The centre of Black American culture for a century, with the best row-house architecture in Manhattan and a Sunday gospel tradition that is not a tourist attraction, whatever the coach tours think.
Nieuw Haarlem
The Dutch founded it as a farming village in 1658 and named it after Haarlem in the Netherlands. It stayed rural until the elevated railways arrived in the 1880s, which triggered a speculative building boom of high-quality row houses and apartment blocks — and then a crash, which left them empty.
A Black real estate agent, Philip Payton Jr., filled them with Black tenants who were being excluded and overcharged everywhere else in the city. Between about 1905 and 1930 Harlem became the largest Black community in the United States and the destination of the Great Migration north.
The Renaissance
The 1920s and 30s produced Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Countee Cullen, Aaron Douglas and Romare Bearden — a concentration of writing, music and art that is still the reference point for Black American culture. The Cotton Club, notoriously, employed Black performers for white-only audiences. The Savoy Ballroom, which did not, is where Lindy Hop was invented.
What to see
The Apollo Theater on 125th, for Amateur Night on Wednesdays.
The Studio Museum in Harlem, on 125th, focused on artists of African descent, in a new building.
The Schomburg Center on Malcolm X Boulevard, a research library of the Black diaspora and part of the New York Public Library. Free, and its exhibitions are excellent. Langston Hughes’s ashes are under the floor of the lobby.
Strivers’ Row — West 138th and 139th between Adam Clayton Powell and Frederick Douglass Boulevards — is a set of 1891 row houses by three architects including Stanford White, and the finest domestic architecture in Manhattan north of the Village. The rear service alleys still have signs reading “Private Road, Walk Your Horses.”
Marcus Garvey Park and Mount Morris Park Historic District for the brownstones.
Sugar Hill in the 140s and 150s, where Duke Ellington and Thurgood Marshall lived. The Morris-Jumel Mansion at 160th is the oldest house in Manhattan, 1765, and Washington used it as a headquarters.
Eating
Sylvia’s on Lenox since 1962, the best known. Amy Ruth’s for chicken and waffles. Melba’s on Frederick Douglass. Red Rooster for a more modern take. Charles’ Country Pan Fried Chicken for the real thing.
Frederick Douglass Boulevard in the 110s and 120s has the newer wave of restaurants and bars.
More Neighborhoods
Midtown
Where the skyscrapers, the theatres and most of the hotels are. Nobody who lives in New York would choose to live here, and almost every visitor should stay here once.
Lower Manhattan
The oldest part of the city, where the streets predate the grid and bend around vanished shorelines. Offices by day, increasingly residential by night.
Greenwich Village
Low brick townhouses on streets that ignore the grid, because the Village was a separate settlement before the grid arrived and refused to be redrawn.