James Weldon Johnson and Marcus Garvey.
Italian Harlem[edit]
Vestiges of Italian Harlem

Church of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel

Patsy's Pizzeria

Southern Italians and Sicilians, with a moderate number of Northern Italians, soon predominated,
especially in the area east of Lexington Avenue between 96th and 116th Streets and east
of Madison Avenue between 116th and 125th Streets, with each street featuring people from
different regions of Italy. The neighborhood became known as "Italian Harlem", the Italian
American hub of Manhattan; it was the first part of Manhattan to be referred to as "Little Italy".
[55]
The first Italians arrived in East Harlem in 1878, from Polla in the province of Salerno, and
settled in the vicinity of 115th Street.[56]
There were many crime syndicates in Italian Harlem from the early Black Hand to the bigger and
more organized Italian gangs that formed the Italian-American Mafia. It was the founding location
of the Genovese crime family, one of the Five Families that dominated organized crime in New
York City.[57]
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Italian Harlem was represented in Congress by future
Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and later by Italian-American socialist Vito Marcantonio. The Italian
neighborhood approached its peak in the 1930s, with over 100,000 Italian-Americans living in its
crowded, run-down apartment buildings. [58] The 1930 census showed that 81 percent of the
population of Italian Harlem consisted of first- or second-generation Italian Americans.
(Somewhat less than the concentration of Italian Americans in the Lower East Side's Little
Italy with 88 percent; Italian Harlem's total population, however, was three times that of Little
Italy.)[56]
Although in certain areas, particularly around Pleasant Avenue, Italian Harlem lasted through the
1970s,[59] today most of the former Italian population is gone. Most of these predominantly older
residents are clustered around Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, mainly
from 114th to 118th Streets. According to the 2000 Census, there were only 1,130 Italian-
Americans still living in this area. [60]
Still, vestiges of the old Italian neighborhood remain. The annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount
Carmel and the "Dancing of the Giglio", the first Italian feast in New York City, is still celebrated
there every year on the second weekend of August by the Giglio Society of East Harlem. Italian
retail establishments still exist, such as Rao's restaurant, started in 1896, and the original Patsy's
Pizzeria which opened in the 1933. In May 2011, one of the last remaining Italian retail
businesses in the neighborhood, a barbershop owned by Claudio Caponigro on 116th Street,
was threatened with closure by a rent increase.[61]

1921–1929[edit]
125th Street between Park and Madison Avenues

Starting around the time of the end of World War I, Harlem became associated with the New
Negro movement, and then the artistic outpouring known as the Harlem Renaissance, which
extended to poetry, novels, theater, and the visual arts.
The growing population also supported a rich fabric of organizations and activities in the 1920s.
Fraternal orders such as the Prince Hall Masons and the Benevolent and Protective Order of
Elks set up lodges in Harlem, with elaborate buildings including auditoriums and large bands.
Parades of lodge members decked out in uniforms and accompanied by band music were a
common sight on Harlem's streets, on public holidays, lodge anniversaries, church festivities and
funerals.[62] The neighborhood's churches housed a range of groups, including athletic clubs,
choirs and social clubs. A similar range of activities could be found at the YMCA on 135th Street
and the YWCA on 137th Street. The social pages of Harlem's two African-American newspapers,
the New York Age and the New York Amsterdam News, recorded the meetings, dinners and
dances of hundreds of small clubs.[63] Soapbox speakers drew crowds on Seventh and Lenox
Avenues until the 1960s, some offering political oratory, with Hubert Harrison the most famous,
while others, particularly in the late 1920s, sold medicine. [64][65] Harlem also offered a wealth of
sporting events: the Lincoln Giants played baseball at Olympic Field at 136th and Fifth Avenue
until 1920, after which residents had to travel to the Catholic Protectory Oval in the Bronx; men's
and women's basketball teams from local athletic clubs played in church gymnasiums, and, as
they became more popular, at the Manhattan Casino on 155th Street, before giving way to
professional teams, most famously the Rens, based at the Renaissance Ballroom on Seventh
Avenue;[66][67] and boxing bouts took place at the Commonwealth Casino on East 135th Street (run
by white promoters the McMahon brothers). The biggest crowds, including many whites, came to
see black athletes compete against whites.[68][69]

Marcus Garvey Park

It took years for business ownership to reflect the new reality. A survey in 1929 found that whites
owned and operated 81.51% of the neighborhood's 10,319 businesses, with beauty parlors
making up the largest number of black-owned businesses.[70][71] By the late 1960s, 60% of the
businesses in Harlem responding to surveys reported ownership by blacks, and an overwhelming
fraction of new businesses were black owned after that time. [72]
Marginalized in the legitimate economy, a small group of blacks found success outside the law,
running gambling on numbers. Invented in 1920 or 1921, numbers had exploded by 1924 into a
racket turning over tens of millions of dollars every year. That year the New York Age reported
that there were at least thirty bankers (the name given to someone running a numbers game) in
Harlem, with many employing between twelve and twenty people to collect bets, and Marcellino,
the largest banker, employing over one hundred. By the late 1920s, Wallace Thurman guessed
there were over a thousand collectors taking bets from 100,000 clients a day. [73] The most
successful bankers, who could earn enormous sums of money, were known as Kings and
Queens. The wealthiest numbers king of all was almost certainly the reputed inventor of the
game, Casper Holstein. He owned a fleet of cars, apartment buildings in Harlem and a home on
Long Island, but did not have the ostentatious style and lifestyle of many other kings. He, and
other bankers, gave money to charities and loans to aspiring businessmen and needy residents.
Holstein's role in the community extended further than most of his colleagues, included
membership in the Monarch Lodge of the Elks, support for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro
Improvement Association, philanthropy in his native Virgin Islands, and patronage of the Harlem
Renaissance.[74][75]
Harlem adapted rapidly to the coming of Prohibition, and its theaters, nightclubs,
and speakeasies became major entertainment destinations. Claude McKay would write that
Harlem had become "an all white picnic ground", and in 1927 Rudolph Fisher published an article
titled "The Caucasian Storms Harlem". [76] Langston Hughes described this period at length,
including this passage from his 1940 autobiography,
White people began to come to Harlem in droves. For several years they packed the expensive
Cotton Club on Lenox Avenue. But I was never there, because the Cotton Club was a Jim Crow
club for gangsters and monied whites. They were not cordial to Negro patronage, unless you
were a celebrity like Bojangles. So Harlem Negroes did not like the Cotton Club and never
appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of their dark community. Nor did ordinary
Negroes like the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown, flooding the little
cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang, and where now the
strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers—like
amusing animals in a zoo.

— Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

In response to the white influx, some blacks operated alternative venues in their homes. Called
buffet flats, they offered alcohol, music, dancing, prostitutes, and, commonly, gambling, and, less
often, rooms to which a couple could go. Their location in residential buildings, typically on cross
streets above 140th Street, away from the nightclubs and speakeasies on the avenues, offered a
degree of privacy from police, and from whites: you could only find a buffet flat if you knew the
address and apartment number, which hosts did not advertise. [77]
Puerto Rican and Latin American immigration after the First World War[78] established an enclave
at the western portion of East Harlem – around 110th Street and Lexington Avenue – which
became known as "Spanish Harlem". The area slowly grew to encompass all of East Harlem,
including Italian Harlem, as Italians moved out – to the Bronx, Brooklyn, upstate New York,
and New Jersey – and Hispanics moved in during another wave of immigration in the 1940s and
1950s.[79] The newly dominant Puerto Rican population, which reached 63,000 in 1950, continued
to define the neighborhood according to its needs, establishing bodegas and botánicas as it
expanded; by the 1930s[78]there was already an enclosed street market underneath the Park
Avenue railroad viaduct between 111th and 116th Streets, called "La Marqueta" ("The Market").
[79]
Catholic and evangelistic Protestant churches appeared in storefronts. [79] Although "Spanish
Harlem" had been in use since at least the 1930s to describe the Hispanic enclave – along with
"Italian Harlem" and "Negro Harlem" [80] – around the 1950s the name began to be used to
describe the entire East Harlem neighborhood. Later, the name "El Barrio" ("The Neighborhood")
began to be used, especially by inhabitants of the area.
Since the 1920s, this period of Harlem's history has been highly romanticized. With the increase
in a poor population, it was also the time when the neighborhood began to deteriorate to 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, many of whom were family members, but who sometimes
brought bad habits or even crime that disrupted the lives of respectable families. Lodgers also
experienced disruption, with many having to move frequently when households relocated,
roommates quarreled or they could not pay rent.[81] Urban reformers campaigned to eliminate the
"lodger evil" but the problem got worse before it got better; in 1940, still affected by
the Depression, 40% of black families in Harlem were taking in lodgers. [82]
The high rents and poor maintenance of housing stock, which Harlem residents suffered through
much of the 20th century, was not merely the product of racism by white landlords. By 1914, 40%
of Harlem's private houses and 10% of its tenements were owned by blacks. [83] Wealthier blacks
continued to purchase land in Harlem,[41] and by 1920, a significant portion of the neighborhood
was owned by blacks.[29][84] By the late 1960s, 60% of the businesses in Harlem responding to
surveys reported ownership by blacks, and an overwhelming fraction of new businesses were
black owned after that time.[72]
In 1928, the first effort at housing reform was attempted in Harlem with the construction of
the Paul Laurence Dunbar Houses, backed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. These were intended to
give working 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.[29] And by 1964, nine giant public housing projects had been constructed in the
neighborhood, housing over 41,000 people. [85]

Stately Harlem apartment buildings adjacent to Morningside Park

The earliest activism by blacks to change the situation in Harlem itself grew out of the Great
Depression, with the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" movement. [86] This was 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 integrate its
staff more fully. This success emboldened Harlem residents, and protests continued under other
leadership, including that of preacher and later congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., seeking
to change hiring practices at other stores, to effect the hiring of more black workers, or the hiring
of members of particular protesting groups. [87]
Communism gained a following in Harlem in the 1930s, and continued to play a role through the
1940s.[54] In 1935, the first of Harlem's five riots broke out. The incident started with a (false)
rumor that a boy caught stealing from a store on 125th Street had been killed by the police. By
the time it was over, 600 stores had been looted and three men were dead. The same year saw
internationalism in Harlem politics, as Harlemites responded to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia by
holding giant rallies, signing petitions and sending an appeal to the League of Nations.[88] Such
internationalism continued intermittently, including broad demonstrations in favor of Egyptian
president Nasser after the Suez invasion of 1956. [89]

1930–1945[edit]
The neighborhood was hit hard by job losses in the Great Depression. In the early 1930s, 25% of
Harlemites were out of work, and employment prospects for Harlemites stayed bad for decades.
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. Major
industries left New York City altogether, especially after 1950.
The job losses of the Depression were exacerbated by the end of Prohibition in 1933 [90] and by
the Harlem Riot of 1935, which scared away the wealthier whites who had long supported
Harlem's entertainment industry.[8] White audiences decreased almost totally after a second
round of riots in 1943. Many Harlemites found work in the military or in the Brooklyn shipyards
during World War II,[91] but the neighborhood declined rapidly once the war ended. Some middle-
class blacks moved north or west to suburbs, a trend that increased after the 1960s Civil Rights
Movement decreased discrimination in housing.
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.[92]

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. addressing a citizens' committee mass meeting in 1942

The earliest activism by blacks to change the situation in Harlem itself grew out of the Great
Depression, with the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" movement. [86] This was 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 integrate its
staff more fully. This success emboldened Harlem residents, and protests continued under other
leadership, including that of preacher and later congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., seeking
to change hiring practices at other stores, to effect the hiring of more black workers, or the hiring
of members of particular protesting groups. [87]
Communism gained a following in Harlem in the 1930s, and continued to play a role through the
1940s.[54] In 1935, the first of Harlem's five riots broke out. The incident started with a boy that
was supposedly caught stealing from a store on 125th Street had been killed by the police. By
the time it was over, 600 stores had been looted and three men were dead. The same year saw
internationalism in Harlem politics, as Harlemites responded to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia by
holding giant rallies, signing petitions and sending an appeal to the League of Nations.[88] Such
internationalism continued intermittently, including broad demonstrations in favor of Egyptian
president Nasser after the Suez invasion of 1956. [93]
Black Harlemites took positions in the elected political infrastructure of New York starting in 1941
with the election of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to the City Council. He was easily elected to
Congress when a congressional district was placed in Harlem in 1944, leaving his City Council
seat to be won by another black Harlemite, Benjamin J. Davis. Ironically, Harlem's political
strength soon deteriorated, as Clayton Powell, Jr. spent his time in Washington or his vacation
home in Puerto Rico, and Davis was jailed in 1951 for violations of the Smith Act.[94]
The year 1943 saw the second Harlem riot. A black soldier knocked down a policeman who then
shot him. An onlooker shouted that the soldier had been killed, and this news spread throughout
the black community and provoked rioting. A force of 6,600, made up of city police, military police
and civil patrolmen, in addition to 8,000 State Guardsmen and 1,500 civilian volunteers was
required to end the violence. Hundreds of businesses were destroyed and looted, the property
damage approaching $225,000. Overall, six people died and 185 were injured. Five hundred
people were arrested in connection with the riot.

1946–1969[edit]
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 (HARYOU), 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 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. [95]

Malcolm X at a 1964 press conference

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 urged civilian review boards to hear complaints
of police abuse, a demand that was ultimately met. As chairman of the House Committee of
Education and Labor at the start of the 1960s, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. used this position to
direct federal funds to various development projects in Harlem. [96]
The largest public works projects in Harlem in these years were public housing, with the largest
concentration built in East Harlem. [97]Typically, existing structures were torn down and replaced
with city-designed and managed properties that would, in theory, present a safer and more
pleasant environment than those available from private landlords. Ultimately, community
objections halted the construction of new projects. [98]
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 grade levels in reading skills, and 80%
tested under grade level in math. [99] In 1964, residents of Harlem staged two school boycotts to
call attention to the problem. In central Harlem, 92% of students stayed home. [100]
1960s race riots[edit]

An incident at 133rd Street and Seventh Avenue during the Harlem Riot of 1964.

The influence of the southern nonviolent protest movement was muted in Harlem. Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was the black leader most respected in Harlem.[101][102] But on September 20,
1958, Izola Curry, deluded into believing the NAACP was controlled by Communists, approached
Dr. King at a Blumstein's book-signing, and asked him if he was Martin Luther King, Jr. When
King replied in the affirmative, she said, "I've been looking for you for five years", then thrust
a letter opener into his chest. NYPD officers took King, still in the chair where he had sat, to an
ambulance that took him to Harlem Hospital, for removal of the blade. Reportage recalling the
event for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2014, noted:

As it happened, one of the cops was black, the other white and the same was the case
“ with the two surgeons. Each pair worked as true partners, proving that the color of their
skin meant nothing and translating the content of their character into life-saving action.
[103] ”
At least two dozen groups of black nationalists also operated in New York, many of them in
Harlem. The most important of these was the Nation of Islam, whose Temple Number Seven was
run by Malcolm X from 1952–1963.[104] Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon
Ballroom in Washington Heights in 1965. The neighborhood remains an important center for the
Nation of Islam.
In 1963, Inspector Lloyd Sealy became the first African-American officer of the NYPD to
command a police station, the 28th precinct in Harlem. [105] Community relations between Harlem
residents and the NYPD were strained as civil rights activists requested that the NYPD hire more
black police officers, specifically in Harlem. In 1964, across Harlem's three precincts, the ratio
was one black police officer for every six white officers. [106] A riot broke in the summer of 1964
following the fatal shooting of an unarmed 15-year-old black teenager by an off-duty white police
lieutenant. One person was killed, more than 100 were injured, and hundreds more were
arrested. Property damage and looting were extensive. The riot would later spread out of
Manhattan and into the borough of Brooklyn and neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the heart
of Brooklyn's African-American community. In the aftermath of the riots, 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.[107] HARYOU was given a major role in organizing the
project, along with the National Urban League and nearly 100 smaller community organizations.
[108]

