A humble man and great artist. He left a lasting legacy for the world. Mr. Lawrence shared the life of ordinary people -- their hopes, dreams and aspirations. Sometimes he also shared their pain and struggles. Mr. Lawrence validated our humanity as African Americans.

Read his biography and then see samples of his work and learn more about his artistic achievements on the Whitney Museum website. You will be able to click below.

Biography

Born in Atlantic City, [Jacob Lawrence] spent part of his childhood in Pennsylvania and then, after his parents split up in 1924, he went with his mother and siblings to New York, settling in Harlem. When years later he told an interviewer that "I am the black community," he was neither boasting nor kidding. He had none of the alienation from Harlem that was felt by some other black artists of the 1930s, like the expatriate William Johnson.

"He trained as a painter at the Harlem Art Workshop, inside the New York Public Library's 113 5th Street branch. Younger than the artists and writers who took part in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Lawrence was also at an angle to them: he was not interested in the kind of idealized, fake-primitive images of blacks - the Noble Negroes in Art Deco guise - that tended to be produced as an antidote to the toxic racist stereotypes with which white popular culture had flooded America since Reconstruction. Nevertheless, he gained self-confidence from the Harlem cultural milieu - in particular, from the art critic Alain Locke, a Harvard-trained esthete (and America's first black Rhodes scholar) who believed strongly in the possibility of an art created by blacks which could speak explicitly to African-Americans and still embody the values, and self-critical powers, of modernism. Or, in Locke's own words, "There is in truly great art no essential conflict between racial or national traits and universal human values." This would not sit well with today's American cultural separatists who trumpet about the incompatibility of American experiences - "It's a black thing, you wouldn't understand" - but it was vital to Lawrence's own growth as an artist. Locke perceived the importance of the Great Migration, not just as an economic event but as a cultural one, in which countless blacks took over the control of their own lives, which had been denied them in the South:

With each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro migrant becomes more and more like that of the European waves at their crests, a mass movement towards the larger and more democratic chance-in the Negro's case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from mediaeval America to modern.
 
"To narrate it, then, would require a modern language, a deep immersion in the experience, and an awareness of the harsh toll that contact with American modernity exacted on the blacks. From childhood, Lawrence had been steeped in family and community stories of the Migration, and when - encouraged by Locke - he decided to paint it, he worked hard to get the historical background right. Months of painstaking research in the Schomburg Collection of the Public Library, New York's chief archive on African-American life and history, followed - even though the finished paintings rarely allude to specific historical events. He took on the task with a youthful earnestness that remains one of the most touching aspects of the final work, and goes beyond mere self-expression. As a result, you sense that something is speaking through Lawrence - a collectivity.

"The series is notable for the language it does not use. Lawrence was not a propagandist. He eschewed the caricatural apparatus of Popular Front Social Realism, then at its high tide in America. Considering the violence and pathos of so much of his subject matter - prisons, deserted villages, city slums, race riots, labor camps - his images are restrained, and all the more piercing for their lack of bombast. When he painted a lynching, for instance, he left out the dangling body and the jeering crowd: there is only bare earth, a branch, an empty noose, and the huddled lump of a grieving woman. He set aside the influence of Rivera and the Mexican muralists, which lay so heavily on other artists; he wasn't painting murals, but images closer in size to single pages, no more than eighteen inches by twelve.

Nevertheless, he imagined the paintings as integrally connected - a single work of art, no less unified than a mural, but portable. Migration is a visual ballad, each image a stanza-compressed, like the blues, to the minimum needs of narration. Number 10, "They were very poor", pares the elements of a black sharecropper's life down to the least common denominator: a man and a woman staring at empty bowls on a bare brown plane, an empty basket hung on the wall by an enormous nail - the sort of nail you imagine in a crucifixion. There isn't a trace of the sentimentality that coats Picasso's Blue Period, or the work of most American Social Realists.
 
"Lawrence called his style "dynamic cubism," though it wasn't notably dynamic, except when he used flamelike forms and pushy oppositions of structure; generally the paintings tend to an Egyptian stillness, friezelike even when you know the subject was moving. His debts to Cubism and to Matisse are obvious: the flat, sharp overlaps of form, the reliance on silhouette, and a high degree of abstraction in the color. But there is something more demotic behind those colors. They came, as Lawrence acknowledged, more from his experience in Harlem than from other art: In order to add something to their lives, [black families] decorated their tenements and their homes in all of these colors. I've been asked, is anyone in my family artistically inclined? I've always felt ashamed of my response and I always said no, not realizing that my artistic sensibility came from this ambiance.... It's only in retrospect that I realized I was surrounded by art. You'd walk Seventh Avenue and took in the windows and you'd see all these colors in the depths of the depression. All these colors.

