The Harlem Neighborhood Block Association

Neighbors united to improve the quality of life in Harlem

Category: History

History focused posts that look at Harlem and/or East Harlem’s past.

HARLEM WEEK 2020

Posted on by Harlem Shill

FROM SUNDAY, AUGUST 16 TO SUNDAY, AUGUST 23

What originally started as a one-day tribute to one of the most culturally rich neighborhoods in the world has now become a month-long celebration enjoying its 46th year. Recognizing this year, 2020 is unlike we have ever seen HARLEM WEEK this year will take place from August 16 – 23 and it will take place virtually. For many years people have planned their vacations around the dates HARLEM WEEK to travel to Harlem to participate in our festival. This year HARLEM WEEK goes to the world as a virtual event sharing the culture, history, resilience and strength of Harlem.

Upcoming Events

AUG165:00 AM – 11:59 PMSupport Harlem Now Virtual Harlem 5K Run Honoring Percy 100 and Charles Rangel 90

The traditional Harlem 5k Run will this year be a virtual event taking place throughout HARLEM WEEK 2020!AUG165:01 AM – 11:59 PMVirtual Exhibitor Vendor Village

Shop, get information, win prizes, get free gifts when you visit the HARLEM WEEK Virtual Exhibitor Vendor village. Shop with local businesses from around the world and visit with reps from Fortune 500 corporations. The HARLEM WEEK Virtual Exhibitor Vendor village has something for everyoneAUG166:00 AM – 11:59 AMHARLEM WEEK/Imagenation Film Festival

Enjoy Films that speak to our HARLEM WEEK Theme of “Movement of The People”, celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Negro Baseball League and the 100th Anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance.AUG1610:00 AM – 11:00 AMChildren’s Corner

Parents, have your kids join us each morning of HARLEM WEEK in the Children’s Corner. Our daily space just for kids up to age 12. Youngsters can enjoy book reading, performances, cooking classes (done with adult supervision) and more.AUG1611:00 AM – 12:00 PMDance Workshop Presented by NJPAC

Every day during HARLEM WEEK take time to dance, move and groove with us and our partners at New Jersey Performing Arts Center with special guest instructors .AUG163:00 PM – 7:00 PMA Great Day In Harlem

Join us online and celebrate A Great Day In Harlem, featuring performances and appearances from local, national and international performing artists including Hezekiah Walker, Erica Campbell, Dance Theater of Harlem, The Harlem Music Festival All Star Band led by Ray Chew and much more!AUG167:00 PM – 7:10 PMA Taste Of Harlem

Harlem has some of the worlds most iconic restaurants and we invite you to experience them virtually throughout HARLEM WEEK 2020. See how some of the mouth watering dishes and delicious beverages are made, join us and enjoy “A Taste of Harlem.”AUG175:00 AM – 11:59 PMSupport Harlem Now Virtual Harlem 5K Run Honoring Percy100 and Charles Rangel 90

The traditional Harlem 5k Run will this year be a virtual event taking place throughout HARLEM WEEK 2020!AUG175:01 AM – 11:59 PMVirtual Exhibitor Vendor Village

Shop, get information, win prizes, get free gifts when you visit the HARLEM WEEK Virtual Exhibitor Vendor village. Shop with local businesses from around the world and visit with reps from Fortune 500 corporations. The HARLEM WEEK Virtual Exhibitor Vendor village has something for everyoneAUG176:00 AM – 11:59 AMHARLEM WEEK/Imagenation Film Festival

Enjoy Films that speak to our HARLEM WEEK Theme of “Movement of The People”, celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Negro Baseball League and the 100th Anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance.SEE FULL CALENDAR

Census, Racial Types, and Time

Posted on by Join HNBA

The Pew Trust has a fascinating visualization of the complicated way in which Americans (and the American census in particular) classified people into racial categories:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/25/the-changing-categories-the-u-s-has-used-to-measure-race/

The census years are aligned across the top, and the inclusion and evolution of categories is reflected in the horizontal colored bands.  Note that citizens could only choose their own racial categories in 1960. Before this, census enumerators would choose your race.

Skyrise for Harlem

Posted on by Harlem Shill

It looks like a collection of nuclear cooling towers, suddenly plopped into Harlem, but June Jordan’s plan for a redevelopment of Harlem in the early 1960s was for a collection of conical high rises:

Esquire Magazine had the (above layout) which was recently featured in an article in The New Yorker.

The conical towers would have concentrated a huge number of residents in towers that would have dwarfed even the larger Harlem and East Harlem projects that you can see in the image (above).

June Jordan (portrait)

June Jordan (the architect pictured above), sought to throw:

herself into what she called “a collaborative architectural redesign of Harlem,” in which she joined forces with the architect R. Buckminster Fuller, champion of the geodesic dome. Jordan and Fuller called their collaboration “Skyrise for Harlem”: a plan for public housing that was attuned to the well-being of two hundred and fifty thousand of the neighborhood’s residents, most of them Black. The project may have seemed a left turn for Jordan, who came to prominence through her essays and poetry. But she had always conceived of her work as falling under the umbrella of environmental design—“that is,” she explained, “in general, an effort to contribute to the positive changing of the world.”