In 1966, the Black Panthers organized a group in Harlem, agitating for violence in pursuit of
change. Speaking at a rally of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Max
Stanford, a Black Panther, declared that the United States "could be brought down to its knees
with a rag and some gasoline and a bottle."[109]
In 1968, Harlemites rioted after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., as did black
residents in other U.S. cities. Two people died—one stabbed to death in a crowd and another
trapped in a burning building. However, the rioting in New York was minor compared to that in
other American cities.[110] Mayor John Lindsay helped to quell the rioting by marching up Lenox
Avenue in a "hail of bricks" to confront the angry crowds.[111] (See also King assassination riots.)
Housing stock[edit]
Little investment in private homes or businesses took place 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.[112] 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. [113] The
worse the accommodations and more desperate the renter, the higher the rents would be. [114] This
pattern persisted 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.
[115]
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.[116] These houses could then be rented profitably to blacks.[117]
After the Harlem River Houses, America's first federally subsidized housing project, were opened
in 1937, other massive housing projects soon followed, with tens of thousands of units
constructed over the next twenty years, especially in Harlem. [98]

A dilapidated Harlem building, photographed on May 14, 2005. The building has since been demolished.

In the post-World War II era, Harlem ceased to be home to a majority of the city's blacks, [118] but it
remained the cultural and political capital of black New York, and possibly black America. [119]
[120]
The character of the community changed in the years after the war, as middle-class blacks left
for the outer boroughs (primarily the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn) and suburbs. The percentage
of Harlem that was black peaked in 1950, at 98.2%. [121] Thereafter, Hispanic, Asian, and white
residents have increased their share.
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, in 2000, Manhattan as a whole had a population density under 70,000 per square
mile.[122] 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 Harlem 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.[85] 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.
[22]
Tenants were sometimes to blame; some would strip wiring and fixtures from their buildings to
sell, throw garbage in hallways and airshafts, or otherwise damage the properties which they
lived in or visited.[123]
Harlem has many townhouses, such as these in the Mount Morris Historic District.

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 World
War I, had a lower population density than the rest of Manhattan. Between 1970 and 1980, for
example, Frederick Douglass Boulevard between 110th Street and 125th Street in central Harlem
lost 42% of its population and 23% of its remaining housing stock.[124] By 1987, 65% of the
buildings in Harlem were owned by the City of New York, [125][126][127] and many had become empty
shells, convenient centers for drug dealing and other illegal 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 doorframe of a brownstone designed by William Tuthill in the Mount Morris Historical District in Harlem.

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.

1970–1989[edit]
By some measures, the 1970s were the worst period in Harlem's history. Many of those
Harlemites who were able to escape from poverty left the neighborhood in search of safer
streets, better schools and homes. Those who remained were the poorest and least skilled, with
the fewest opportunities for success. Though the federal government's Model Cities
Program spent $100 million on job training, health care, education, public safety, sanitation,
housing, and other projects over a ten-year period, Harlem showed no improvement. [128]
The deterioration shows up starkly in the statistics of the period. In 1968, Harlem's infant
mortality rate had been 37 for each 1000 live births, as compared to 23.1 in the city as a whole.
Over the next eight years, infant mortality for the city as whole improved to 19, while the rate in
Harlem increased to 42.8, more than double. Statistics describing illness, drug addiction, housing
quality, and education are similarly grim and typically show rapid deterioration in the 1970s. The
wholesale abandonment of housing was so pronounced that between 1976 and 1978 alone,
central Harlem lost almost a third of its total population, and east Harlem lost about 27%. [128] The
neighborhood no longer had a functioning economy; stores were shuttered and by estimates
published in 1971, 60% of the area's economic life depended on the cash flow from the illegal
"Numbers game" alone.[129]
The worst part of Harlem was the "Bradhurst section" between Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Boulevard and Edgecombe, from 139th Street through 155th. In 1991, this region was described
in the New York Times as follows: "Since 1970, an exodus of residents has left behind the poor,
the uneducated, the unemployed. Nearly two-thirds of the households have incomes below
$10,000 a year. In a community with one of the highest crime rates in the city, garbage-strewn
vacant lots and tumbledown tenements, many of them abandoned and sealed, contribute to the
sense of danger and desolation that pervades much of the area." [130]

Aerial view of Harlem with river, seen from north (2010)

Plans for rectifying the situation often started with the restoration of 125th Street, long the
economic heart of black Harlem.[131] By the late 1970s, only marginalized and poor retail
remained.[132] Plans were drafted for a "Harlem International Trade Center", which would have
filled the entire block between 125th Street and 126th, from Lenox to Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Boulevard, with a center for trade with the third world. A related retail complex was planned to the
west, between Frederick Douglass Boulevard and St. Nicholas. However, this plan depended on
$30 million in financing from the federal government, [131] and with the election of Ronald
Reagan to the presidency of the United States, it had no hope of being completed. [132]
The city did provide one large construction project, though not so favored by residents. Starting
in the 1960s and continuing through the 1970s, Harlemites fought the introduction of an immense
sewage treatment plant, the North River Water Pollution Control Plant, on the Hudson
River in West Harlem. A compromise was ultimately reached in which the plant was built with a
state park, including extensive recreational facilities, on top. The park, called Riverbank State
Park, was opened in 1993 (the sewage plant having been completed some years earlier). [133]
The city began auctioning its enormous portfolio of Harlem properties to the public in 1985. This
was intended to improve the community by placing property in the hands of people who would
live in them and maintain them. In many cases, the city would even pay to completely renovate a
property before selling it (by lottery) below market value. [134]The program was soon beset by
scandal—buyers were acquiring houses from the city, then making deals with churches or other
charities in which they would inflate the appraised values of the properties and the church or
charity would take out federally guaranteed 203(k) mortgage and buy it. The original buyer would
realize a profit and the church or charity would default on the mortgage (presumably getting
some kind of kickback from the developer). [135][136] Abandoned shells were left to further
deteriorate, and about a third of the properties sold by the city were tenements which still had
tenants, who were left in particularly miserable conditions. These properties, and new restrictions
on Harlem mortgages, bedeviled the area's residential real estate market for years.

1990–present[edit]
After four decades of decline, Central Harlem's population bottomed out in the 1990 census, at
101,026. It had decreased by 57% from its peak of 237,468 in 1950. Between 1990 and 2006 the
neighborhood's population grew by 16.9%, with the percentage of blacks decreasing from 87.6%
to 69.3%,[49] then dropping to 54.4% by 2010,[137] and the percentage of whites increasing from
1.5% to 6.6% by 2006,[49] and to "almost 10%" by 2010. [137]
From 1987 through 1990, the city removed long-unused trolley tracks from 125th Street, laid new
water mains and sewers, installed new sidewalks, curbs, traffic lights, streetlights, and planted
trees. Two years later, national chains opened branches on 125th Street for the first time – The
Body Shop opened a store at 125th street and 5th Avenue (still extant As of 2010),and a Ben &
Jerry's ice cream franchise employing formerly homeless people opened across the street.
[138]
The development of the region would leap forward a few years later with the 1994 introduction
of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, which brought $300 million in development funds
and $250 million in tax breaks.[139]
Plans were laid for shopping malls, movie theaters, and museums. However, these plans were
nearly derailed in 1995 by the "Freddy's Fashion Mart" riot, which culminated in political arson
and eight deaths. These riots did not resemble their predecessors, and were organized by black
activists against Jewish shop owners on 125th street. [140]

Sign disparaging Barack Obama outside the Atlah World Missionary Church in the former Harlem Club at
123rd Street and Lenox Avenue