"The memory of them is plain in Number 57, "The female worker was also one of the last groups to leave the South", with its single figure of a laundress in a white smock, stirring a vat of fabrics - blue, black, yellow, pink - with her pole: a dense and well-locked composition, suggesting the permanence and resistance which is one of the underlying themes of Lawrence's series."
- From "American Vision: The Epic History of Art in America", by Robert Hughes

Click below to go to Whitney site http://www.whitney.org/jacoblawrence/meet/jharlem_community.html

The people have always made Harlem so special. And folks from the West Indies and South America have added so much texture and richness to our area. The best way to begin is to understand some of the important traditions. Though slavery was practiced throughout the islands, its impact was somewhat different.

What is Carnival?

Hundred and hundreds of years ago, the followers of the Catholic religion in Italy started the tradition of holding a wild costume festival right before the first day of Lent. Because Catholics are not supposed to eat meat during Lent, they called their festival, carnevale — which means “to put away the meat.” As time passed, carnivals in Italy became quite famous; and in fact the practice spread to France, Spain, and all the Catholic countries in Europe. Then as the French, Spanish, and Portuguese began to take control of the Americas and other parts of the world, they brought with them their tradition of celebrating carnival.

During and after the Slave trade when many people were uprooted and transferred to Caribbean Islands by force their traditions were kept residually in their souls. These traditions were then incorporated by slaves in La Trinity (Trinidad) and other Caribbean Islands where the French and other land owners settled. Parts of these festivities and celebrations resembled the French Mardi Gras. There-in lies the birth of Carnival in the Caribbean. However, Carnival is continuously evolving and today bears no resemblance to the original.

African influences on carnival traditions

Important to Caribbean festival arts are the ancient African traditions of parading and moving in circles through villages in costumes and masks. Circling villages was believed to bring good fortune, to heal problems, and chill out angry relatives who had died and passed into the next world. Carnival traditions also borrow from the African tradition of putting together natural objects (bones, grasses, beads, shells, fabric) to create a piece of sculpture, a mask, or costume — with each object or combination of objects representing a certain idea or spiritual force.
Feathers were frequently used by Africans in their motherland on masks and headdresses as a symbol of our ability as humans to rise above problems, pains, heartbreaks, illness — to travel to another world to be reborn and to grow spiritually. Today, we see feathers used in many, many forms in creating carnival costumes.
 
African dance and music traditions transformed the early carnival celebrations in the Americas, as African drum rhythms, large puppets, stick fighters, and stilt dancers began to make their appearances in the carnival festivities.

In many parts of the world, where Catholic Europeans set up colonies and entered into the slave trade, carnival took root. Brazil, once a Portuguese colony, is famous for its carnival, as is Mardi Gras in Louisiana (where African-Americans mixed with French settlers and Native Americans). Carnival celebrations are now found throughout the Caribbean in Barbados, Jamaica, Grenada, Dominica, Haiti, Cuba, St. Thomas, St. Marten; in Central and South America in Belize, Panama, Brazil; and in large cities in Canada and the U.S. where Caribbean people have settled, including Brooklyn, Miami, and Toronto. Even San Francisco has a carnival!

Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad's carnival is a beautiful example of how carnival can unite the world. For in this small nation, the beliefs and traditions of many cultures have come together; and for a brief five days each year, the whole country forgets their differences to celebrate life!
Like many other nations under colonial rule, the history of Native Americans and African people in Trinidad is a brutal, sad story. Spain and England at different times both claimed Trinidad as their colonies. Under British rule, the French settled in Trinidad, bringing with them their slaves, customs, and culture. By 1797, 14,000 French settlers came to live in Trinidad, consisting of about 2,000 whites and 12,000 slaves. Most of the native peoples (often called the Amerindians) who were the first people to live in Trinidad, died from forced labor and illness.

