While we are all familiar with the Harlem Hospital’s location at Malcolm X Blvd. and 135th. Street, the original Harlem Hospital was located at 120th Street and the East River in 1887 – currently the location of Public School 202. Initially, the hospital served as a holding area for patients to be transferred to Randalls and Wards Islands and Bellevue Hospital. 

By 1903, construction had begun on a new Harlem Hospital located on the east side of Lenox Avenue between 136th and 137th streets in central Harlem. 

The new building was required because of the rapid increase in the area’s population with the expansion of the subway under Lenox Ave.

In 1907 the new Harlem Hospital opened under the jurisdiction of Bellevue and Allied Hospitals, at that time it was the central authority for all municipal hospitals in New York.

The new building was both impressive and imposing but failed in the coming decades to fully acknowledge the racial change in the community around the hospital. It was particularly galling that in this epicenter of Black culture, learning, life, and politics, this public hospital (funded in part by the Black residents surrounding it) initially failed to employ Black doctors, nurses, and administrators. Menial jobs were the only positions open to the Black community.

In 1919, Dr. Louis T. Wright was not only the first African-American physician on staff at Harlem Hospital Center, but the first in any city hospital.  Dr. Wright originated the intradermal method for smallpox vaccination, and was the first physician to experiment with antibiotics Aureomycin and Terramycin. 

Harlem Hospital Center has also been in the forefront of training African American Nurses.  The Harlem Hospital School of Nursing School was opened in January 1923, because of the refusal of the City Hospitals to accept Black Nurses. The school continued to train nurses until its closing in June 1977.  Dr. John Cordice and Dr. Aubre Maynard, master heart surgeons, used the thoracic surgical procedure developed by Dr. Maynard, to save Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life in 1958, when the civil rights activist suffered a stab wound to the chest while visiting Harlem. 

Harlem Hospital is currently a 272-bed, public teaching hospital affiliated with Columbia University