Five years later, the revitalization of 125th Street resumed, with the construction of a Starbucks
outlet backed in part by Magic Johnson (1999), the first supermarket in Harlem in 30 years,
[139]
the Harlem USA retail complex, which included the first first-run movie theater in many years
(2000),[141] and a new home for the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001). In the same year, former
president Bill Clinton took office space in Harlem, at 55 West 125th Street. [142] In 2002, a large
retail and office complex called Harlem Center was completed at the corner of Lenox and 125th.
[139]
There has been extensive new construction and rehabilitation of older buildings in the years
since.
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. The number of housing units in Harlem increased
by 14% between 1990 and 2000,[126] 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 New York City saw only a 12% increase. [126] Even empty shells of buildings in the neighborhood
were routinely selling for nearly $1,000,000 each as of 2007. [143]
In January 2010, The New York Times reported that in "Greater Harlem", which they defined as
running from the East River to the Hudson River, from 96th Street to 155th Street, blacks ceased
to be a majority of the population in 1998, with the change largely attributable to the rapid arrival
of new white and Hispanic residents. The paper reported that the population of the area had
grown more since 2000 than in any decade since the 1940s. [144] Median housing prices dropped
farther in Harlem than in the rest of Manhattan during the real estate crash of 2008, but
recovered more rapidly as well.[145]
The neighborhood's changes have provoked some discontent. James David Manning, pastor of
the ATLAH World Missionary Church on Lenox Avenue, has received press for declaring a
boycott on all Harlem shops, restaurants, other businesses, and churches other than his own. He
believes that this will cause an economic crash that will drive out white residents and drop
property values to a level his supporters can afford. [146] There have been rallies against
gentrification.[147]
On March 12, 2014, two buildings in East Harlem were destroyed in a gas explosion.[148]

History of Harlem
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Demonstrators carrying photographs of Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan march on 125th Street near Seventh
Avenue during the Harlem Riot of 1964

[show]New Netherland series

History of New York City

Lenape and New Netherland, to 1664

New Amsterdam
British and Revolution, 1665–1783
Federal and early American, 1784–1854
Tammany and Consolidation, 1855–97
(Civil War, 1861–65)
Early 20th century, 1898–1945
Post–World War II, 1946–77
Modern and post-9/11, 1978–

See also
 Timelines: NYC • Bronx • Brooklyn • Queens • Staten Island
Category

 v
 t
 e

Founded in the 17th century as a Dutch outpost, Harlem developed into a farming village, a
revolutionary battlefield, a resort town, a commuter town, a ghetto, and a center of African-
American culture.

Contents
[hide]

 11637–1865
 21866–1920
o 2.1Black population increase

o 2.2Italian Harlem

 31921–1929

 41930–1945

 51946–1969
o 5.11960s race riots

o 5.2Housing stock

 61970–1989

 71990–present

 8References

 9Cited sources

1637–1865[edit]
Before the arrival of European settlers, the area that would become Harlem (originally Haarlem)
was inhabited by the Manhattans, a native tribe, who along with other Native Americans, most
likely Lenape[1] occupied the area on a semi-nomadic basis. As many as several hundred farmed
the Harlem flatlands.[2] The first European settlement in the area was by Hendrick (Henry) de
Forest, Isaac de Forest, his brother, and their sister Rachel de Forest, Franco-Dutch immigrants
in 1637.[1] in 1639 Jochem Pietersen Kuyter established the homestead named Zedendaal,
or Blessed Valley, stretched along the Harlem River from about the present 127th Street to 140th
Street.[3][4][5] Early European settlers were forced to flee to New Amsterdam in lower Manhattan
whenever hostilities with the natives heated up,[6] and the native population gradually decreased
amidst conflict with the Dutch.[1] The settlement was named Nieuw Haarlem (New Haarlem), after
the Dutch city of Haarlem, and was formally incorporated in 1660[7] under leadership of Peter
Stuyvesant.[8] The Indian trail to Harlem's lush bottomland meadows was rebuilt by black laborers
of the Dutch West India Company,[9] and eventually developed into the Boston Post Road.
In 1664, the English took control of the New Netherland colony, and English
colonial Governor Richard Nicolls established the "Harlem Line" as the southern
border patent line of the village of Nieuw Haarlem (later, the village of Harlem) running westward
from near modern East 74th Street, at the East River.[10][11][12][13] The British also tried to change the
name of the community to "Lancaster", but the name never stuck,[14] and eventually settled down
to the Anglicized Harlem. The Dutch took control of the area again for one year in 1673. [15] The
village grew very slowly until the middle 18th century, and it became a resort of sorts for the rich
of New York City.[16] Only the Morris-Jumel Mansion survives from this period.
Harlem played an important role in the American Revolution. The British had established their
base of operations in lower Manhattan, and George Washington fortified the area around Harlem
to oppose them. From Harlem, he could control the land routes to the north, as well as traffic on
the Harlem River. The New York Provincial Congress met in White Plains, as did the convention
drafting the constitution for New York State.[17] On September 16, 1776, the Battle of Harlem
Heights, sometimes referred to as the Battle of Harlem or Battle of Harlem Plain, was fought in
western Harlem around the Hollow Way (now West 125th Street), with conflicts on Morningside
Heights to the south and Harlem Heights to the north. The American troops were outnumbered,
5000 to 2000, and were ill equipped compared to their opponents, but outflanked the British and
forced them to retreat to the area around what is now West 106th Street. It was Washington's
first American victory.[18] Later that year, the British would avenge this defeat by chasing
Washington and his troops north, then turning back and burning Harlem to the ground. [19]

In 1765, Harlem was a small agricultural town not far from New York City.

Rebuilding took decades, and infrastructure was improved much more slowly than was
happening in New York City proper. [20] The village remained largely rural through the early 19th
century and, though the "grid system" of streets, designed downtown, was formally extended to
Harlem in 1811, it does not seem that anybody expected it would mean much. The 1811 report
that accompanied the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 noted that it was "improbable that (for
centuries to come) the grounds north of the Harlem Flat will be covered with houses." [21][22]
Though undeveloped, the area was not poor. Harlem was "a synonym for elegant living through a
good part of the nineteenth century."[22]The village remained largely farmland estates, such as
[Conrad] Van Keulen's Hook, orig. Otterspoor, bordered north of the Mill Creek (now 108th
St., orig. Montagne Creek at 109th St.), which flowed into Harlem Lake, to the farm of Morris
Randall, northwest on the Harlem River, and westward to the Peter Benson, or Mill Farm.[23] This
former bowery [of land] was subdivided into twenty-two equal plots, of about 6 to 8 acres
(32,000 m2) each, of which portions later owned by Abraham Storm, including thirty-one acres
(east of Fifth Avenue between 110th & 125th St.) were sold by Storm's widow Catherine in 1795
to James Roosevelt (great grandfather of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1760–1847). This
branch of the Roosevelt family subsequently moved to the town of Hyde Park, but several of
Roosevelt's children remain interred in Harlem.[24]
As late as 1820, the community had dwindled to 91 families, a church, a school, and a library.
Wealthy farmers, known as "patroons",[22] maintained these country estates largely on the heights
overlooking the Hudson River. Service connecting the outlays of Harlem with the rest of the City
of New York (on the southern tip of the island of Manhattan) was done via steamboat on the East
River, an hour-and-a-half 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 Harlem and Westchester County, starting at a depot at East 23rd Street, and extending
127 miles (204 km) north to a railroad junction in Columbia County at Chatham, New York by
1851. Charles Henry Hall, a wealthy lawyer and land speculator, recognized the changes that
this railroad would make possible in Harlem and began a successful program of infrastructure
development, building out streets, gas lines, sewer lines, and other facilities needed for urban
life.[25] Piers were also built, enabling Harlem to become an industrial suburb serving New York
City. The rapid development of infrastructure enabled some to become wealthy, and the area
became important to politicians, many of whom lived in Harlem. New York mayors Cornelius Van
Wyck Lawrence and Daniel Tiemann both lived in Harlem in this period. For many in New York
City, Harlem was at this time regarded as a sort of country retreat. [25][26] The village had a
population of poorer residents as well, including blacks, who came north to work in factories or to
take advantage of relatively low rents.
Between 1850 and 1870, many large estates, including Hamilton Grange, the estate
of Alexander Hamilton, were auctioned off as the fertile soil was depleted and crop yields fell.
Some of the land became occupied by Irish squatters, whose presence further depressed
property values.[22]

125th Street station on the IRT Broadway – Seventh Avenue Line.