Carnival was introduced to Trinidad around 1785, as the French settlers began to arrive. The tradition caught on quickly, and fancy balls were held where the wealthy planters put on masks, wigs, and beautiful dresses and danced long into the night. The use of masks had special meaning for the slaves, because for many African peoples, masking is widely used in their rituals for the dead. Obviously banned from the masked balls of the French, the slaves would hold their own little carnivals in their backyards — using their own rituals and folklore, but also imitating their masters’ behavior at the masked balls.

For African people, carnival became a way to express their power as individuals, as well as their rich cultural traditions. After 1838 (when slavery was abolished), the freed Africans began to host their own carnival celebrations in the streets that grew more and more elaborate, and soon became more popular than the balls.

The Birth of the Steelband

One of the exciting aspects of Caribbean carnival is the appearance in the early 20th century of the steel pan, which are instruments made from used oil drums that have been cut off on one end and then shaped, pounded, and tuned. Every carnival season, steelbands, composed of one to two hundred pan players, practice for months on end. Ready with their tunes, these steelbands take to the stadiums and the streets, to create some of the most beautiful music in the world.
The history of the steelband in Trinidad and Tobago is directly tied to the banning of all types of drumming in Trinidad in the 1880’s. Though this ban was not readily accepted and rioting resulted, ultimately Africans applied and readapted their tradition of the drum to create new forms and mediums of music, including the tamboo bamboo rhythmic ensemble made up of bamboo joints beaten together and pounded on the ground. Biscuit tins and dustbins were manipulated and crafted into instruments, becoming the first “pans.” To explore the roots of pan and understand that this phenomenal music came about through years of struggle an

America’s Largest and Most Italian Little Italy Excerpts by Professor Gerald Meyer

Italian Harlem--which was located on Manhattan’s east side between 96th Street and 125th Street from Lexington Avenue to the East River—at its height in 1930 was home to eighty-nine thousand first- and second-generation Italian Americans. Its large population allowed for the construction of an unusually extensive and elaborate social infrastructure, including the country’s largest festa. This community encouraged the development of an extraordinary set of political and communal leaders—Salvatore Cotillo, Leonard Covello, Edward Corsi, Fiorello LaGuardia, and Vito Marcantonio. Italian Harlem may be the most important single site for an understanding and an appreciation of the Italian-American experience.

 The first Italians arrived in East Harlem in 1878, from Polla in the province of Salerno, and settled in the vicinity of 115th Street. 1) In response to the inhospitable treatment of their adopted land, Southern Italians gathered together to the extent that they actually became the most residentially segregated European nationality in the United States. 2) Within the Little Italys, immigrants from various regions—even towns—settled together. In Italian Harlem there was on East 112th Street, a settlement from Bari; on East 107th Street between First Avenue and the East River, people from Sarno near Naples; on East 100th Street between First and Second Avenues, Sicilians from Santiago; on East 100th Street, many northern Italians from Piscento; and on East 109th Street, a large settlement of Calabrians. 3) The 1930 census showed the remarkable homogeneity of Italian Harlem, 81 percent of its population consisted of either first- or second-generation Italian Americans. (This was somewhat less than the concentration of Italian Americans in the Lower East Side’s Little Italy—88 percent; but Italian Harlem’s total population was three times that of Little Italy.) 4) Some blocks reported: Italians 672, others 10; Italians 703, others 17; Italians 914, others 18. 5) Italian Harlem occupied the eastern half of East Harlem which stretched west to Fifth Avenue.

By 1890, the original Irish- and German-American communities were rapidly being replaced by Italian Harlem and a Yiddish-speaking community of Eastern European Jews, which was located between Lexington Avenue and Fifth Avenue. 6) They shared East Harlem with the much smaller communities of Finnish Americans, Greek Americans, and the remnants of the original German- and Irish-American communities. In the twenties, Jewish Harlem began to be replaced by the expansion of Black Harlem in the north and the rise of El Barrio, that is, Spanish Harlem. In general what was characteristic of East Harlem’s three historic communities—Jewish Harlem, El Barrio, and Italian Harlem—was that they were long-standing entities which constructed an organizational life that satisfied the cultural and social needs of their residents. All played key roles in the history of these peoples and the history of immigrant experience within the United States in general.

