East Harlem
Based on Wikipedia: East Harlem
The Neighborhood That Ate Itself
In 1896, a small restaurant opened on the corner of 114th Street and Pleasant Avenue in Upper Manhattan. It had ten tables. Today, more than a century later, Rao's still has those same ten tables, and getting a reservation is nearly impossible—the regulars have essentially inherited their seats like family heirlooms. This tiny Italian-American restaurant sits like a time capsule in a neighborhood that has reinvented itself so thoroughly, so repeatedly, that its current identity bears almost no resemblance to what it was when that restaurant first fired up its ovens.
East Harlem is a study in urban metamorphosis.
The neighborhood occupies a roughly rectangular patch of Upper Manhattan, bounded by 96th Street to the south, Fifth Avenue to the west, and the East and Harlem Rivers wrapping around its eastern and northern edges. Despite its name, most New Yorkers don't consider it part of Harlem proper—it's its own beast entirely, with a character forged through wave after wave of immigration, each group leaving its mark before being displaced by the next.
Before the Tenements
For most of the nineteenth century, this was farmland. Rural. Quiet. The kind of place city dwellers might visit for fresh air. Residential settlements didn't really take hold until the 1860s, clustering northeast of Third Avenue and East 110th Street.
Then the trains came.
The elevated transit line reached Harlem in 1879 and 1880, and suddenly the calculus changed. Real estate developers saw opportunity. Apartment buildings and brownstones began sprouting like mushrooms after rain. The Lexington Avenue subway, completed in 1919, accelerated the transformation further. There was just one obstacle: Duffy's Hill at 103rd Street, one of the steepest grades in all of Manhattan, which effectively blocked the extension of cable cars up Lexington Avenue. Geography has a way of shaping neighborhoods in unexpected ways.
The first residents of this newly urbanized area were poor German, Irish, Scandinavian, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants. By around 1917, the Jewish population alone had reached ninety thousand. But the neighborhood's most famous ethnic identity was already taking root.
How Italian Harlem Was Born from a Labor Dispute
The origin story is wonderfully specific. In the 1870s, a contractor building trolley tracks on First Avenue needed workers. When his regular laborers went on strike, he imported Italian workers as strikebreakers. These men built a shantytown along the East River at 106th Street.
That shantytown was the seed.
By the mid-1880s, four thousand Italians had arrived. They kept coming. The neighborhood expanded north to East 115th Street and west to Third Avenue. But here's what's fascinating: Italian Harlem wasn't a single homogeneous community. It was a patchwork of micro-neighborhoods, with each street dominated by people from different regions of Italy. Southern Italians and Sicilians predominated, with a moderate sprinkling of Northern Italians. The first to arrive, in 1878, came from Polla, a small town in the province of Salerno, and settled around 115th Street.
The area east of Lexington Avenue between 96th and 116th Streets became the heart of Italian Harlem. East of Madison Avenue, between 116th and 125th Streets, another Italian enclave took shape. And between these settlements? Gasworks. Stockyards. Tar dumps. Garbage dumps. The urban landscape of the late nineteenth century was not pretty.
Little Italy Before There Was a Little Italy
Here's something that might surprise you: Italian Harlem was the first part of Manhattan to be called "Little Italy." The more famous neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, the one tourists flock to today, came second.
At its peak in the 1930s, more than one hundred ten thousand Italian-Americans lived in Italian Harlem, crammed into crowded, run-down apartment buildings. The 1930 census revealed that eighty-one percent of the population consisted of first- or second-generation Italian Americans. This was actually slightly less concentrated than the Lower East Side's Little Italy, where eighty-eight percent were of Italian descent—but Italian Harlem's total population was three times larger.
It was, in other words, the real center of Italian-American life in New York City.
The Dark Side of the Old Neighborhood
Where there were immigrants, there was crime. Italian Harlem spawned some of the most notorious criminal organizations in American history.
