Harlem

Harlem, residential and business district, New York, United States. Harlem occupies much of the northern part of the borough of Manhattan. Black residents constitute the largest population group, with Hispanics (especially Puerto Ricans) the second-largest. The principal business thoroughfare, 125th Street, runs east to west across the district.

The village of Nieuw Haarlem (named after Haarlem in the Netherlands) was established in 1658 by the Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant. The community grew as a suburb of New York from about 1830 and by the 1880s was a fashionable residential area. From about 1900 through World War I it developed as a black district. By the 1920s it had become the centre of a black literary and intellectual movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. By the end of World War II housing conditions had deteriorated; today the community contains extensive slum areas as well as newer housing developments, a large state office building, and blocks of renovated brownstone buildings.