Throughout East Harlem, and most especially Italian Harlem, there prevailed extremely poor housing and conditions of overcrowding. Italian Harlem was a community of original settlement, whose housing was constructed specifically for immigrants. It was a tenement district where speculators had constructed block after block of narrow five- and six-story dumb-bell shaped (because they had airshafts on either side) dwellings that contained railroad flats, that is, apartments where one room entered directly onto the next. Overwhelmingly, these were old-law tenements, which had been constructed before the enactment of the Tenement Laws of 1901. 7) Therefore, they occupied most of the lot, leaving a minimum of open space for light and air, and most lacked toilets and bathtubs within the apartments. As late as 1939, in the most Italian census tract, 84 percent of the dwellings were without central heating, 67 percent lacked a tub or shower, and 55 percent a private toilet. Only 7.5 percent of the apartments contained five or more rooms. 8) Further contributing to the overcrowding was the absence of public spaces.

The only park within this community, Thomas Jefferson, was established around the turn of the century, when the city demolished six square blocks of tenements and other structures in order to create one open space. In the mid-1920’s, the district had the distinction “of having the most populated block in the city. . . . Five thousand human beings in one city street . . . .” 9) The only notable exception to Italian Harlem’s tenement-district character was East 116th Street and a few adjacent streets which contained one- and two-family row houses. East 116th Street, known as “Doctors’ Row,” served as the corso, or promenade, for this community. It was very important for the “completeness” of this community that it contained an area where the prominenti of the community could reside. (Marcantonio and Covello, for example, lived there in adjacent row houses on East 116th Street.) Nonetheless, this middle class enclave was limited in size— in 1940 the census tract that embraced this relatively privileged area contained only sixteen one-family and twenty-four two-family dwellings. 10) Italian Harlem was a dormitory community that included no important concentration of businesses or industry. Approximately 20 percent of the community’s working population found employment there, the others commuted. 11) The lack of employment was compensated for by the area’s two significant assets: proximity to districts offering jobs and an excellent public transportation system.

Every avenue had at least one mode of transit, with a subway line under Lexington Avenue and elevated railroads above Second and Third Avenues. The other north-south streets were served by cable cars or streetcars, which stopped at almost 60 percent of the street intersections. 12) Italian Harlem’s housing stock predetermined that it would be a poor working class community. The vast majority of the Italian migrants to the United States were contadini whose skills ill-matched the needs of an industrializing urban economy. Low levels of literacy in the Italian language and formal education in general also hindered the adaptation of Southern Italians to their new country. The skills of the much smaller numbers of artigiani, who were generally literate, reflected the pre-industrial character of Southern Italy’s economy. No organization or group of earlier-arrived co-nationals acted to mitigate either their economic hardships or the pervasive and persistent hostility Italians faced from the host society.

As a result, the Italians predominated in the lowest-paying least-skilled occupations. In Italian Harlem, these occupational patterns, perhaps to even the most extreme measure, prevailed. A 1929 survey of the occupations of fathers cited: milkmen, vegetable vendors, street cleaners, truck drivers, dock hands, factory hands, builders, plumbers, plasterers, stone masons, painters, and auto mechanics. The number of professionals and even while collar workers was negligible. 13) The concentration of Italian Americans in occupations that were seasonal and especially vulnerable to economic downturns exacerbated their plight. The Great Depression struck Italian Harlem with a vengeance. In 1930 and 1931 the East Harlem Nursing Service conducted employment surveys which showed that in a group of 363 families, 28 percent had work relief jobs, 21 percent worked in the private sector or the traditional civil service, 6 percent had irregular work, and 45 percent were unemployed. 14) Another study which surveyed the economic condition of the parishioners of East Harlem’s churches in this period categorized them into three tiers: “very poor,” defined as “unable to pay rent”; “poor” as having “enough to eat most of the time but little else”; and “fair” as “comfortable living is possible.” Of the four Italian parishes in Italian Harlem, the parishioners of three (Our Lady of Mount Carmel, St. Ann’s, and St. Lucy’s) fell into the “very poor” category and Holy Rosary’s “poor.” 15) These conditions persisted. In 1940, one-third of East Harlem’s work force was still unemployed.

