Building a Healthy Black Harlem: Health Politics in Harlem, New ...

Chapter 1

Health Conditions
in HArlem
in the Early Years
of Black Urbanization

While there were no uniformly black neighborhoods at the turn of the twentieth century, a large portion of New York City's African American population lived in present-day midtown Manhattan in neighborhoods known as San Juan Hill and the Tenderloin. Growth in the city's black population, the destruction of black residential areas during the 1901 construction of Pennsylvania Station, and the availability of housing in Harlem led New York City's native black population to move to Harlem in droves.¹ The “On to Harlem” movement—the large migration of blacks from lower Manhattan to Harlem—was well under way as of 1914.² By that year, African American