It started with the Black Hand, an early extortion racket that preyed on fellow immigrants. The name itself was theatrical—victims would receive threatening letters decorated with a black handprint. But the Black Hand was disorganized, almost amateurish compared to what came next.
Italian Harlem was the founding location of the Genovese crime family, one of the Five Families that would come to dominate organized crime in New York City. The family took its name from Vito Genovese, though its origins trace back to earlier bosses. To this day, the Genovese family maintains a presence in the neighborhood through what's known as the 116th Street Crew.
The 1970s brought the East Harlem Purple Gang, an Italian-American drug operation that doubled as a murder-for-hire crew. The nickname came from their tendency to leave victims beaten so badly they turned purple.
Political Power and the Neighborhood's Champions
Crime wasn't the only path to power. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Italian Harlem sent one of its own to Congress: Fiorello H. La Guardia, who would later become one of New York City's most beloved mayors. The "Little Flower," as he was nicknamed (Fiorello means little flower in Italian), was short, pudgy, and incorruptible. As mayor, he helped plan a major expansion of Thomas Jefferson Park at First Avenue, between 111th and 114th Streets—bringing green space to his old neighborhood.
In the 1940s, the district elected Vito Marcantonio, a civil rights lawyer, socialist, and activist who represented some of the most progressive positions in Congress. He championed labor rights, opposed racial segregation, and defended immigrants—positions that eventually made him a target during the Red Scare of the early Cold War.
The Great Displacement
After World War II, Italian Harlem began to die.
Not suddenly. Not all at once. But the forces that would ultimately hollow out the community were set in motion. The unhealthy tenements—buildings that had been crumbling for decades—started coming down, replaced by new housing projects. This sounds like progress. In many ways, it was progress. But demolition and reconstruction shattered the social fabric of the neighborhood. Families who had lived on the same block for generations were scattered.
They moved to the Bronx. To Brooklyn. To Long Island and upstate New York and New Jersey. Each departure weakened the ties that held the community together.
Still, Italian Harlem persisted as a large and conspicuous community through the 1980s and 1990s. Even into the twenty-first century, a remnant held on around Pleasant Avenue and the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, roughly from 114th to 118th Streets.
By the 2000 Census, only one thousand one hundred thirty Italian-Americans remained in the area.
The Feast That Outlived the Neighborhood
Every year, on the second weekend of August, something remarkable happens. The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel returns to East Harlem, complete with the "Dancing of the Giglio"—a tradition where men hoist a towering, multi-story structure on their shoulders and carry it through the streets.
This was the first Italian feast in New York City. The Giglio Society of East Harlem keeps it alive, centered around the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. For a few days each summer, the old Italian neighborhood flickers back to life, a ghost briefly made solid.
And then there's Rao's, still serving at those ten tables. Patsy's Pizzeria, which opened in 1933, still making pies. Until 2019, there was even a barbershop on 116th Street that Claudio Caponigro had opened in the mid-1950s. When rising rent threatened the shop in 2011, it made the news. Caponigro held on for another eight years before finally retiring.
These are the last physical traces of a community that once numbered over a hundred thousand.
Spanish Harlem Rises
Even as Italian families were building their enclave in the early twentieth century, another group was establishing a foothold at the neighborhood's western edge.
Puerto Rican and Latin American migrants began arriving after World War I, settling around 110th Street and Lexington Avenue. They called their new home "Spanish Harlem." At first, it was just one pocket of the larger neighborhood, coexisting with Italian Harlem to the east.
But the balance was shifting.
The 1940s and 1950s brought another massive wave of Puerto Rican immigration—what historians call the Great Migration. By 1950, the Puerto Rican population in East Harlem had reached sixty-three thousand. As Italians moved out, Puerto Ricans moved in. The new residents transformed the neighborhood according to their needs. Bodegas appeared—small grocery stores stocking Caribbean products. Botánicas opened—shops selling herbs, candles, and spiritual supplies rooted in Santería and other folk traditions.