By 1950, the levels of employment had greatly increased, but 60 percent of its work force was employed as craftsmen, laborers, and operatives. 16) At all times, however, a small stratum of middle class Italian Americans, who served vital communal needs, resided in Italian Harlem. A “Community Survey,” sponsored by Covello in 1940, listed fifty-nine Italian-American doctors, eighteen lawyers, and a scattering of dentists, morticians, politicians, and labor leaders. This community’s middle class contingent was augmented by a large number of small-scale proprietors residing in the community. Community surveys produced by Covello showed that, with remarkably few exceptions, among the hundreds of small stores in Italian Harlem, ownership of particular types of stores and businesses was linked to ethnicity, for example, clothing, hardware, and jewelry stores were owned by Jews and bars by Irish Americans. Italian Americans predominantly owned the baking, bedding, fish, flower, fruit and vegetable, grocery, music, and shoe stores, as well as garages and restaurants. They also owned practically all the funeral homes, coal and ice delivery businesses, tile and marble installing, and barber shops. Jews and Italians, in more or less equal numbers, owned the candy stores, drug stores, radio repair shops, and printing establishments. 17) The Catholic Church which had served the Irish and other European immigrant nationalities so well seemed unwilling to play that role for the Italians. Almost immediately after the Italians arrived in Harlem, clashes broke out between them and the Irish. The Catholic churches already established in the community reserved the “lower churches,” that is, the basements for Italian-language services. One elderly Italian resident, who was interviewed in the thirties recalled that when the Italians attended services in predominantly Irish parishes they were subjected to a barrage of insults and even beatings. Excluded from the organize church, in 1882 a group of Italian immigrants began celebrating the feast of the patron of its native village, Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Originally this event took place in the front yard of a residence at East 110th Street and First Avenue, but the following year, the group obtained rooms on the first floor of a house on East 113th Street, where an Italian priest celebrated East Harlem’s first Italian-language Mass. 18) The Italian craftsmen literally built Our Lady of Mount Carmel with their own hands after coming home from exhausting days of work; Italian junkmen and icemen lent their carts and horses to carry materials.

However, in 1884 when the work was completed, the Italians were sent into the lower church—that is, the basement—to worship. Despite the fact that over 90 percent of the baptisms in this period were of the offspring of the Italian immigrants, they remained there until 1919 when the first Italian priest, Gaspare Dalia, became the pastor. 19) The statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel was not moved to the church proper until 1923. 20) Italian Harlem’s festa to La Madonna de Monte Carmelo became the best attended festa in the entire United States. Its popularity was ensured when in 1903 Pope Leo XIII awarded the statue a set of golden crowns (one for the Madonna and one for the child Jesus) and declared the church a basilica, a status which in the entire United States is shared only with Our Lady of Perpetual Help in New Orleans. By the thirties, pilgrimages from as far away as California, Florida, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Canada swelled the number of participants to 500,000.

The procession wound its way though every block in Italian Harlem in a sense defining its borders and consecrating its ground. The traditional relationship between the Southern Italians and the Church persisted in other ways. In 1930, Our Lady of Mount Carmel reported that it had one thousand adult male members and three thousand female adult members.*23* In the forties, Covello conducted a survey of East Harlem high school boys that showed when compared with schoolboys from other predominantly Catholic ethnic groups the Italian American boys evidenced far less religious fervor. 21) The distant relationship of southern Italians and the organize Church was also reflected in the fact that the festa of Our Lady of Mount Carmel as well as the other feste were organized by congregations, that is, societies based on place of origin that the Church recognized as responsible for conducting the feste. Social service activities sponsored by the Catholic Church, which could have forged closer associations between the organized church and its adherents within the community remained limited.

Italian Harlem contained a galaxy of voluntary organizations founded, organized, financed, and otherwise operated by its residents. In 1935, no fewer than 110 mutual benefit societies existed in Italian Harlem, that is, one for approximately every 225 adult males. These organizations, which were composed of former residents from a locality in Italy, typically were named after the patron saint or the town of its members. They provided recreational and religious activities, death benefits, sometimes sickness and accident benefits, and aid in seeking work. Attendance of members at other members’ funerals was mandatory. Generally, each society had its own doctor and lawyer, who were also members. 22) These societies allowed their members to associate regularly with people who spoke their own dialect. Also, for a group that was defamed and devalued within the wider society, they gave their members the opportunity to achieve recognition and status by gaining a title or simply building a reputation within a community. 23) In the third generation the mutual aid societies based on Italian home towns were generally replaced by social and athletic clubs based on patterns of residence within the community itself or some other mutual affinity. All of these societies exclusively enrolled men. The major locations for informal socializing—coffee shops and barber shops—also excluded women. The Catholic churches sponsored women’s societies, but their memberships were quite limited.

