Posted on 08/06/2012 12:15:23 PM PDT by jazusamo
Books about the history of Harlem have long fascinated me — my favorite being "When Harlem Was in Vogue" by David Levering Lewis. However, a more recent book, titled simply "Harlem" by Jonathan Gill, presents a more comprehensive history — going all the way back to the time when the Dutch were the first settlers of New York, and named that area for the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands.
Most of us today think of Harlem as a black community, but it was not that for most of its 400-year history. John James Audubon, famed for his studies of birds, was among the many people who at various times organized efforts to keep blacks from moving into Harlem — efforts that, in the long run, met with what might be called very limited success.
Among the many well-known people who were not black who were born in Harlem were Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, Arthur Miller and Bennett Cerf.
Like other communities, Harlem held many very different kinds of people at the same time, both before and after it became predominantly black.
There was an Italian community in East Harlem, but it was not just an undifferentiated Italian community. People from Genoa lived clustered together, as did people from Naples, Sicily and other parts of Italy. Jews from Germany lived separately from Jews who originated in Eastern Europe, who in turn lived in separate enclaves of people from different parts of Eastern Europe.
Harlem had the highest crime rate in New York before blacks moved there, and a photograph in this book, taken a hundred years ago, showed the worst housing conditions I have ever seen in Harlem. In some of the poorer Italian neighborhoods in East Harlem, people went barefoot in the summer and lived on one meal a...
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
The author is most articulate. Next to him, “O” looks even MORE stupid!!
When my German heritage family left their Illinois farms for south Chicago around 1900, that part of the city was overwhelmingly Irish.
Even though the area was middle class and my family prospered in the apartment business, my dad and my uncle both carried blackjacks to protect their bikes and their newspaper earnings during the Depression.
By the 1960’s, the area had become the most dangerous public housing slum in America.
now I can play Harlem Nocturne with a whole new attitude.
When the subway opened and made Harlem ccessible for everyone, real estate developers rushed to build apartment houses. They overbuilt and couldn’t get rid of them. Around that same time, keeping blacks out became less of a priority.
Dr. Sowell is just a wonderful man all around, as is his “right hand lady” or secretary, Ms. Karlak. G. Gordon Liddy is known to call him the “Smartest Man in America,” but he’s more than that. Having read just about everything he’s published over the last 5 years or so, I honestly believe he’s a national treasure.
If he looked any stupider, he would be beyond the looking glass, and into a brave new world of terminal idiocy.
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