Under the Park Avenue railroad viaduct between 111th and 116th Streets, an enclosed street market took shape. La Marqueta—The Market—became a center of neighborhood life, a place where you could buy plantains and mangoes and gossip about neighbors.
Catholic churches and evangelistic Protestant congregations moved into storefronts. The sounds of the street changed. Conversations shifted from Italian to Spanish.
By the 1950s, "Spanish Harlem" had expanded from a geographic description of one corner to a name for the entire neighborhood. Later, residents began calling it "El Barrio"—simply, The Neighborhood. If you lived there, you knew exactly which neighborhood was meant.
The Brutal Decades
The 1950s and 1960s brought urban renewal—that Orwellian phrase that often meant bulldozers and displacement. Large sections of East Harlem were leveled for new housing projects. The neighborhood became one of the hardest-hit areas in New York City during the urban crisis of the 1960s and 1970s.
The statistics tell a grim story. High crime rates. Teenage pregnancy. An AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Drug abuse that hollowed out families. Homelessness. An asthma rate five times the national average—a legacy of pollution and substandard housing. The highest jobless rate in New York City.
East Harlem has the second-highest concentration of public housing in the United States, surpassed only by Brownsville in Brooklyn. When you concentrate poverty this densely, problems compound.
The tenements that remained were crowded and poorly maintained. Arson was epidemic—landlords torched their own buildings for insurance money, or buildings simply burned because no one was maintaining them. The New York City of the 1970s was teetering on bankruptcy, struggling with deficits, race riots, white flight to the suburbs, gang warfare, and seemingly intractable poverty.
The Young Lords Take Over a Church
In 1969 and 1970, a group called the Young Lords made headlines in East Harlem. The organization had originated as a street gang in Chicago before being reorganized by José "Cha-Cha" Jiménez into a political movement. The New York chapter brought revolutionary politics to El Barrio.
They ran a Free Breakfast for Children program, feeding kids before school—a model borrowed from the Black Panther Party. They opened a Free Health Clinic. They called for Puerto Rican independence and neighborhood empowerment.
The Young Lords allied with the Black Panthers, united by a shared analysis of racism and capitalism. They were young, militant, and media-savvy. When they occupied the First Spanish Methodist Church on 111th Street—demanding it be used for community programs—they captured national attention.
The movement eventually fractured, as radical movements often do. But for a brief moment, the Young Lords represented a vision of what El Barrio could become if its residents seized control of their own destiny.
A Neighborhood in Perpetual Transition
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, East Harlem had become genuinely multiethnic. About a third of residents were Puerto Rican. African Americans made up a significant portion. White residents were a minority but present. And something new was happening: the Asian population, particularly Chinese, had increased dramatically since 2000.
Between 2000 and 2010, the numbers shifted remarkably. The Asian population grew by one hundred nine percent. The White population increased by sixty-eight percent. Meanwhile, the Black population decreased by twelve percent, and the Hispanic and Latino population fell by four percent.
These numbers tell a familiar story: gentrification.
Property values in East Harlem climbed along with the rest of New York City through 2006. New residents arrived. Demographics shifted. The same economic forces that had transformed Brooklyn neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Park Slope were reaching into Upper Manhattan.
The Most Dangerous Block in the City
But gentrification is uneven. In 2015, the New York Post identified one block—Lexington Avenue between East 123rd and 124th Streets—as one of the most dangerous in the city. Police statistics recorded nineteen assaults there that year, more than any other single block.
According to the Harlem Neighborhood Block Association, East Harlem housed twenty-two drug-treatment programs, four homeless-services providers, and four transitional-living facilities. These services are necessary. They help people in crisis. But concentrating them in one neighborhood creates its own problems.
Tragedy struck on March 12, 2014, when a gas explosion at 1644-1646 Park Avenue killed eight people and injured more than seventy. The blast was powerful enough to level two buildings and damage others nearby. It was a reminder that the neighborhood's aging infrastructure posed dangers beyond crime.