1866–1920[edit]
During the American Civil War, Harlem saw draft riots, along with the rest of the city, but the
neighborhood was a significant beneficiary of the economic boom that followed the end of the
war, starting in 1868. The neighborhood continued to serve as a refuge for New Yorkers, but
increasingly those coming north were poor and Jewish or Italian. [26] Factories, homes, churches,
and retail buildings were built at great speed. [27] The Panic of 1873 caused Harlem property
values to drop 80%,[27] and gave the City of New York the opportunity to annex the troubled
community as far north as 155th Street.[28]
Recovery came soon, and row houses (as distinct from the previous generation's free-standing
houses) were being constructed in large numbers by 1876. Development accelerated in part in
anticipation of elevated railroads, which were extended to Harlem in 1880. With the construction
of the "els", urbanized development occurred very rapidly. Developers anticipated that the
planned Lexington Avenue subway would ease transportation to lower Manhattan. Fearing that
new housing regulations would be enacted in 1901, they rushed to complete as many new
buildings as possible before these came into force. [29] Early entrepreneurs had grandiose
schemes for Harlem: Polo was played at the original Polo Grounds, later to become home of
the New York Giants baseball team. Oscar Hammerstein I opened the Harlem Opera House on
East 125th Street in 1889. By 1893, even row houses did not suffice to meet the growing
population, and large-scale apartment buildings were the norm. [30] In that year, 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, also in that year, the construction glut and a delay in the building of the subway led to a
fall in real estate prices which attracted immigrant Eastern Europe Jews and Italians to Harlem in
accelerating numbers. There had been a Jewish community of 12 in Harlem in 1869 [31] that grew
to a peak of almost 200,000 in about 1915.[32] Presaging their resistance to the arrival of blacks,
existing landowners tried to stop Jews from moving into the neighborhood. At least one rental
sign declared "Keine Juden und Keine Hunde" (No Jews and no dogs).[33] Italians began to arrive
in Harlem only a few years after the Jews did. By 1900 there were 150,000 Italians in Harlem.
[32]
Both groups moved particularly into East Harlem.
The Jewish population of Harlem embraced the City College of New York, which moved to
Harlem in 1907. In the years after the move, 90% of the school's students were Jewish, [34] and
many of the school's most distinguished graduates date from this period. Both the Jewish
and Italian Mafia emerged in East Harlem and soon expanded their operations to the entire
neighborhood.[35] West 116th Street between Lenox and 8th Avenue became a vice district. [36] The
neighborhood also became a major center for more conventional entertainment, with 125th
Street as a particular center for musical theater, vaudeville, and moving pictures. [37]
The Jewish presence in Harlem was ephemeral, and by 1930, only 5,000 Jews remained. As
they left, their apartments in East Harlem were increasingly filled by Puerto Ricans, who were
arriving in large numbers by 1913.[38] Italian Harlem lasted longer, and traces of the community
lasted into the 1970s in the area around Pleasant Avenue.
Black population increase[edit]
Main article: African Americans in New York City

These buildings on West 135 Street were among the first in Harlem to be occupied entirely by blacks; in
1921, #135 became home to Young's Book Exchange, the first "Afrocentric" bookstore in Harlem. [39]

Marcus Garvey in 1925

Black residents have been present in Harlem continually since the 1630s, and as the
neighborhood modernized in the late 19th century, they could be found especially in the area
around 125th Street and in the "Negro tenements" on West 130th Street. By 1900, tens of
thousands lived in Harlem.[40] The mass migration of blacks into the area began in 1904, due to
another real estate crash, the worsening of conditions for blacks elsewhere in the city, and the
leadership of black real estate entrepreneurs including Phillip Payton, Jr. 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 in 1904 and 1905 that eclipsed the late-19th century slowdown.
[29]
Landlords could not find white renters for their properties, so Philip Payton stepped in to bring
blacks. His company, the Afro-American Realty Company, has been credited with the migration
of blacks from their previous neighborhoods,[41] the Tenderloin, San Juan Hill (now the site
of Lincoln Center), Minetta Lane in Greenwich Village and Hell's Kitchen in the west 40s and 50s.
[42][43]
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 [44] and in San Juan Hill in 1905[22] 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 original Penn Station.
In 1907, black churches began to move uptown. Several congregations built grand new church
buildings, including St Philip's on West 134th Street just west of Seventh Avenue (the wealthiest
church in Harlem), the Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street and St Mark's Methodist
Church on Edgecombe Avenue. More often churches purchased buildings from white
congregations of Christians and Jews whose members had left the neighborhood, including
Metropolitan Baptist Church on West 128th and Seventh Avenue, St James Presbyterian Church
on West 141st Street, and Mt Olivet Baptist Church on Lenox Avenue. [39][45] Only the Catholic
Church retained its churches in Harlem, with white priests presiding over parishes that retained
significant numbers of whites until the 1930s.[46]
The early 20th-century Great Migration of blacks to northern industrial cities was fueled by their
desire to leave behind the Jim Crow South, seek better jobs and education for their children, and
escape a culture of lynching violence. During World War I, expanding industries recruited black
laborers to fill new jobs, thinly staffed after the draft began to take young men. [41] So many blacks
came that it "threaten[ed] the very existence of some of the leading industries of Georgia,
Florida, Tennessee and Alabama."[47] Many settled in Harlem. In 1910, Central Harlem was about
10% black. By 1920, central Harlem was 32.43% black. The 1930 census showed 70.18% of
Central Harlem's residents as black[48] and lived as far south as Central Park, at 110th Street.
[49]
The expansion was fueled primarily by an influx of blacks from the southern U.S. states,
especially Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, who took trains up the East Coast.
There were also numerous immigrants from the West Indies. 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,[50] 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.[41][51] Some made pacts not to sell to or rent to blacks.
[52]
Others tried to buy property and evict black tenants, but the Afro-American Realty Company
retaliated by buying other property and evicting whites. Some even attempted to convince banks
to deny mortgages to black buyers, but soon gave up those efforts.[53]
Soon after blacks began to move into Harlem, the community became known as "the spiritual
home of the Negro protest movement."[54] 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. 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. Du Bois lived and published in
Harlem in the 1920s, as did James Weldon Johnson and Marcus Garvey.
Italian Harlem[edit]
Vestiges of Italian Harlem
Church of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel

Patsy's Pizzeria

Southern Italians and Sicilians, with a moderate number of Northern Italians, soon predominated,
especially in the area east of Lexington Avenue between 96th and 116th Streets and east
of Madison Avenue between 116th and 125th Streets, with each street featuring people from
different regions of Italy. The neighborhood became known as "Italian Harlem", the Italian
American hub of Manhattan; it was the first part of Manhattan to be referred to as "Little Italy".
[55]
The first Italians arrived in East Harlem in 1878, from Polla in the province of Salerno, and
settled in the vicinity of 115th Street.[56]
There were many crime syndicates in Italian Harlem from the early Black Hand to the bigger and
more organized Italian gangs that formed the Italian-American Mafia. It was the founding location
of the Genovese crime family, one of the Five Families that dominated organized crime in New
York City.[57]
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Italian Harlem was represented in Congress by future
Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and later by Italian-American socialist Vito Marcantonio. The Italian
neighborhood approached its peak in the 1930s, with over 100,000 Italian-Americans living in its
crowded, run-down apartment buildings. [58] The 1930 census showed that 81 percent of the
population of Italian Harlem consisted of first- or second-generation Italian Americans.
(Somewhat less than the concentration of Italian Americans in the Lower East Side's Little
Italy with 88 percent; Italian Harlem's total population, however, was three times that of Little
Italy.)[56]
Although in certain areas, particularly around Pleasant Avenue, Italian Harlem lasted through the
1970s,[59] today most of the former Italian population is gone. Most of these predominantly older
residents are clustered around Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, mainly
from 114th to 118th Streets. According to the 2000 Census, there were only 1,130 Italian-
Americans still living in this area. [60]
Still, vestiges of the old Italian neighborhood remain. The annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount
Carmel and the "Dancing of the Giglio", the first Italian feast in New York City, is still celebrated
there every year on the second weekend of August by the Giglio Society of East Harlem. Italian
retail establishments still exist, such as Rao's restaurant, started in 1896, and the original Patsy's
Pizzeria which opened in the 1933. In May 2011, one of the last remaining Italian retail
businesses in the neighborhood, a barbershop owned by Claudio Caponigro on 116th Street,
was threatened with closure by a rent increase.[61]