Information on the development of Harlem is compiled from Osofsky, 71-149, and LPC, Washington Apartments Designation Report

That part of New York known as Harlem embraces the area of Manhattan north of 96th Street, and joins the narrow northern handle of Manhattan known as Washington Heights. The original village of Harlem was established in 1658 by Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant and named Nieuw Harlem after the Dutch city of Harlem. Throughout the Dutch, British and colonial periods, rich farms were located in the region’s flat, eastern portion, while some of New York’s most illustrious early families, such as the Delanceys, Bleekers, Rikers Beekmans, and Hamiltons maintained large estates in the high, western portion of the area.

Harlem suffered economic decline in the 1830’s when many of the farms, depleted from decades of cultivation, were abandoned and the great estates were sold at public auctions. The area became a refuge for those desiring cheap property and housing, including newly-arrived and destitute immigrants who gathered in scattered shantytowns. However, most of the scenic topography and rural character of Harlem was left untouched.

The advent of new and better forms of transportation, as well as the rapidly increasing population of New York following the Civil War brought about the transformation of Harlem into a middle and upper-middle class neighborhood. Although the New York and Harlem Railroad had operated from lower Manhattan to Harlem beginning in 1837, service was poor and unreliable and the trip was long. The impetus for new residential development in this area came with the arrival of three lines of elevated rail service which, by 1881, ran as far north as 129th Street, and by 1886 extended further north.

Beginning in the 1870’s, Harlem was the site of a massive wave of speculative development which resulted in the construction of numerous new single-family rowhouses, tenements, and luxury apartment houses, commercial concerns and religious, educational, and cultural institutions, such as the distinguished Harlem Opera House on West 125th Street, were established in Harlem to serve the expanding population. The western half of Harlem, though developed slightly later, became a fashionable and prosperous neighborhood. Luxury elevator apartment buildings with the most modern amenities were constructed, such as the Graham Court Apartments built in 1898-1901 on Seventh Avenue (now 1923-1937 Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard), as well as more modest types of multi-family housing. Those who relocated from downtown included recent immigrants from Great Britain and Germany. Anticipated transportation improvements in the late 1890’s, such as the proposed subway routes to west Harlem, ignited another wave of real estate speculation which led to highly inflated market values.

Between 1898 and 1904, when the Lenox Avenue subway opened at 145th Street, virtually all the vacant land in Harlem was built upon. This tremendous increase in residential construction led to overbuilding, the result being extensive vacancies and inflated rents as landlords sought to recover their investments. A general collapse of the real estate market hit Harlem in 1904-05, as loans were withheld and mortgages foreclosed, and landlords dropped rents drastically in an effort to attract tenants.

Taking advantage of the deflated market and the housing surplus, a black businessman named Philip Payton and his Afro-American Realty Company, founded in 1904, played a major role in the development of Harlem as an African-American community. In the aftermath of the real estate collapse, Payton acquired five-year leases on white-owned properties, managed them, and rented them to African-Americans at ten percent above the deflated market price.

Thus, New York’s black middle class – long denied access to “better” neighborhoods – began moving to Harlem. This real estate climate offered, for the first time, decent, attractive housing in large quantities to a segment of New York’s population which had never had such an opportunity. The major center of African-American New York in the late nineteenth century had been the section west of Herald and Times Squares, from the West 20’s to the 60’s comprising the overcrowded areas known as Hell’s Kitchen, the Tenderloin, and San Juan Hill. A dramatic increase in Harlem’s African-American community came when hundreds of families living in the Tenderloin were displaced during the construction of Pennsylvania Station in 1906-1910.

Harlem was considered an ideal place to live, with its broad tree-lined streets and new, up-to-date housing stock. Quoting an Urban League report of 1914, Gilbert Osofsky notes that Harlem was “a community in which Negroes as a whole are…better housed than in any other part of the country.” The author explains, “the creation of a black Harlem was one example of the general development of large, segregated Negro communities within many American cities in the years preceding and following World War I.” The migration to Harlem continued during the 1920’s as people came to New York in record numbers from the American South and the West Indies.

