Lewis writes in ‘‘When Harlem Was
in Vogue,’’ by 1910, with the onset of
World War I, hundreds of thousands
of Blacks poured out of the South
and into Northern cities, in search of
higher wages. Soon, an overwhelm-
ing majority of Black New Yorkers
had been born outside the city.
Harlem was already prepared
to welcome the infl ux. Black New
Yorkers had been pushing north
out of Midtown since the 1890s,
and by 1910 large African Ameri-
can churches purchased or built
new buildings for their congrega-
tions. The congregants followed: In
1911, St. Philip’s Episcopal Church
purchased a block of apartment
buildings on 135th Street. The cab-
arets and jazz clubs in Midtown that
helped pioneer America’s obses-
sion with Black music weren’t far
behind. Buoyed by economic gains
made during World War I, some
Black New Yorkers found the secu-
rity that had eluded them down-
town. In a surreal 1925 short story
by Rudolph Fisher, ‘‘City of Refuge,’’
the story’s protagonist, a Southernturned into apartments for multiple
families rather than a single renter.
Areas like Five Points were multira-
cial ghettos where, at various points
in history, Irish, German, Chinese
and African American migrants
lived. By 1920, more than two mil-
lion people living in New York were
immigrants, many of them of east-
ern and southern European origin.
In the later decades of the 19th cen-
tury, overcrowding in Lower Man-
hattan and Midtown prompted the
development of neighborhoods like
Harlem, where real estate develop-
ers and reformers helped construct
cheap apartment buildings for Euro-
pean immigrants.
The history of arrival is not just
a story of development and coex-
istence, though; it is also a story
of violent competition for control.
Persistent race riots plagued Lower
Manhattan, with Blacks often
becoming targets of the white work-
ing class and losing in the contest
for living space. Riots in 1834, 1863
and 1900 encouraged Black migra-
tion farther north. As David Leveringmigrant fresh off the subway, expe-
riences Harlem as a utopia where
his rights are truly inalienable,
everyone has money and a Black
traffi c cop can lord his authority
over a white driver. The story is a
delirious representation of the rel-
ative freedom Southern migrants
encountered in Harlem. What was
previously an enclave for European
immigrants had transformed into a
Black mecca by the 1920s.
Harlem’s reputation as a neigh-
borhood with strong cultural and
social infrastructure put it at Black
culture’s vanguard. Figures like the
scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, the sociol-
ogist Charles S. Johnson and the
philosopher Alain Locke envisioned
culture as the ideal way to assault
anti-Black racism. Harlem was their
staging ground. These members
of the Black intellectual elite, with
the support of wealthy patrons
both white and Black, engineered
the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson
recruited talented artists, luring
writers and artists like the Kansas
City-based painter Aaron Douglasin reality, arrival here has always
been bound up with questions
of power. Who gets to be where,
when — and why? The answers are
decided ad hoc, by what the writer
Lucy Sante has called Manhattan’s
‘‘great machinery of movement.’’
And the ever-growing need for
housing, above all, has served as
that machine’s engine. Upwardly
mobile residents pushed their way
north as newer immigrants and
the poor settled in the abandoned
neighborhoods. All parties acted
on the faith that there would always
be more space to settle, exploit and
eventually abandon to newcomers.
For example, as Irish immigrants
fl eeing religious confl ict and pover-
ty in the early 19th century fl owed
into Manhattan — between the early
1820s and 1830s the United States
experienced a sixfold increase in
Irish immigrants, with many of
them settling in New York — real
estate barons like John Jacob Astor
saw an opportunity. Houses could
be subdivided into overcrowded
tenement buildings, their fl oors
↑Harlem in the early 1940s. ↑Nightclub, Harlem, 1930s.