II.4 New Neighborhoods

But the black neighborhoods became overcrowded. Blacks couldn't move to Harlem, however, or other developed areas, because there was no quick or easy way to get there. Then in 1904 the subway opened, giving more people better access to Harlem, but the new buildings there were too expensive, at least at first. The subway-construction boom in northern Manhattan and the Bronx opened up huge areas, but the population didn't grow as fast as the new areas were being developed. There was too much new construction. You know how there are these office-building booms and busts in New York? Well, there can also be housing booms and busts. We just have never seen one in our lifetime, because they don't build enough new houses. But at the time, they were building a lot of houses, and so the prices actually fell.

So there was a surplus of housing. That made it possible for blacks to move in. One thing that's funny about New York is that the black neighborhood did not develop, as it did in other cities, from a common core that grew outward. Instead, in New York the black area leapfrogged. It went from the West Side in the fifties and jumped over 80 blocks to the middle of Harlem, around 135th Street, to new housing. What had happened, apparently, was that speculators had overbuilt the housing. They were sitting there with new empty buildings. They had payments to make on them. They could say, "Look, I'm not a racist. Do I want to be pure, or do I want to get my money back?" And it turned out that they became less concerned about race and more concerned about money. They were willing to rent to blacks, often at a higher rent than whites would have paid. So blacks suddenly began moving to Harlem in a big way in the early part of the twentieth century, and the housing there was better than that in a lot of other parts of the city. You can still see it today. Striver's Row, along about 138th, 139th Streets, and Sugar Hill. Those are wonderful neighborhoods, and those began to be settled in the early twentieth century by blacks moving from San Juan Hill.