1921–1929[edit]

125th Street between Park and Madison Avenues

Starting around the time of the end of World War I, Harlem became associated with the New
Negro movement, and then the artistic outpouring known as the Harlem Renaissance, which
extended to poetry, novels, theater, and the visual arts.
The growing population also supported a rich fabric of organizations and activities in the 1920s.
Fraternal orders such as the Prince Hall Masons and the Benevolent and Protective Order of
Elks set up lodges in Harlem, with elaborate buildings including auditoriums and large bands.
Parades of lodge members decked out in uniforms and accompanied by band music were a
common sight on Harlem's streets, on public holidays, lodge anniversaries, church festivities and
funerals.[62] The neighborhood's churches housed a range of groups, including athletic clubs,
choirs and social clubs. A similar range of activities could be found at the YMCA on 135th Street
and the YWCA on 137th Street. The social pages of Harlem's two African-American newspapers,
the New York Age and the New York Amsterdam News, recorded the meetings, dinners and
dances of hundreds of small clubs.[63] Soapbox speakers drew crowds on Seventh and Lenox
Avenues until the 1960s, some offering political oratory, with Hubert Harrison the most famous,
while others, particularly in the late 1920s, sold medicine. [64][65] Harlem also offered a wealth of
sporting events: the Lincoln Giants played baseball at Olympic Field at 136th and Fifth Avenue
until 1920, after which residents had to travel to the Catholic Protectory Oval in the Bronx; men's
and women's basketball teams from local athletic clubs played in church gymnasiums, and, as
they became more popular, at the Manhattan Casino on 155th Street, before giving way to
professional teams, most famously the Rens, based at the Renaissance Ballroom on Seventh
Avenue;[66][67] and boxing bouts took place at the Commonwealth Casino on East 135th Street (run
by white promoters the McMahon brothers). The biggest crowds, including many whites, came to
see black athletes compete against whites.[68][69]
Marcus Garvey Park

It took years for business ownership to reflect the new reality. A survey in 1929 found that whites
owned and operated 81.51% of the neighborhood's 10,319 businesses, with beauty parlors
making up the largest number of black-owned businesses.[70][71] By the late 1960s, 60% of the
businesses in Harlem responding to surveys reported ownership by blacks, and an overwhelming
fraction of new businesses were black owned after that time. [72]
Marginalized in the legitimate economy, a small group of blacks found success outside the law,
running gambling on numbers. Invented in 1920 or 1921, numbers had exploded by 1924 into a
racket turning over tens of millions of dollars every year. That year the New York Age reported
that there were at least thirty bankers (the name given to someone running a numbers game) in
Harlem, with many employing between twelve and twenty people to collect bets, and Marcellino,
the largest banker, employing over one hundred. By the late 1920s, Wallace Thurman guessed
there were over a thousand collectors taking bets from 100,000 clients a day. [73] The most
successful bankers, who could earn enormous sums of money, were known as Kings and
Queens. The wealthiest numbers king of all was almost certainly the reputed inventor of the
game, Casper Holstein. He owned a fleet of cars, apartment buildings in Harlem and a home on
Long Island, but did not have the ostentatious style and lifestyle of many other kings. He, and
other bankers, gave money to charities and loans to aspiring businessmen and needy residents.
Holstein's role in the community extended further than most of his colleagues, included
membership in the Monarch Lodge of the Elks, support for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro
Improvement Association, philanthropy in his native Virgin Islands, and patronage of the Harlem
Renaissance.[74][75]
Harlem adapted rapidly to the coming of Prohibition, and its theaters, nightclubs,
and speakeasies became major entertainment destinations. Claude McKay would write that
Harlem had become "an all white picnic ground", and in 1927 Rudolph Fisher published an article
titled "The Caucasian Storms Harlem". [76] Langston Hughes described this period at length,
including this passage from his 1940 autobiography,
White people began to come to Harlem in droves. For several years they packed the expensive
Cotton Club on Lenox Avenue. But I was never there, because the Cotton Club was a Jim Crow
club for gangsters and monied whites. They were not cordial to Negro patronage, unless you
were a celebrity like Bojangles. So Harlem Negroes did not like the Cotton Club and never
appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of their dark community. Nor did ordinary
Negroes like the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown, flooding the little
cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang, and where now the
strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers—like
amusing animals in a zoo.

— Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

In response to the white influx, some blacks operated alternative venues in their homes. Called
buffet flats, they offered alcohol, music, dancing, prostitutes, and, commonly, gambling, and, less
often, rooms to which a couple could go. Their location in residential buildings, typically on cross
streets above 140th Street, away from the nightclubs and speakeasies on the avenues, offered a
degree of privacy from police, and from whites: you could only find a buffet flat if you knew the
address and apartment number, which hosts did not advertise. [77]
Puerto Rican and Latin American immigration after the First World War[78] established an enclave
at the western portion of East Harlem – around 110th Street and Lexington Avenue – which
became known as "Spanish Harlem". The area slowly grew to encompass all of East Harlem,
including Italian Harlem, as Italians moved out – to the Bronx, Brooklyn, upstate New York,
and New Jersey – and Hispanics moved in during another wave of immigration in the 1940s and
1950s.[79] The newly dominant Puerto Rican population, which reached 63,000 in 1950, continued
to define the neighborhood according to its needs, establishing bodegas and botánicas as it
expanded; by the 1930s[78]there was already an enclosed street market underneath the Park
Avenue railroad viaduct between 111th and 116th Streets, called "La Marqueta" ("The Market").
[79]
Catholic and evangelistic Protestant churches appeared in storefronts. [79] Although "Spanish
Harlem" had been in use since at least the 1930s to describe the Hispanic enclave – along with
"Italian Harlem" and "Negro Harlem" [80] – around the 1950s the name began to be used to
describe the entire East Harlem neighborhood. Later, the name "El Barrio" ("The Neighborhood")
began to be used, especially by inhabitants of the area.
Since the 1920s, this period of Harlem's history has been highly romanticized. With the increase
in a poor population, it was also the time when the neighborhood began to deteriorate to 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, many of whom were family members, but who sometimes
brought bad habits or even crime that disrupted the lives of respectable families. Lodgers also
experienced disruption, with many having to move frequently when households relocated,
roommates quarreled or they could not pay rent.[81] Urban reformers campaigned to eliminate the
"lodger evil" but the problem got worse before it got better; in 1940, still affected by
the Depression, 40% of black families in Harlem were taking in lodgers. [82]
The high rents and poor maintenance of housing stock, which Harlem residents suffered through
much of the 20th century, was not merely the product of racism by white landlords. By 1914, 40%
of Harlem's private houses and 10% of its tenements were owned by blacks. [83] Wealthier blacks
continued to purchase land in Harlem,[41] and by 1920, a significant portion of the neighborhood
was owned by blacks.[29][84] By the late 1960s, 60% of the businesses in Harlem responding to
surveys reported ownership by blacks, and an overwhelming fraction of new businesses were
black owned after that time.[72]
In 1928, the first effort at housing reform was attempted in Harlem with the construction of
the Paul Laurence Dunbar Houses, backed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. These were intended to
give working 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.[29] And by 1964, nine giant public housing projects had been constructed in the
neighborhood, housing over 41,000 people. [85]

