East Harlem
East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem, or El Barrio, is a neighborhood of Upper Manhattan in New York City, north of the Upper East Side and bounded by 96th Street to the south, Fifth Avenue to the west, and the East and Harlem Rivers to the east and north. Despite its name, it is generally not considered to be a part of Harlem proper, but it is one of the neighborhoods included in Greater Harlem.
The neighborhood has one of the largest Hispanic communities in New York City, mostly Puerto Ricans, as well as Dominicans, Cubans, and Mexicans. The community is notable for its contributions to Latin freestyle and salsa music. East Harlem also includes the remnants of a once predominant Italian community, or Italian Harlem. The Chinese population has increased dramatically in East Harlem since 2000.
East Harlem has historically suffered from many social issues, such as a high crime rate, the highest jobless rate in New York City, teenage pregnancy, AIDS, drug abuse, homelessness, and an asthma rate five times the national average. It has the second-highest concentration of public housing in the United States, behind Brownsville, Brooklyn. East Harlem is undergoing some gentrification, and in 2016 the city considered rezoning the area.
East Harlem is part of Manhattan Community District 11, and its primary ZIP Codes are 10029 and 10035. It is patrolled by the 23rd and 25th Precincts of the New York City Police Department.
History
Early history
The area that became East Harlem was rural for most of the 19th century, but residential settlements northeast of Third Avenue and East 110th Street had developed by the 1860s. The construction of the elevated transit line to Harlem in 1879 and 1880, and the building of the Lexington Avenue subway in 1919, urbanized the area, precipitating the construction of apartment buildings and brownstones. The extension of cable cars up Lexington Avenue into East Harlem was stymied by the incline created by Duffy's Hill at 103rd Street, one of the steepest grades in Manhattan. East Harlem was first populated by poor German, Irish, Scandinavian, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, with the Jewish population standing at 90,000 around 1917. In the 1870s, Italian immigrants joined the mix after a contractor building trolley tracks on First Avenue imported Italian laborers as strikebreakers. The workers' shantytown along the East River at 106th Street was the beginning of an Italian neighborhood, with 4,000 having arrived by the mid-1880s. As more immigrants arrived, it expanded north to East 115th Street and west to Third Avenue.East Harlem consisted of pockets of ethnically sorted settlements – Italian, German, Irish, and Jewish – which were beginning to press up against each other, with the spaces still between them occupied by "gasworks, stockyards and tar and garbage dumps". In 1895, the Union Settlement Association, one of the oldest settlement houses in New York City, began providing services in the area, offering the immigrant and low-income residents a range of community-based programs, including boys and girls clubs, a sewing school and adult education classes.
Italian Harlem
and Sicilians, with a moderate number of Northern Italians, soon predominated, especially in the area east of Lexington Avenue between 96th and 116th Streets and east of Madison Avenue between 116th and 125th Streets, with each street featuring people from different regions of Italy. The neighborhood became known as "Italian Harlem", the Italian American hub of Manhattan; it was the first part of Manhattan to be referred to as "Little Italy". The first Italians arrived in East Harlem in 1878, from Polla in the province of Salerno, and settled in the vicinity of 115th Street.There were many crime syndicates in Italian Harlem, from the early Black Hand to the bigger and more organized Italian gangs that formed the Italian-American Mafia. It was the founding location of the Genovese crime family, one of the Five Families that dominated organized crime in New York City. This includes the current 116th Street Crew of the Genovese family. During the 1970s, Italian East Harlem was also home to the Italian-American drug gang and murder-for-hire crew known as the East Harlem Purple Gang.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Italian Harlem was represented in Congress by future Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia. After becoming mayor, La Guardia helped plan a large expansion of Thomas Jefferson Park at First Avenue, between 111th and 114th Streets, in the mid-1930s. The neighborhood was represented, in the 1940s, by Italian-American civil rights lawyer, socialist, and activist Vito Marcantonio. The Italian neighborhood approached its peak in the 1930s, with more than 110,000 Italian-Americans living in its crowded, run-down apartment buildings. The 1930 census showed that 81 percent of the population of Italian Harlem consisted of first- or second-generation Italian Americans, somewhat less than the concentration of Italian Americans in the Lower East Side's Little Italy with 88 percent; Italian Harlem's total population, however, was three times that of Little Italy.
The character of the Italian-American community changed when, after the Second World War, the unhealthy tenements started to be demolished and replaced with better housing, forcing families to relocate. Despite this, Italian Harlem endured as a large and conspicuous community through the 1980s and 1990s, and even later, the Italian-American community in East Harlem remained strong in certain areas, particularly around Pleasant Avenue.