While C. L. Davis II, from Buffalo, NY questions whether or not June Jordan can be classified as an architect in Race and Architecture: https://raceandarchitecture.com/2013/11/26/writing-and-building-black-utopianism-representing-the-architextural-musings-of-june-jordans-his-own-where-1971/, her bold proposal clearly situated her work in the Le Corbusier > Robert Moses > Buckminster Fuller school of slum clearance > towers in the park, school:

Note the scale of the brownstones and tenaments below one of the towers, sectionally represented.

Jordan believed that the grid pattern was responsible for high crime rates, and that The Commissioners’ Plan was “pathological crucification.” [Fish, C. (2007). Place, Emotion, and Environmental Justice in Harlem: June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s 1965 “Architextual” Collaboration. Discourse].

Fuller and Jordan’s “Skyrise” never made it off the pages of Esquire. The ARCH plan for the East Harlem Triangle was never adopted, though Goldstein argues that it did lead the way for residents to build “a social service center and hundreds of affordable housing units in the following years.” Without any radical reconstruction, most of Harlem foundered, the area’s real estate prices plummeting in the 1970s as in so many other economically disadvantaged neighborhoods across the five boroughs. In the 1980s, gentrification tentatively arrived in Harlem, mostly by way of middle-class black residents who, as Monique M. Taylor writes in “Can You Go Home Again? Black Gentrification and the Dilemma of Difference,” were looking for “real estate bargains” while also being “strongly motivated by a desire to participate in the rituals that define daily life in this (in)famous and historically black community.

https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/10/16868494/harlem-history-buckminster-fuller-development-rezoning

For more, see:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/when-june-jordan-and-buckminster-fuller-tried-to-redesign-harlem

https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/10/16868494/harlem-history-buckminster-fuller-development-rezoning

Representing the “Architextural” Musings of June Jordan

Behind The Collier Brother’s Home

Posted on by Join HNBA

You may recognize this vacant lot, church, and new rental building on W. 127, just behind the Collier Brother’s Park:

The church ‘grew’. The two brownstones to the right were knocked down and the decades-old vacant lot is where the new rental is located. The Victorian framed home to the left in the photo below is where the vacant space next to the church is now:

to see more:

https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/d2ab0ad0-c546-012f-6df9-58d385a7bc34#/?uuid=510d47dd-19aa-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Mount Morris Park

Posted on by Join HNBA

Here are 3 great photos of Marcus Garvey Park (formerly Mount Morris Park) from Columbia University’s collection of images.

Below is a postcard from 1905 on the east side of the park, looking south towards where the basketball courts are today:

Mount Morris Park was renamed in honor of Marcus Garvey in 1973, the park was built largely as a green space for Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall cronies, many of whom lived uptown by the 1860s.

Below is a postcard sent in 1916 after an ocean voyage:

The land for the park had been purchased by the city in 1839, but landscaping was long delayed. Its design was eventually supervised by Ignaz A. Pilat, who would later serve as an able associate of Frederick Law Olmsted during the creation of Central Park.

This final image is of the bandstand, and was sent in 1907:

To see the collection:

https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/durst/cul:jh9w0vt4h9

High Times and Hot Times in Homo Harlem, 1920-1990

Posted on by Join HNBA

Historian Michael Henry Adams leads a virtual tour of Lesbian and Gay life in the historic African American cultural capital, where we’ll meet personalities living and lost and see landmarks long gone and still standing that illuminate the a fabled part of New York. Past and Present LGBTQ+ Harlemites have played a leading role in defining Harlem’s artistic significance.

To join the virtual tour: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/high-times-and-hot-times-in-homo-harlem-1920-1990-tickets-114454941812?aff=ebdssbonlinesearch

For a short 11 minute look at one of Harlem’s great gay performers – Gladys Bentley – see:

Steamship Fares

Posted on by Join HNBA

To travel (before the age of rail and subways) to lower Manhattan (and Astoria), the Sylvian Steamship company ran for 8 cents (10 cents if purchased on board):

Details of the fare:

And, the complete card here:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1800s-Timetable-Card-NYC-East-River-Sylvan-steamship-steamers-Harlem-Peck-Slip-/333161431240

400 Miles to Freedom

Posted on by Join HNBA

If you’ve ever been curious about internal race relations within the Jewish community (in Israel and here in in the US), 400 Miles to Freedom is a great introduction. I’m including it here because of some wonderful shots of our neighborhood in the film:

400 Miles to Freedom (2012)

In 1984, the Beta Israel, a secluded 2,500-year-old community of observant Jews in the northern Ethiopian mountains, fled a dictatorship and began a secret and dangerous journey of escape. Co-director Avishai Mekonen, then a 10-year-old boy, was among them. 400 MILES TO FREEDOM follows his story as he breaks the 20 year silence around the brutal kidnapping he endured as a child in Sudan during his community’s exodus out of Africa, and in so doing explores issues of immigration and racial diversity in Judaism.

Harlem River Drive

Posted on by Join HNBA

One of my favorite songs of all time, Harlem River Drive, can be found on Soundcloud as a repeatedly covered and remixed tune:

https://soundcloud.com/teza-cappuccino/harlem-river-drive-teza-cappuccino-edit

The Library of Congress has a great short of horse racing on Harlem River Drive. Note the Aquaduct Bridge with its full complement of masonry arches before the center arches were replaced with a steel span to permit boat traffic:

Note the people on the Aqueduct Bridge, taking the parade of wealthy families and their horses.

To see the full 1903 film:

https://www.loc.gov/item/00694402/