Harlem, New York was the center of the Renaissance

Harlem, New York was the center of the Renaissance. Harlem is a neighborhood in New York City's Upper Manhattan. It is roughly limited on the west by the Hudson River, on the north by the Harlem River and 155th Street, on the east by Fifth Avenue, and on the south by Central Park North. The broader Harlem area spans west to the Hudson River, north to 155th Street, east to the East River, and south to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Central Park, and East 96th Street.

It was once a Dutch village that was initially constituted in 1658 and is named after the Dutch city of Haarlem. Harlem's history has been characterized by a series of economic boom-and-bust cycles, each with considerable demographic shifts. In the nineteenth century, Harlem was mostly occupied by Jewish and Italian Americans, but African-American people began to arrive in huge numbers during the Great Migration in the twentieth century. Central and West Harlem were the epicenters of the Harlem Renaissance, a major African-American cultural movement, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Prior to the arrival of European settlers, the area that would become Harlem (originally Haarlem) was inhabited by a Native American band, the Wecquaesgeek, dubbed Manhattans or Manhattoe by Dutch settlers, who occupied the area on a semi-nomadic basis with other Native Americans, most likely Lenape. The Harlem flatlands were farmed by hundreds of people. A few towns were created between 1637 and 1639. Under the leadership of Peter Stuyvesant, Harlem was formally incorporated in 1660.

Beginning around the end of World War I, Harlem became connected with the New Negro movement, and then with the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural outpouring that included poetry, novels, drama, and the visual arts. There were so many black people that it "threatens the very viability of parts of Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and Alabama's key industries." Many of them settled in Harlem. Central Harlem was 32.43 percent black by 1920. According to the 1930 census, 70.18 percent of central Harlem's people were black and lived as far south as Central Park, on 110th Street.