Definition
Harlem is the Upper Manhattan neighborhood — roughly 110th Street north to 155th Street, and from Fifth Avenue west to St. Nicholas — that, beginning around 1910, transformed from a stalled white middle-class development into the cultural and political capital of Black America.
By 1930 Harlem held the largest concentration of Black residents in the United States, around 165,000 people in roughly two square miles. It was the East-Coast terminus of the Great Migration — George Starling, one of the three protagonists of Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, arrived in 1945 — and remained the symbolic center of Black New York for the rest of the century.
Why it matters
How it works
The transformation followed a now-familiar pattern. Around 1900, white developers had overbuilt elegant brownstones in central Harlem on the assumption that the IRT subway extension would draw white middle-class buyers north. The buyers did not come fast enough, owners faced foreclosure, and Philip Payton's Afro-American Realty Company began leasing the empty buildings to Black tenants priced out of the older Tenderloin and San Juan Hill districts further south.
White residents and landlords organized resistance — the Hudson Realty Company bought back several blocks and evicted Black tenants — but the financial logic favored the existing leases. By 1914 the line had effectively shifted, and Black Harlem had a foothold of several blocks along 135th Street. The Great Migration filled the rest.
Unlike Chicago's South Side, which was built around heavy industry, Harlem's economy was service-and-culture-oriented from the start. Theaters (the Apollo, the Lafayette), nightclubs (the Cotton Club, Connie's Inn, Small's Paradise), publishers, churches (Abyssinian Baptist), and political offices clustered along Lenox and Seventh Avenues. The density supported a Black intellectual life — the Schomburg Center, the New York Public Library's 135th Street branch — that became the institutional substrate of the Harlem Renaissance.
By the time George Starling arrived from Florida in 1945, the cultural high tide had passed. Harlem was crowded, expensive, and aging. But it remained the destination — the only place in America where a Black migrant could step off a train and find, within walking distance, a Black-owned restaurant, a Black-owned bookstore, a Black church of any denomination, and a job lead.