During the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920’s, Harlem became the urban cultural center of Black America, with its center around 135th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues. Rents in Harlem rose drastically after World War I. The deterioration of Harlem housing which began in the 1920’s can be attributed in large part to the high cost of living in the community and the increased demands on the neighborhood brought by the rising population. Many have blamed both white and black landlords for the distressing scenario in which rents continued to increase while maintenance and services were neglected. As with so many Harlem properties, 409 Edgecombe Avenue eventually experienced such a decline, but not before its heyday as the most prestigious address on Sugar Hill.

To learn more about the history, check out a great website about Harlem! columbia.edu/cu/iraas/harlem/index website

The highland area of West Harlem developed later and more gradually that the low-lying valley of Harlem because of limited transportation connections to the rest of the city. In the nineteenth century, the area was a popular destination for excursions out of town, especially for bicyclists, drivers of trotting horses, and patrons of Manhattan Field and the adjacent Polo Grounds (which opened in the late 1880’s). The first Polo Grounds, at 110th Street and Sixth Avenue, was open from 1883 until 1888. The second Polo Grounds at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue was used for baseball in 1889-90 until the grandstand at 157th Street and Eighth Avenue was ready for the 1891 season.

The Giants and Yankees shared the Polo Grounds until Yankee Stadium was built in the early 1920’s; the Giants remained at the Polo Grounds until the 1957 season, and then the team moved to San Francisco. When residential construction reached the area during Harlem’s real estate boom, the ridge of the heights (later known as Coogan’s Bluff) overlooking the Harlem River as a particularly appealing location for stylish apartment buildings which initially attracted upper-middle class tenants of German, Jewish, and Irish background. Sometimes identified as part of Washington Heights, the neighborhood extending from Edgecombe Avenue to Amsterdam Avenue, and from 145th Street to 155th Street, came to be known as “Sugar Hill” when affluent African-Americans began moving there in the late 1920’s.

By 1930, the population of this entire area south of 155th Street was over fifty percent Black, with certain areas having a population that was between seventy-five and eighty five percent Black. The African-American elite in Harlem gravitated to certain residential enclaves ; some lived in the King Model Houses, later nicknamed Striver’s Row (which was open to Black tenants in 1919), while others settled in attractive apartment buildings such as Graham Court and the Dunbar Apartments (1926-28), the first major non-profit co-operative apartment complex built specifically for African- Americans. Beginning in the late 1920’s, Harlem’s elite migrated to the “class houses” of Sugar Hill, notably Nos. 409 and 555 Edgecombe Avenue. In 1946, Ebony magazine gave one account of the derivation of the name “Sugar Hill,” explaining that some ‘shanty’ Irish looked across 130th Street to the brick-topped ledge where wealthy, “lace curtain” Irish lived years ago, [and] dubbed it Sugar Hill. Years later Negroes nudged the title 20 blocks uptown, where Negroes with ‘sugar’ settled.

” The appellation came to represent all that was “sweet and expensive,” signifying that one had arrived, economically and socially, at the summit of New York’s African-American culture. The summit was geographic as cultural; people on the “Hill” looked down upon the “valley” of central Harlem where the poorer residents of Harlem lived, many in overcrowded tenements and cramped, converted rowhouses. While the valley was truly the heart of Harlem, Sugar Hill was celebrated for its exclusivity and status. … On Sugar Hill… Harlem’s would be ‘sassiety’ does to town. ‘Midst paneled walls, parquet floors, electric refrigeration, colored tile baths, luxurious lobbies, elevators and doormen resplendent in uniforms, they cavort and disport themselves in what is called the best ofay manner. There were racketeers and gamblers who called the Hill home, living side by side with judges, scholars, and writers. In the 1940’s Ebony reported that Sugar Hill incomes ranged from $3,000 to $7,000 per annum, most being within the upper half of wages in the United States, yet also estimated that one-quarter of Hill dwellers had to take in boarders and make other sacrifices in order to meet expenses. Rents in Harlem were generally high, but in Sugar Hill they were even higher. ..As one observer commented, “…Harlem prices leave little for luxurious living. The main difference between those on Sugar Hill and those in the slums is the knowledge of where their next meal is coming from and, at night, a spaciousness which helps erase the memory of Jim Crow day.” The Kennedy Center created a wonderful website where one can hear historic audio, see text and learn more about life during Harlem's heyday.