Stately Harlem apartment buildings adjacent to Morningside Park

The earliest activism by blacks to change the situation in Harlem itself grew out of the Great
Depression, with the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" movement. [86] This was 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 integrate its
staff more fully. This success emboldened Harlem residents, and protests continued under other
leadership, including that of preacher and later congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., seeking
to change hiring practices at other stores, to effect the hiring of more black workers, or the hiring
of members of particular protesting groups. [87]
Communism gained a following in Harlem in the 1930s, and continued to play a role through the
1940s.[54] In 1935, the first of Harlem's five riots broke out. The incident started with a (false)
rumor that a boy caught stealing from a store on 125th Street had been killed by the police. By
the time it was over, 600 stores had been looted and three men were dead. The same year saw
internationalism in Harlem politics, as Harlemites responded to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia by
holding giant rallies, signing petitions and sending an appeal to the League of Nations.[88] Such
internationalism continued intermittently, including broad demonstrations in favor of Egyptian
president Nasser after the Suez invasion of 1956. [89]

1930–1945[edit]
The neighborhood was hit hard by job losses in the Great Depression. In the early 1930s, 25% of
Harlemites were out of work, and employment prospects for Harlemites stayed bad for decades.
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. Major
industries left New York City altogether, especially after 1950.
The job losses of the Depression were exacerbated by the end of Prohibition in 1933 [90] and by
the Harlem Riot of 1935, which scared away the wealthier whites who had long supported
Harlem's entertainment industry.[8] White audiences decreased almost totally after a second
round of riots in 1943. Many Harlemites found work in the military or in the Brooklyn shipyards
during World War II,[91] but the neighborhood declined rapidly once the war ended. Some middle-
class blacks moved north or west to suburbs, a trend that increased after the 1960s Civil Rights
Movement decreased discrimination in housing.
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.[92]

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. addressing a citizens' committee mass meeting in 1942

The earliest activism by blacks to change the situation in Harlem itself grew out of the Great
Depression, with the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" movement. [86] This was 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 integrate its
staff more fully. This success emboldened Harlem residents, and protests continued under other
leadership, including that of preacher and later congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., seeking
to change hiring practices at other stores, to effect the hiring of more black workers, or the hiring
of members of particular protesting groups. [87]
Communism gained a following in Harlem in the 1930s, and continued to play a role through the
1940s.[54] In 1935, the first of Harlem's five riots broke out. The incident started with a boy that
was supposedly caught stealing from a store on 125th Street had been killed by the police. By
the time it was over, 600 stores had been looted and three men were dead. The same year saw
internationalism in Harlem politics, as Harlemites responded to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia by
holding giant rallies, signing petitions and sending an appeal to the League of Nations.[88] Such
internationalism continued intermittently, including broad demonstrations in favor of Egyptian
president Nasser after the Suez invasion of 1956. [93]
Black Harlemites took positions in the elected political infrastructure of New York starting in 1941
with the election of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to the City Council. He was easily elected to
Congress when a congressional district was placed in Harlem in 1944, leaving his City Council
seat to be won by another black Harlemite, Benjamin J. Davis. Ironically, Harlem's political
strength soon deteriorated, as Clayton Powell, Jr. spent his time in Washington or his vacation
home in Puerto Rico, and Davis was jailed in 1951 for violations of the Smith Act.[94]
The year 1943 saw the second Harlem riot. A black soldier knocked down a policeman who then
shot him. An onlooker shouted that the soldier had been killed, and this news spread throughout
the black community and provoked rioting. A force of 6,600, made up of city police, military police
and civil patrolmen, in addition to 8,000 State Guardsmen and 1,500 civilian volunteers was
required to end the violence. Hundreds of businesses were destroyed and looted, the property
damage approaching $225,000. Overall, six people died and 185 were injured. Five hundred
people were arrested in connection with the riot.

1946–1969[edit]
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 (HARYOU), 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 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. [95]
Malcolm X at a 1964 press conference

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 urged civilian review boards to hear complaints
of police abuse, a demand that was ultimately met. As chairman of the House Committee of
Education and Labor at the start of the 1960s, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. used this position to
direct federal funds to various development projects in Harlem. [96]
The largest public works projects in Harlem in these years were public housing, with the largest
concentration built in East Harlem. [97]Typically, existing structures were torn down and replaced
with city-designed and managed properties that would, in theory, present a safer and more
pleasant environment than those available from private landlords. Ultimately, community
objections halted the construction of new projects. [98]
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 grade levels in reading skills, and 80%
tested under grade level in math. [99] In 1964, residents of Harlem staged two school boycotts to
call attention to the problem. In central Harlem, 92% of students stayed home. [100]
1960s race riots[edit]

An incident at 133rd Street and Seventh Avenue during the Harlem Riot of 1964.
The influence of the southern nonviolent protest movement was muted in Harlem. Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was the black leader most respected in Harlem.[101][102] But on September 20,
1958, Izola Curry, deluded into believing the NAACP was controlled by Communists, approached
Dr. King at a Blumstein's book-signing, and asked him if he was Martin Luther King, Jr. When
King replied in the affirmative, she said, "I've been looking for you for five years", then thrust
a letter opener into his chest. NYPD officers took King, still in the chair where he had sat, to an
ambulance that took him to Harlem Hospital, for removal of the blade. Reportage recalling the
event for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2014, noted:

As it happened, one of the cops was black, the other white and the same was the case
“ with the two surgeons. Each pair worked as true partners, proving that the color of their
skin meant nothing and translating the content of their character into life-saving action.
[103] ”
At least two dozen groups of black nationalists also operated in New York, many of them in
Harlem. The most important of these was the Nation of Islam, whose Temple Number Seven was
run by Malcolm X from 1952–1963.[104] Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon
Ballroom in Washington Heights in 1965. The neighborhood remains an important center for the
Nation of Islam.
In 1963, Inspector Lloyd Sealy became the first African-American officer of the NYPD to
command a police station, the 28th precinct in Harlem. [105] Community relations between Harlem
residents and the NYPD were strained as civil rights activists requested that the NYPD hire more
black police officers, specifically in Harlem. In 1964, across Harlem's three precincts, the ratio
was one black police officer for every six white officers. [106] A riot broke in the summer of 1964
following the fatal shooting of an unarmed 15-year-old black teenager by an off-duty white police
lieutenant. One person was killed, more than 100 were injured, and hundreds more were
arrested. Property damage and looting were extensive. The riot would later spread out of
Manhattan and into the borough of Brooklyn and neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the heart
of Brooklyn's African-American community. In the aftermath of the riots, 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.[107] HARYOU was given a major role in organizing the
project, along with the National Urban League and nearly 100 smaller community organizations.
[108]

In 1966, the Black Panthers organized a group in Harlem, agitating for violence in pursuit of
change. Speaking at a rally of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Max
Stanford, a Black Panther, declared that the United States "could be brought down to its knees
with a rag and some gasoline and a bottle."[109]
In 1968, Harlemites rioted after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., as did black
residents in other U.S. cities. Two people died—one stabbed to death in a crowd and another
trapped in a burning building. However, the rioting in New York was minor compared to that in
other American cities.[110] Mayor John Lindsay helped to quell the rioting by marching up Lenox
Avenue in a "hail of bricks" to confront the angry crowds.[111] (See also King assassination riots.)
Housing stock[edit]
Little investment in private homes or businesses took place 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.[112] 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. [113] The
worse the accommodations and more desperate the renter, the higher the rents would be. [114] This
pattern persisted 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.
[115]
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.[116] These houses could then be rented profitably to blacks.[117]
After the Harlem River Houses, America's first federally subsidized housing project, were opened
in 1937, other massive housing projects soon followed, with tens of thousands of units
constructed over the next twenty years, especially in Harlem. [98]

A dilapidated Harlem building, photographed on May 14, 2005. The building has since been demolished.

