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The community of Harlem is in Manhattan, New York. The boundaries of Harlem have changed over the years. Currently, Harlem is from the East River to the Hudson River between 155th Street - where it meets Washington Heights. Central Harlem begins at the northern end of Central Park at 110th Street; Spanish Harlem extends east Harlem's boundaries south to 96th Street... In the west it begins north of Morningside Heights, which gives an irregular border west of Morningside Avenue.

Harlem was originally established in 1658 by Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant. It was named Nieuw Harlem after the Dutch city of Harlem. In the 1830’s, many of Harlem’s farms were sold at public auctions due to the fact that they were depleted from decades of cultivation and abandoned. Following the Civil War, new and better forms of transportation in addition to the rapidly increasing population of New York brought about the transformation of Harlem into a middle and upper-class neighborhood. Harlem greatly developed during the1880's, when elevated railroads made the area accessible to downtown New Yorkers.

Central Harlem became a Black neighborhood between 1900 and 1920 when its real estate market collapsed, leaving scores of new apartment buildings empty. New York's black middle class – long denied access to "better" neighborhoods -- began moving to Harlem. In addition, to find tenants, landlords opened up the area to African Americans who were leaving the southern states and the West Indies. Philip Payton (a black businessman) took advantage of the deflated market and his Afro-American Realty Company in 1904. A dramatic increase in Harlem's African-American community arrived when hundreds of families living in the Tenderloin were displaced during the construction of Pennsylvania Station in 1906-10. By 1914, Harlem's population reached 50,000, and between 1920 and 1930, the number quadrupled. Harlem became the urban cultural center of black America, with its center around 135th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues.

During the 1920's, Harlem became a mecca for Black writers, intellectuals, and artist, who launched the artistic and literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Notable names included writer Langston Hughes, painter Aaron Douglas, and sculptor Augusta Savage. This also was the time when Harlem became the center of the city's nightlife. Legendary musicians such as, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Eubie Blake, and Louis Armstrong lived and worked in Harlem and performed at nightspots such as the Savoy Ballroom, the Cotton Club, and the Apollo Theater.

The large supply of cheap housing began a pattern of dispersal of ethnic groups that would characterize the history of East Harlem from beginning to the present. Due to the fact that East Harlem was an improvement over the Lower East Side, many new immigrant groups moved uptown. At which time, previous settlers went elsewhere. Each new group was met with hostility and each in turn exhibited hostility toward the new ethnic group that succeeded it. Italians settled in the area east of Third Avenue to the River, closely followed by Eastern Europeans from the 1880s through the 1910s. The newcomers settled down and flourished. In the 1930s, the Italian community in "Harlem" was the largest in the country.

In 1929, the Great Depression hit Harlem hard. Fifty percent of the city's African Americans became unemployed. 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 (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 1920s). The period also saw the rise of leaders such as Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, and civil rights activist and politician Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

During the 1930’s and into the 40’s, as Puerto Ricans came from the Caribbean and African Americans migrated from the South into East Harlem, they were met with resistance from the existing ethnic groups. As a result, these groups moved to other parts of New York and the population boom mixed with the economic dis-investment had a disastrous effect on the community. The conditions made the city take notice. However, their solution of replacing the tenement buildings with public housing projects did not help the residents. Instead they made the situation worse. These projects required the city to destroy the tenements and brownstones ruining the vibrant neighborhoods that Latinos and African Americans had come to know.

Due to the social problems, in the 1960’s Harlem’s population declined. Many Harlemnites relocated to other neighborhoods. In the 1970's, Harlem’s housing stock deteriorated as landlords abandoned their properties. A massive program of redevelopment began in the 1980’s. Harlem soon became a tourist attracting as travelers added it to their sightseeing list.

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