The Rezoning Battle
In February 2016, the New York Times featured East Harlem as one of the city's "next hot neighborhoods." A real-estate broker described it as "one of the few remaining areas in New York City where you can secure a good deal." New luxury developments were going up. Retail stores, bars, and restaurants were opening. National-brand chains were appearing on the edges of the neighborhood.
The city government saw opportunity—or, depending on your perspective, saw a chance to reshape the neighborhood from above. Beginning in 2016, officials began seeking to rezone East Harlem to facilitate new residential, commercial, community facility, and manufacturing development.
Residents pushed back. They developed their own plan, the East Harlem Neighborhood Plan, and presented it to the city in February 2017. The plan reflected community priorities: affordable housing, local hiring requirements, protections for existing residents against displacement.
By August 2017, residents and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer were complaining that the city had ignored their input almost entirely. The rezoning went forward anyway. The pattern was familiar: government officials making decisions about a neighborhood without the neighborhood's consent.
Historic Preservation Arrives Late
In 2019, the oldest portion of East Harlem—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.
The designation came too late to save Italian Harlem as a living community. The Italians were gone except for a handful of elderly holdouts. But the buildings remained, and now they had formal protection. The brownstones and tenements that had housed a hundred thousand Italian-Americans, that had seen the rise of crime families and political movements, that had watched one ethnic group yield to another—these structures would be preserved.
Whether the communities that once filled them could be remembered with equal clarity was another question.
Life Expectancy and Living Conditions
The statistics on East Harlem today are sobering. According to NYC Health's 2018 Community Health Profile, residents of Manhattan Community District 11—which encompasses East Harlem plus Randall's Island and Ward's Island—have an average life expectancy of 77.3 years. That sounds respectable until you learn that the median for all New York City neighborhoods is 81.2 years.
Nearly four years of life. Gone. Just because of where you live.
The median household income in the district was $36,770 as of 2017. Twenty-three percent of residents lived in poverty, compared to fourteen percent in Manhattan overall. One in nine residents was unemployed. Forty-eight percent of residents struggled to pay their rent.
East Harlem remains what it has been throughout its history: predominantly working-class. The gentrification that has transformed other Manhattan neighborhoods has touched it but not conquered it. Not yet.
The Music That Emerged
One element of East Harlem's story deserves special mention: its contribution to American music. The neighborhood played a crucial role in the development of both salsa and Latin freestyle.
Salsa emerged in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s, a fusion of Cuban son, Puerto Rican bomba and plena, jazz, and other influences. The musicians who created it were largely Puerto Rican New Yorkers—Nuyoricans—and East Harlem was one of their home bases. The Fania All-Stars, the supergroup that defined the salsa sound, drew heavily from El Barrio.
Latin freestyle came later, in the 1980s, blending electronic dance music with Latin rhythms and influences. Again, East Harlem was central to the sound. Groups like the Cover Girls and artists like TKA got their start in the neighborhood's clubs and recording studios.
Music is one thing that can't be demolished or displaced. The sounds that East Harlem created spread around the world.
What Remains
Today, if you walk through East Harlem, you'll find layers of history compressed into a few dozen blocks. The Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel still stands, hosting the annual feast. Rao's still serves dinner at its ten tables to those lucky enough to have connections. La Marqueta, though diminished from its heyday, still operates under the Park Avenue viaduct.
You'll also find public housing projects, some well-maintained and others struggling. Bodegas with hand-lettered signs in Spanish. Chinese businesses expanding from the south. Luxury developments that look utterly out of place next to century-old tenements.
And you'll find a community that is—as it has always been—in transition. The Germans and Irish who came first are long forgotten. The Jews who numbered ninety thousand have left only traces. The Italians have dwindled to a thousand. The Puerto Ricans, who dominated for half a century, now share the neighborhood with newcomers from every continent.
East Harlem is a palimpsest, a document written over again and again, with earlier texts showing through the newer ones. The neighborhood that exists today will, in another generation, be as distant a memory as Italian Harlem is now.
But the ten tables at Rao's will probably still be full.