Harlem Overview

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

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

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

History

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

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

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