Rising of New York
New York, NYFall 2021, GSAPP
Course: New York Rising: How Real Estate Shapes a City?
Instructor: Kate Ascher, Thomas Mellins
How has the character of Broadway between 110th-125th Street of Morningside Heights and 125th Street Corridor of Harlem developed differently in the 20th century as a result of social, economic, and political forces?
- Introduction
2. Development of Morningside Heights in the early 20th century
Morningside Heights is one of the rare neighborhoods that skipped the general pattern of urbanization on Manhattan Island which began at the southern part of the Island. The divergence from the general development is a result of three causes: its topographic isolation due to the plateau rising above Harlem, the presence of asylum in the area, and the lack of public transit until the beginning of the 20th century.
The institutional character of Morningside Heights started taking shape in 1887 after several distinguished organizations purchased large land parcels for their institutional campuses. In the later decades, these institutions that settled on Morningside Heights included educational, medical, and religious organizations such as Riverside Church, Woman’s Hospital, Barnard College, Union Theological Seminary, and the Institute of Musical Art. After settling on Morningside Heights, most of these institutions became well-known as the neighborhood offered a great combination of quiet seclusion and urban thrill.
Certainly, not every building in Morningside Heights has an institutional purpose. A big portion of the neighborhood especially, Broadway, consists of residential buildings boosted by speculative builders with the hope of gaining financial profit. While many assume that the development of residential buildings was a direct result of Columbia and other institutions’ arrival, this is not the case. At the beginning of the 20th century, the development of residential buildings grew independently from the existence of these institutions. Although some row houses were built in the 1880s, the majority of the residential development began after the arrival of the subway system to Broadway in 1904. The development of the subway station connected Morningside Heights to Downtown, increasing investments from speculative developers to build apartment buildings for middle-class families in the area. The vacant land that had not been purchased by the institutions was rapidly transformed into New York City’s first middle-class apartment house neighborhood, with upper-middle-class households settling in remarkable twelve-story apartment buildings on Broadway.
3. Development of Harlem’s 125th Street Corridor in the early 20th century
At the beginning of the 20th century, the population of Harlem almost exclusively consisted of middle-class white ethnic groups including Jews, Irish, Italians and Germans. The beginning of construction on the IRT subway in 1900, with a route from Lenox Avenue and Broadway, led to massive speculation of unimproved property which resulted in a significant increase in construction of tenement houses. However, the arrival of the subway in 1904 did not create the desired effect on apartment rentals and many of Harlem’s middle-class residents moved out to other parts of the city as the development of the subway route made other parts of the city easily accessible.
The overbuilding of the tenements in Harlem resulted in the inability of homeowners to find tenants among the white ethnic group and this led some landlords to begin renting the vacant tenements to Black families. Starting with the initial opening, thousands of African-Americans moving into the City started renting apartments in Harlem. With the Great Migration, the black population of Harlem has increased rapidly. By 1914, approximately 50,000 African Americans of the 60,000 who lived in Manhattan were living in Harlem. By 1923, the population had almost tripled; and by 1930, the population was over 225,000, making the area the largest black urban center in the world.
It is important to understand why the Black population has chosen Harlem to settle. Whereas the White population was looking for space and more commodious homes, African-Americans were looking in part for sites where they could establish cultural institutions and construct notions of community that were spaces that they could call their own. And Harlem provided the new settlers with this accommodation.
Similar to how educational, medical, and religious institutions were looking for land in Morningside Heights to expand their complexes, the same ambition can be seen in Harlem for black community. Whilethe institutions of Morningside were looking for a campus life to enhance the college-life experience, African Americans were looking for a collective vitality where the bonds and the history can be enhanced.
4. Development of Morningside Heights in the mid 20th century
Until the 1950s, the development of apartment buildings on Morningside Heights grew independent of the nearby presence of institutions, and only a few of the early apartments renters in Morningside Heights were affiliated with the institutions. The developers expected high rents from the large twelve-story corner buildings that are offering spacious apartments. Not being able to afford the high rents of the apartments; the faculty, staff, and students of the institutions chose to reside in other parts of the city. However, academic institutions such as Columbia University and Teachers College became increasingly concerned about the high rents since lack of concentration of faculty, staff, and students in Morningside Heights would also lack the “college” life experience which is key to establishing an intellectual neighborhood. Since there was little available land remaining in the area, the institutions started purchasing several apartment buildings in 1919 and 1920. The institutions continued acquiring a couple more apartment buildings in the 1930s, 1930s, and 1950s. However, the scope of acquisition has grown much bigger in 1960, when Columbia purchased more than 100 buildings in the area in order to rent them to university affiliates. Although the growth of residential and institutional development proceeded independently until the 1960s, the two separate strands of neighborhood development merged after the mid 20th century. Broadway kept its residential and institutional complexes and only a small number of commercial buildings appeared since the apartment buildings along Broadway all incorporated street-level shops.
