and
Lexington Avenues
Early history The area that became East Harlem was rural for most of the 19th century, but residential settlements northeast of
Third Avenue and
East 110th Street had developed by the 1860s. East Harlem consisted of pockets of ethnically sorted settlements – Italian, German, Irish, and Jewish – which were beginning to press up against each other, with the spaces still between them occupied by "gasworks, stockyards and tar and garbage dumps". The first Italians arrived in East Harlem in 1878, from
Polla in the province of
Salerno, and settled in the vicinity of 115th Street. There were many crime syndicates in Italian Harlem, from the early
Black Hand to the bigger and more organized Italian gangs that formed the
Italian-American Mafia. It was the founding location of the
Genovese crime family, one of the
Five Families that dominated organized crime in New York City. This includes the current
116th Street Crew of the Genovese family. During the 1970s, Italian East Harlem was also home to the Italian-American drug gang and murder-for-hire crew known as the
East Harlem Purple Gang. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Italian Harlem was represented in Congress by future Mayor
Fiorello H. La Guardia. The neighborhood was represented, in the 1940s, by Italian-American civil rights lawyer,
socialist, and activist
Vito Marcantonio. The Italian neighborhood approached its peak in the 1930s, with more than 110,000 Italian-Americans living in its crowded, run-down apartment buildings. The 1930 census showed that 81 percent of the population of Italian Harlem consisted of first- or second-generation Italian Americans, somewhat less than the concentration of Italian Americans in the
Lower East Side's
Little Italy with 88 percent; Italian Harlem's total population, however, was three times that of Little Italy. However, vestiges of the old Italian neighborhood remain. The annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the "Dancing of the Giglio", the first Italian feast in New York City, is still celebrated there every year on the second weekend of August by the
Giglio Society of East Harlem and is centered around
Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Italian retail establishments still exist in Italian Harlem, such as
Rao's restaurant, which started in 1896, and the original
Patsy's Pizzeria, which opened in 1933. Another major Italian retail business in the neighborhood, a barbershop opened by Claudio Caponigro on 116th Street in the mid-1950s, was threatened with closure by a rent increase in May 2011 but ultimately closed only in 2019 when Mr. Caponigro retired.
Spanish Harlem Puerto Rican and
Latin American migration after the
First World War established an enclave at the western portion of East Harlem – around
110th Street and
Lexington Avenue – which became known as "Spanish Harlem". The area slowly grew to encompass all of East Harlem, including Italian Harlem, as Italians moved out – to
the Bronx,
Brooklyn,
Long Island, upstate
New York and
New Jersey – and
Nuyoricans moved in during another wave of immigration in the 1940s and 1950s. – the name began to be used to describe the entire East Harlem neighborhood by the 1950s. Later, the name "El Barrio" ("The Neighborhood") began to be used, especially by residents of the area.
Decline In the 1950s and 1960s, large sections of East Harlem were leveled for urban renewal projects, and the neighborhood was one of the hardest hit areas in the 1960s and 1970s as New York City struggled with deficits,
race riots,
urban flight, gang warfare, drug abuse, crime and poverty.
Tenements were crowded, poorly maintained, and frequent targets for arson. In 1969 and 1970, a regional chapter of the
Young Lords which were reorganized from a neighborhood street gang in Chicago by
Jose (Cha-Cha) Jimenez, ran several programs including a Free Breakfast for Children and a Free Health Clinic to help Latino and poor families. The Young Lords came together with the
Black Panthers and called for
Puerto Rican independence and neighborhood empowerment.
Recent history By the beginning of the 21st century, East Harlem was a racially diverse neighborhood, with about a third of the population being Puerto Rican. Until 2006, property values in East Harlem climbed along with those in the rest of New York City, leading to gentrification and
changes to area demographics. On March 12, 2014, at 9:00
EDT,
a large explosion and fire at 1644–1646
Park Avenue killed eight people and injured more than 70. The
New York Post listed one part of the neighborhood – the block of
Lexington Avenue between East 123rd and 124th Streets – as one of "the most dangerous blocks in the city" because police crime statistics for 2015 showed that 19 assaults had taken place there, more than for any other city block. The
Post also reported that there were, according to the Harlem Neighborhood Block Association, "22 drug-treatment programs, four homeless-services providers and four transitional-living facilities" in East Harlem. East Harlem has begun to feel the effects of
gentrification. In February 2016, an article in
The New York Times about "New York's Next Hot Neighborhoods" featured East Harlem as one of four such areas. A real-estate broker described it as "one of the few remaining areas in New York City where you can secure a good deal". The article mentioned new luxury developments, access to transportation, the opening of new retail stores, bars and restaurants, and national-brand stores beginning to appear on the outskirts of the neighborhood. Primarily, though, it was the cost of housing in comparison to the rest of Manhattan, which the article noted as the major factor. Beginning in 2016, the New York City government was seeking to rezone East Harlem "to facilitate new residential, commercial, community facility, and manufacturing development". The residents of the neighborhood generated a suggested zoning plan, the "East Harlem Neighborhood Plan", which was offered to the city in February 2017, but in August 2017 residents and the
Manhattan Borough President,
Gale Brewer, complained that the city had ignored their plan almost entirely. In 2019, the oldest portion of the neighborhood, the blocks of
East 111th through
120th Streets between
Park and
Pleasant Avenues, was listed on the
National Register of Historic Places as the East Harlem Historic District. ==Demographics==