In the post-World War II era, Harlem ceased to be home to a majority of the city's blacks, [118] but it
remained the cultural and political capital of black New York, and possibly black America. [119]
[120]
The character of the community changed in the years after the war, as middle-class blacks left
for the outer boroughs (primarily the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn) and suburbs. The percentage
of Harlem that was black peaked in 1950, at 98.2%. [121] Thereafter, Hispanic, Asian, and white
residents have increased their share.
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, in 2000, Manhattan as a whole had a population density under 70,000 per square
mile.[122] 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 Harlem 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.[85] 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.
[22]
Tenants were sometimes to blame; some would strip wiring and fixtures from their buildings to
sell, throw garbage in hallways and airshafts, or otherwise damage the properties which they
lived in or visited.[123]

Harlem has many townhouses, such as these in the Mount Morris Historic District.
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 World
War I, had a lower population density than the rest of Manhattan. Between 1970 and 1980, for
example, Frederick Douglass Boulevard between 110th Street and 125th Street in central Harlem
lost 42% of its population and 23% of its remaining housing stock.[124] By 1987, 65% of the
buildings in Harlem were owned by the City of New York, [125][126][127] and many had become empty
shells, convenient centers for drug dealing and other illegal 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 doorframe of a brownstone designed by William Tuthill in the Mount Morris Historical District in Harlem.

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.

1970–1989[edit]
By some measures, the 1970s were the worst period in Harlem's history. Many of those
Harlemites who were able to escape from poverty left the neighborhood in search of safer
streets, better schools and homes. Those who remained were the poorest and least skilled, with
the fewest opportunities for success. Though the federal government's Model Cities
Program spent $100 million on job training, health care, education, public safety, sanitation,
housing, and other projects over a ten-year period, Harlem showed no improvement. [128]
The deterioration shows up starkly in the statistics of the period. In 1968, Harlem's infant
mortality rate had been 37 for each 1000 live births, as compared to 23.1 in the city as a whole.
Over the next eight years, infant mortality for the city as whole improved to 19, while the rate in
Harlem increased to 42.8, more than double. Statistics describing illness, drug addiction, housing
quality, and education are similarly grim and typically show rapid deterioration in the 1970s. The
wholesale abandonment of housing was so pronounced that between 1976 and 1978 alone,
central Harlem lost almost a third of its total population, and east Harlem lost about 27%. [128] The
neighborhood no longer had a functioning economy; stores were shuttered and by estimates
published in 1971, 60% of the area's economic life depended on the cash flow from the illegal
"Numbers game" alone.[129]
The worst part of Harlem was the "Bradhurst section" between Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Boulevard and Edgecombe, from 139th Street through 155th. In 1991, this region was described
in the New York Times as follows: "Since 1970, an exodus of residents has left behind the poor,
the uneducated, the unemployed. Nearly two-thirds of the households have incomes below
$10,000 a year. In a community with one of the highest crime rates in the city, garbage-strewn
vacant lots and tumbledown tenements, many of them abandoned and sealed, contribute to the
sense of danger and desolation that pervades much of the area." [130]
Aerial view of Harlem with river, seen from north (2010)

Plans for rectifying the situation often started with the restoration of 125th Street, long the
economic heart of black Harlem.[131] By the late 1970s, only marginalized and poor retail
remained.[132] Plans were drafted for a "Harlem International Trade Center", which would have
filled the entire block between 125th Street and 126th, from Lenox to Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Boulevard, with a center for trade with the third world. A related retail complex was planned to the
west, between Frederick Douglass Boulevard and St. Nicholas. However, this plan depended on
$30 million in financing from the federal government, [131] and with the election of Ronald
Reagan to the presidency of the United States, it had no hope of being completed. [132]
The city did provide one large construction project, though not so favored by residents. Starting
in the 1960s and continuing through the 1970s, Harlemites fought the introduction of an immense
sewage treatment plant, the North River Water Pollution Control Plant, on the Hudson
River in West Harlem. A compromise was ultimately reached in which the plant was built with a
state park, including extensive recreational facilities, on top. The park, called Riverbank State
Park, was opened in 1993 (the sewage plant having been completed some years earlier). [133]
The city began auctioning its enormous portfolio of Harlem properties to the public in 1985. This
was intended to improve the community by placing property in the hands of people who would
live in them and maintain them. In many cases, the city would even pay to completely renovate a
property before selling it (by lottery) below market value. [134]The program was soon beset by
scandal—buyers were acquiring houses from the city, then making deals with churches or other
charities in which they would inflate the appraised values of the properties and the church or
charity would take out federally guaranteed 203(k) mortgage and buy it. The original buyer would
realize a profit and the church or charity would default on the mortgage (presumably getting
some kind of kickback from the developer). [135][136] Abandoned shells were left to further
deteriorate, and about a third of the properties sold by the city were tenements which still had
tenants, who were left in particularly miserable conditions. These properties, and new restrictions
on Harlem mortgages, bedeviled the area's residential real estate market for years.

1990–present[edit]
After four decades of decline, Central Harlem's population bottomed out in the 1990 census, at
101,026. It had decreased by 57% from its peak of 237,468 in 1950. Between 1990 and 2006 the
neighborhood's population grew by 16.9%, with the percentage of blacks decreasing from 87.6%
to 69.3%,[49] then dropping to 54.4% by 2010,[137] and the percentage of whites increasing from
1.5% to 6.6% by 2006,[49] and to "almost 10%" by 2010. [137]
From 1987 through 1990, the city removed long-unused trolley tracks from 125th Street, laid new
water mains and sewers, installed new sidewalks, curbs, traffic lights, streetlights, and planted
trees. Two years later, national chains opened branches on 125th Street for the first time – The
Body Shop opened a store at 125th street and 5th Avenue (still extant As of 2010),and a Ben &
Jerry's ice cream franchise employing formerly homeless people opened across the street.
[138]
The development of the region would leap forward a few years later with the 1994 introduction
of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, which brought $300 million in development funds
and $250 million in tax breaks.[139]
Plans were laid for shopping malls, movie theaters, and museums. However, these plans were
nearly derailed in 1995 by the "Freddy's Fashion Mart" riot, which culminated in political arson
and eight deaths. These riots did not resemble their predecessors, and were organized by black
activists against Jewish shop owners on 125th street. [140]

Sign disparaging Barack Obama outside the Atlah World Missionary Church in the former Harlem Club at
123rd Street and Lenox Avenue

Five years later, the revitalization of 125th Street resumed, with the construction of a Starbucks
outlet backed in part by Magic Johnson (1999), the first supermarket in Harlem in 30 years,
[139]
the Harlem USA retail complex, which included the first first-run movie theater in many years
(2000),[141] and a new home for the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001). In the same year, former
president Bill Clinton took office space in Harlem, at 55 West 125th Street. [142] In 2002, a large
retail and office complex called Harlem Center was completed at the corner of Lenox and 125th.
[139]
There has been extensive new construction and rehabilitation of older buildings in the years
since.
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. The number of housing units in Harlem increased
by 14% between 1990 and 2000,[126] 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 New York City saw only a 12% increase. [126] Even empty shells of buildings in the neighborhood
were routinely selling for nearly $1,000,000 each as of 2007. [143]
In January 2010, The New York Times reported that in "Greater Harlem", which they defined as
running from the East River to the Hudson River, from 96th Street to 155th Street, blacks ceased
to be a majority of the population in 1998, with the change largely attributable to the rapid arrival
of new white and Hispanic residents. The paper reported that the population of the area had
grown more since 2000 than in any decade since the 1940s. [144] Median housing prices dropped
farther in Harlem than in the rest of Manhattan during the real estate crash of 2008, but
recovered more rapidly as well.[145]
The neighborhood's changes have provoked some discontent. James David Manning, pastor of
the ATLAH World Missionary Church on Lenox Avenue, has received press for declaring a
boycott on all Harlem shops, restaurants, other businesses, and churches other than his own. He
believes that this will cause an economic crash that will drive out white residents and drop
property values to a level his supporters can afford. [146] There have been rallies against
gentrification.[147]
On March 12, 2014, two buildings in East Harlem were destroyed in a gas explosion.[148]