Harlem (1658- ), also called Uptown, is the part of Manhattan in New York City just north of Central Park. For much of the 1900s it was, in effect, the capital of black America. Its glory days were in the 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance. The Apollo Theater is there and so is the Cotton Club.
Some streets have been renamed:
- Martin Luther King Jr Blvd – 125th Street, the main street going east to west
- Malcolm X Blvd – Lenox Ave, the main street going north to south down the middle of Harlem
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr Blvd – 7th Avenue
- Frederick Douglass Blvd – 8th Avenue
Strivers’ Row, which is 139th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, has some of the best terrace houses (row houses) in Manhattan.
Harlem was a woods and then farmland. In the 1800s summer homes began to appear, a place to get away from the city. In the 1880s the city itself started to spread into Harlem. At first it was a well-to-do white neighbourhood of Protestants and Jews.
Harlem turned black during the 1920s. It saw a flowering of the arts: the Harlem Renaissance. It became famous for its wild jazz joints along Lenox Avenue where both blacks and whites went. Harlem was still part white in those days. There were even white nightclubs where most blacks could not go, like the Cotton Club.
Blacks came mainly from the South and the West Indies. Some came from the old black neighbourhood on 52nd Street in Midtown Manhattan.
By 1930 Harlem had 225,000 blacks, making it larger than any black city in Africa or the world. But the 1930s brought bad times. The buildings started to fall apart and yet more people arrived. Riots broke out in 1935, 1943 and again in 1964.
In the 1950s and 1960s another wave of blacks came to New York from the South, but this time most moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and Jamaica, Queens, not Harlem. By the 1960s they each had more blacks than Harlem.
Harlem hit bottom in the 1980s: crack had arrived and property owners were giving up buildings as a lost cause to the city. Most people were poor and black, with Hispanics in the east and the north. There was a small black middle-class.
Most white people were afraid to go to Harlem, even to busy 125th Street in the middle of the day. That level of fear is not based on a sound reading of police reports. It is based on outright fear of blacks. Chinatown seemed worse yet plenty of whites went there.
With rising property values in Harlem since the late 1990s it is no longer as poor as it once was. Parts are even turning white again.
Given how close it is to Midtown Manhattan, Harlem is extremely underbuilt.
You saw Harlem in these films:
- Shaft (1971, 2000)
- Claudine (1974)
- Cotton Club (1984)
- Mo’ Better Blues (1990)
- Rage in Harlem (1991)
- Jungle Fever (1991)
- New Jack City (1991)
- Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)
- American Gangster (2007)
– Abagond, 2008.
See also:
- New York
- Uptown
- Cynda Williams: Harlem Blues
- Harlem Renaissance:
- Harlemites:
- films set in Harlem
- Race in America
- black ghetto
- The best American writers live north of 110th Street
Harlem has a rich history among African Americans. It was the birthplace of the Harlem Renaissance when the best and brightest Black talents flourish. It had its ups and downs like any NYC borough. I don’t think the place is any scarier than Greenwich Village or Lower East Side. As you wrote in this article, it’s nonblacks’ unfounded fear of Blacks, including mixed race Puerto Ricans and Dominicans that’s driving the perception that Harlem isn’t safe to visit. People need to have an open mind and not following what people or the media think of the much-maligned NYC neighborhood.
Stephanie B.
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I completely agree! I’ve lived on 129th and Lenox, 122nd and ACP, and now I’m on 145th and St. Nick. I’m tired of people giving Harlem a bad name. I absolutely love it here. I hope to move further down again. Even on Lenox. I must admit that while I lived on Lenox I saw more than a couple shootings, police brutality, helicopters, etc, BUT I love Harlem’s character and anywhere you go, you can find that. There are muggings and rapes on the upper east side. Truth be told though, I love that it’s predominantly black in Harlem and I hope it stays that way. I don’t care for the Upper East Side’s snooty attitude that much :p
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Just visited Harlem last year. What a change! Rich blacks, middle class blacks and black artists are moving in, renovating and reviving what once was.
Plus the food can’t be beat.
Try Sylvia’s on Lenox…
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What is the painting at the top of this post?
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The painting is Archibald Motley’s “Blues” (1929). He is from the Harlem Renaissance, so I thought it fitting. BUT, strictly speaking, it is a picture of Paris! But it was too cool to pass up. Even Penguin thought so: they put it on the cover of their Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. For the longest time it was even my masthead picture at the top.
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Langston Hughes, and Zora Neel Hurston all the art and music and culture. All the beauty of black people.
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Where is the capital of Black America now? Atlanta? Was Detroit the capital at one point?
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