Nation: No Place Like Home

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York, and a 19th century sightseer described it as a place of "little velvety islands and silvery rivers, sublimely picturesque in vernal bloom." Established in 1658 by Peter Stuyvesant, Nieuw Haarlem lay in a lush bottomland dotted with farms like "Happy Valley" and "Quiet Vale." At first it was connected to the rest of Manhattan by a single road built with Negro labor along an Indian footpath that is now part of Broadway.

When the elevated railway was extended to Harlem in 1880, land values boomed. It was obvious, said the Harlem Monthly Magazine in 1893, that "the center of fashion, wealth, culture and intelligence must, in the near future, be found in the ancient and honorable village of Harlem."

A Bridge of Green. Harlem became a place of brownstone fronts and Saratoga trunks. Oscar Hammerstein built the Harlem Opera House: it now houses a bowling alley. William Waldorf Astor put up a $500,000 apartment house on Seventh Avenue. Commodore Vanderbilt showed off his trotters on Lenox Avenue. The rich flocked up to Harlem for the summer.

Then the Negroes began pressing to get in. After the bloody Civil War draft riots in New York, when rampaging whites lynched 18 Negroes, drowned five others, and burned down a Negro orphan asylum, the black colony began an exodus to remote uptown areas, first the upper West Side and after the turn of the century to Harlem. White real estate dealers formed "protective" associations to prevent blockbusting, hung "White Only" signs in windows.

But economics played a hand, perhaps proving the validity of the current cliché that ultimately the bridge between black and white will be green—the color of money. The land speculation collapsed. Apartments went empty, even after rent cuts. Finally, a group of Negroes got into a house on 134th Street. Later, the Equitable Life Assurance Society gave in and sold "Strivers' Row," a magnificent row of brownstones on 139th Street that had been designed by Stanford White. The houses had 14 rooms and two baths, French doors and hardwood floors, but Equitable unloaded them for $8,000 apiece.

"Let Me Off Uptown." The Negro migration was on, and the Northern labor shortages created by World War I sharply accelerated it. From 1915 to 1925 more than 1,000,000 Southern Negroes moved North.

Harlem's Golden Age began. "Meat was cheap and home brew was strong," wrote Historian Lerone Bennett. "Duke Ellington was at the Cotton Club and Satchmo was at the Sunset, God was in heaven and Father Divine was in Harlem." Those were the days of speakeasies with names like Glory Hole and Basement Brownie's Coal Bed, of stompin' at the Savoy and vaudeville at the Apollo, of "rent parties" where guests paid 50¢ or $1 to help the host pay his rent and got all the food and drink—and sometimes sex—that they could manage. It was the time when Jazz Singer Anita O'Day told her audiences:

If it's pleasure you're about,

And you feel like steppin' out,

All you've got to do is shout:

Let me off Uptown.

But Uptown was growing more and more crowded, and lurking just beneath the throbbing, wild surface that white merrymakers saw on their Saturday night outings lay serious trouble. In Novelist Carl Van