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"Nigger Hell." Among the first settlers on Manhattan Island were eleven blacks, who arrived with the Dutch in 1626. The first New York City race riot occurred under the English in 1712, when a wild rumor that slaves were plotting to massacre the whites condemned 21 Negroes to death. In 1741 a similar tale circulated by a white servant girl caused the colonists to burn 14 Negroes "alive with a slow fire until dead and consumed to ashes," hang 18 more. Refusing to be impressed into the war to make Negroes free, shanty Irishmen in 1863 staged the historic "Draft Riots," featured by the burning of a Negro orphanage at 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue, and the sacking of an early Negro quarter (now Chinatown). In 1900 a policeman allegedly arresting a Negro woman for soliciting started another race riot.
"San Juan Hill," a settlement of some 40,000 on the middle West Side of Manhattan, was the Negro quarter before the War. The War and post-War industrial boom of 1917-18 brought thousands of unskilled workers North. In New York they spilled out of San Juan Hill into the Italian-Spanish colony of Harlem. By 1920 New York's Negro population had jumped to 250,000. The recession of the boom stranded the blackamoors, changed New York's "Nigger Heaven" into a "Nigger Hell."
New York has no tradition for hiring Negroes either as unskilled laborers or as domestic servants. A few blacks work as "red caps," as cooks, butlers or elevator boys. But the dominant whites have pre-empted most available jobs since Depression with the result that of the city's 250,000 Negroes, less than 15,000 work regularly. More than 100,000 are now on relief.
Unlike Chicago's Black Belt, Harlem's businesses are run practically without Negro participation. A handful of professional blacks live in the fine old Stanford White block known as Strivers Row. In good times they aped the manners of Park Avenue, subscribed to a social register, gave their daughters debut parties. Theatrical folk like Duke Ellington, sporting characters like Harry Wills, live farther north in Sugar Hill. But even Harlem's unique assets are flagrantly exploited by whites. Jews own the successful colored bands, the Cotton Club, the Savoy Ball Room, all Harlem's saloons, its brothels and its $50,000,000 a year policy game business. Jews also run Harlem's markets and are its principal landlords.
One result is abnormally high food prices, demanded and obtained because segregated Negroes cannot trade elsewhere. And Harlem's housing problem is an open scandal. The Urban League, estimating that 50% of an employed Negro's income must go for rent, has found that Harlem rentals are from 15% to 20% higher than those in the corresponding poor quarters of the city's French, Germans, Italians, Jews. High rents mean unhealthy "doubling up" of families. So, while Harlem's broad, clean streets make a better appearance than those of Yorkville or Little Italy, the district's population density of 222 to the acre is 75% greater than that of the rest of Manhattan.