Harlem, Manhattan

Harlem is a neighborhood of Manhattan, long known as a major African American cultural and business center. Although the name is sometimes stretched to include all of upper Manhattan including Washington Heights, Fort George, Inwood and Spanish Harlem, traditionally Harlem is bounded on the south by East 96th Street, on the West by Central Park West/Frederick Douglass Boulevard to 125th Street then west on 125th Street to the Hudson River, on the North by 155th Street, and on the east by the East River.

The first settlement in what is now Harlem was by Dutch settlers in the first half of the 17th century, and they named it Nieuw Haarlem (or New Haarlem, after the Dutch city of Haarlem). In 1664, the British took control of the New Netherland colony and renamed the town Harlem. As New York City grew, it eventually incorporated Harlem.

Harlem was a place of farms and country estates until elevated railroads were extended there in the 1880s. With the construction of the els, development occurred very rapidly, with townhouses, apartments, and tenements springing up practically overnight. 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.

The first blacks to come to Harlem came in the early 1900s, the first ones affiliated with St. Philip's Episcopal church. Before living in Harlem, most of Manhattan's blacks had lived in a neighborhood called the Tenderloin.

In the 1920s, Harlem was the center of a flowering of Black culture that became known as the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance was a time of amazing artistic production, but ironically, many blacks were excluded from what they were creating. Many jazz venues, like the Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington played, were restricted to whites only.

The Apollo Theater opened in Harlem on January 26, 1934.

In the post-WWII era, Harlem ceased to be home to a majority of NYC's blacks, but it remained the cultural and political capital of black New York, and possibly black America. Harlem was spared the riots that ruined other black neighborhoods in the 1960s, maintained its housing stock, and began to see gentrification in the 1990s, much by black professionals.