Harlem: From Nieuw Haarlem to Hamilton's Grange and the Harlem Renaissance

Early Harlem as a rural village by the water.

Early Harlem

Before European settlers arrived, the land now called Harlem was home to the Lenape.

• 1660: under Governor Peter Stuyvesant of the Dutch West India Company, the farming village of Nieuw Haarlem, named for the Dutch city of Haarlem, was incorporated.
• 1664: the English took the Dutch colony of New Netherland — New Amsterdam, Schenectady, Heemstede (now Hempstead) and the rest — and Nieuw Haarlem became Harlem. It stayed small and rural, growing slowly.
• 1700s: wealthy New Yorkers, then packed into the southern tip of Manhattan, summered in the area. The Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights, built in 1765 for Roger Morris, is the oldest surviving house in Manhattan.

Hamilton's Harlem

• September 16, 1776: the Battle of Harlem Heights was fought in western Harlem, near today's West 125th Street. Outnumbered 5,000 to 2,000, the Continental Army still outflanked the British and drove them back to about today's 106th Street — George Washington's first victory of the war. Captain Alexander Hamilton was among the American troops, and may have first come to know the area then.
• Hamilton later often tied up his small boat nearby on fishing trips up the Hudson.
• New York City suffered yellow fever each fall, and those who could left town. In fall 1799, Hamilton and his in-laws, the Churches, rented a country home in Harlem Heights.
• In 1800, Hamilton bought fifteen acres from pharmacist Jacob Schieffelin and twenty more from physician Samuel Bradhurst. The land had streams feeding a duck pond and views of the Hudson, East and Harlem Rivers, and was crossed by Bloomingdale Road — part of it today's Hamilton Place.
• His home, The Grange, was finished in 1802 near today's West 143rd Street and Convent Avenue. The estate ran roughly from West 140th to 145th Streets and from St. Nicholas Avenue to Broadway, with the Schieffelins to the west and the Bradhursts — remembered in Bradhurst Avenue — to the east.

The city arrives

In the early 1800s Harlem was still countryside, with estates on the heights above the Hudson. The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 laid a street grid over Manhattan up to 155th Street. The grid took nearly 60 years to get that far north, but from the 1850s to 1870s speculators were already carving up the big estates.

The Harlem Renaissance

• In the early 1900s, African Americans leaving the Jim Crow South moved north, and as the subway reached uptown many settled in Harlem. The neighborhood went from about 10% African American in 1910 to about 70% in 1930.
• Between the world wars, the Harlem Renaissance flourished, with figures such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Arthur Schomburg, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington.

Decline and revival

Job losses in the Great Depression began a decline that lasted decades, worsened by civil rights inequality and the loss of nearly a third of the community's residents. Since the 1990s, new construction and the restoration of older buildings have revived Harlem — a changing place that honors its past.

Harlem today is home to varied architecture and serves as a cultural capital. NPS.

Sources

Based on "Harlem," Hamilton Grange National Memorial, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. A photograph of the Apollo Theater, from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons ShareAlike licence, is not reproduced.