Today, the few remaining Italian-American residents in Harlem are predominantly older, clustered around Pleasant Avenue and the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, mainly from 114th to 118th Streets and the surrounding area. According to the 2000 Census, there were only 1,130 Italian-Americans still living in this area.
However, vestiges of the old Italian neighborhood remain. The annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the "Dancing of the Giglio", the first Italian feast in New York City, is still celebrated there every year on the second weekend of August by the Giglio Society of East Harlem and is centered around Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Italian retail establishments still exist in Italian Harlem, such as Rao's restaurant, which started in 1896, and the original Patsy's Pizzeria, which opened in 1933. Another major Italian retail business in the neighborhood, a barbershop opened by Claudio Caponigro on 116th Street in the mid-1950s, was threatened with closure by a rent increase in May 2011 but ultimately closed only in 2019 when Mr. Caponigro retired.
Spanish Harlem
and Latin American migration after the First World War established an enclave at the western portion of East Harlem – around 110th Street and Lexington Avenue – which became known as "Spanish Harlem". The area slowly grew to encompass all of East Harlem, including Italian Harlem, as Italians moved out – to the Bronx, Brooklyn, Long Island, upstate New York and New Jersey – and Nuyoricans moved in during another wave of immigration in the 1940s and 1950s.The newly dominant Puerto Rican population, which reached 63,000 in 1950, continued to define the neighborhood according to its needs, establishing bodegas and botánicas as it expanded; by the 1930s there was already an enclosed street market underneath the Park Avenue railroad viaduct between 111th and 116th Streets, called "La Marqueta". Catholic and evangelistic Protestant churches appeared in storefronts. Although "Spanish Harlem" had been in use since at least the 1930s to describe the Latino enclave – along with "Italian Harlem" and "Negro Harlem" – the name began to be used to describe the entire East Harlem neighborhood by the 1950s. Later, the name "El Barrio" began to be used, especially by residents of the area.
Decline
In the 1950s and 1960s, large sections of East Harlem were leveled for urban renewal projects, and the neighborhood was one of the hardest hit areas in the 1960s and 1970s as New York City struggled with deficits, race riots, urban flight, gang warfare, drug abuse, crime and poverty. Tenements were crowded, poorly maintained, and frequent targets for arson. In 1969 and 1970, a regional chapter of the Young Lords which were reorganized from a neighborhood street gang in Chicago by Jose Jimenez, ran several programs including a Free Breakfast for Children and a Free Health Clinic to help Latino and poor families. The Young Lords came together with the Black Panthers and called for Puerto Rican independence and neighborhood empowerment.Recent history
By the beginning of the 21st century, East Harlem was a racially diverse neighborhood, with about a third of the population being Puerto Rican. As it has been throughout its history, it is predominantly a working-class neighborhood.Until 2006, property values in East Harlem climbed along with those in the rest of New York City, leading to gentrification and changes to area demographics.
On March 12, 2014, at 9:00 EDT, a large explosion and fire at 1644–1646 Park Avenue killed eight people and injured more than 70.
The New York Post listed one part of the neighborhood – the block of Lexington Avenue between East 123rd and 124th Streets – as one of "the most dangerous blocks in the city" because police crime statistics for 2015 showed that 19 assaults had taken place there, more than for any other city block. The Post also reported that there were, according to the Harlem Neighborhood Block Association, "22 drug-treatment programs, four homeless-services providers and four transitional-living facilities" in East Harlem.
East Harlem has begun to feel the effects of gentrification. In February 2016, an article in The New York Times about "New York's Next Hot Neighborhoods" featured East Harlem as one of four such areas. A real-estate broker described it as "one of the few remaining areas in New York City where you can secure a good deal". The article mentioned new luxury developments, access to transportation, the opening of new retail stores, bars and restaurants, and national-brand stores beginning to appear on the outskirts of the neighborhood. Primarily, though, it was the cost of housing in comparison to the rest of Manhattan, which the article noted as the major factor. Beginning in 2016, the New York City government was seeking to rezone East Harlem "to facilitate new residential, commercial, community facility, and manufacturing development". The residents of the neighborhood generated a suggested zoning plan, the "East Harlem Neighborhood Plan", which was offered to the city in February 2017, but in August 2017 residents and the Manhattan Borough President, Gale Brewer, complained that the city had ignored their plan almost entirely.
In 2019, the oldest portion of the neighborhood, the blocks of East 111th through 120th Streets between Park and Pleasant Avenues, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the East Harlem Historic District.