5. Development of Harlem in the mid 20th century
While Broadway on 110th-125th Street of Morningside Heights was mostly occupied by residential and institutional buildings in the 20th century; the 125th Corridor of Harlem was considered as the commercial strip with a variety of businesses. Until the early 1930s, those businesses along 125th Street were almost exclusively White-owned and White-staffed. Almost all theaters on West 125th Street were still segregated: Hotel Theresa did not accept Black customers until 1940, and Blumstein’s Department Store didn’t hire Black cashiers or clerks. This resulted in the coexistence of drastically different streetscapes where Black tenement buildings and almost entirely While-operated commercial strip on West 125th Street occupied the same neighborhood, creating spatial and racial segregation. This spatial segregation became an integral part of Harlem’s demographic, economic, social, and racial dynamics in the upcoming decades. As the White population controlled the land, money, business property, and power; a conflict over physical space became one of the central points of Harlem’s business development and housing. In most cases, the tenants living above the store were not allowed to work in the store, which increased the tension in the neighborhood. This resulted in the outbreak of the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” protest at Blumstein’s in 1934 and followed by the 1935 civil uprising. During the civil uprising and protests, the public character of the sidewalk has evolved uniquely after the public claimed the sidewalk by bringing elements such as soapbox speakers which were used to mobilize the community by allowing radical thoughts to be announced. The urban and open spaces such as streets, corridors, sidewalks became important spaces while protesting the spatial segregation that the Black population has faced.
6. Development of Morningside heights in the late 20th century
The development in the late 20th century of Broadway will be investigated through a site that is in close proximity to the 125 Street Corridor of Harlem. The dual character of Morningside Heights that consists of institutional and residential blocks began to change during the Depression, and World War II, and the conflicts that divide the neighborhood started to emerge during the following decades. After World War II, middle-class whites were replaced by the poor black and Puerto Rican families who were moving to New York City in increasing numbers. The changing character of the Morningside Heights neighborhood was of great concern to the area’s institutions, who feared that it would be harder to attract students, faculty, and staff if the surrounding neighborhood were perceived as dangerous and deteriorating. The institutions at the northern end of the neighborhood were even more afraid since their buildings were adjacent to the low-income residential community of Manhattanville north of 122nd Street and east of Broadway. This led Columbia and 8 other institutions to persuade and then sponsor the Morningside Gardens, a slum clearance project that replaced the building on the two blocks north of 123rs Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway which included six twenty-story buildings that housed 984 middle-income cooperative apartments.
However, there was opposition from the displaced residents of the neighborhood which gathered under the organization called “Save Our Homes” to protest the renewal project that was seen as a way to remove Puerto Rican and black households residing in the neighborhood. Overall, the Morningside Gardens along with Grant Houses allowed Columbia to claim neighborhood interest in these blocks after lobbying for their demolition and replacement with new housing projects. Although there were conflicts between the neighborhood residents and the area’s institutions, Columbia had succeeded in its goal of turning the neighborhood into a safe intellectual neighborhood by the late 1990s. However, it should be noted that the manner in which this was accomplished was often controversial.
7. Development of 125th Street Corridor in the late 20th century
While the institutions of Morningside Heights paved the way for a homogenous city fabric that almost exclusively consisted of residential and institutional buildings in the late 20th century, the residents of 125th Street Corridor tried maintaining mix-use programs in opposition to the urban renewal proposals. According to architect and educator J. Max Bond Jr., who is one of New York’s most influential architects, a vision of rich fabric with a great mix of housing, social facilities, working places should be maintained and reproduced in Harlem in order to overcome urban renewal’s monumentality. As opposed to the superimposed pattern of Morningside Heights, he celebrated the messiness of urban life with the eclectic land use he discovered in Harlem. Towards the end of the 20th century, a couple of community conventions such as “ Own a Piece of Block'' have been organized by the members of the Architects Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH) to restore the traditional streetscape to maintain the sidewalk edge that defined the 125th Street’s Public Life. The vision was to control the development of 125th Street to bring benefits to the community. Their strategy supported the ownership of the land and the use of 125th Street as a source of economic development within the community with the goal of generating manpower, information, capital, land, and skills for the black population who needed to gain control over their lives.
Although the residents of Harlem tried to prevent the top-down development approach, there were cases where the government acted as a developer within the neighborhood and disoriented the space. One example is the Harlem State Office building located at 163 West 125th Street. A number of row houses and Turkish baths were demolished to build this structure and prominent local shops such as African National Bookstore were forced to relocate. The construction of the building not only displaced a number of residents but also changed the spatial environment of the neighborhood drastically. Although many of the 125th Street businesses have been replaced by chain stores in the 21st century; the older African American–owned businesses there, such as funeral homes, barbershops, and beauty shops, still remain.
Conclusion
The beginning of the 20th century both in Morningside Heights and in Harlem was significantly affected by the arrival of the subway which paved the way for speculative builders to construct new buildings. While Morningside already had institutional buildings at the time, the number of spacious residential buildings has increased. During the same time, the population of Harlem rapidly shifted from exclusively white to the black population which brought spatial segregation and conflict over land, business property, and money that drove Harlem’s development in the coming decades. In the mid 20th century, the number of residential buildings purchased by institutions such as Columbia has increased rapidly in order to expand and claim a neighborhood interest. This urban renewal project often caused conflicts as some of these projects such as Morningside Gardens displaced the residents occupying a small but significant number of residential buildings. As opposed to the quiet seclusion that Morningside provided to the institutions, 125th Street continued offering a rich and diverse urban fabric through its commercial strip. The urban and open spaces such as streets, corridors, sidewalks often became vital spaces while protesting the spatial segregation that the Black population has faced. Towards the end of the 20th century, institutions such as Columbia took bold steps to control the neighborhood and demolished existing houses to build new ones with controlled residents in order to create a safe college neighborhood. On the other side of the Morningside Plateau, developmental strategies have been proposed to support the ownership of the land and the use of 125th Street as a source of economic development within the community. Overall, the social, economic, and political interests of the institutions and government significantly affected the spatial development on Broadway between 110th and 125th Street of Morningside as well as the 125th Street Corridor of Harlem during the 20th century.
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