More on Numbers Gambling

With the publication of our book Playing the Numbers drawing near, I’ve added some more pages explaining the game:

• how the number was generated
• how players chose a number to bet on,
• how the policing of numbers worked
• who operated the game, the bankers and kings and queens.

I’ve also added a new resource, selections from a dream book — the texts that translated dreams and events from everyday life into three digit numbers on which to bet.

(click the tab at the top of the blog to see these pages)

Bromley Real Estate Maps

The Bromley Real Estate map overlay is now complete.

Andrew Wilson and his helpers at the ACL have replaced those sections of our 1932-1940 map that had changed since 1930 with what was there in 1930 — those changes appear as the light brown sections of the map in the image below. 

We have also taken the chance to add a new feature — the buttons on the right turn on and off boundary lines indicating the area of Harlem in which the population was over 50% black in 1920, 1925, and 1930.

The site now features a button providing information on the Bromley map layer and the boundary lines, as well as link to a key to the map, which is marked with information on the materials from which buildings are constructed, the number of floors, the presence of shops, basements and elevators, water pipes, trolley tracks, and elevated and subway stations.

This update was funded by the 2010 Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History

Morgan Thompson – a West Indian Laborer’s Life in Harlem

A West Indian, born in 1888, who arrived in Harlem in 1917, Morgan Thompson* was convicted of assault in 1928 after he lost his temper and stabbed a man who had confronted his seventeen year old son  on West 144th Street.

(* This name is a pseudonym, used at the request of the Municipal Archives)

The most striking feature of Thompson’s life revealed by mapping it is the distance from Harlem that he traveled to work. He was employed as a laborer by construction contractors. Between 1928 and 1933, the years he spent on probation, he labored on fifteen different constructions sites, in downtown Manhattan and on the Upper East Side, and in the outer boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.  Only once did he work in Harlem, on the new YMCA on 135^th Street. (Note: some of the addresses outside Harlem are approximate locations)

Laboring was by nature itinerant work, but employment in the other occupations open to blacks was also unstable and required them to travel beyond Harlem, producing the crowds photographed pouring out of the 135th Street subway station in rush hour, in this image from the Survey Graphic Harlem Number.

Laboring, like many of the jobs open to black men, was also dangerous. The previous September Thompson had suffered a workplace injury, for which he received compensation. Within a month of returning to work after his arrest, Thompson injured his ankle so badly that it would be three months before he could put sufficient weight on it to work.  And then, after only a month back at work, Morgan suffered a smashed finger.

In Harlem, in 1928 Thompson lived with his wife of seventeen years, Margaret, a domestic servant three years his junior who also hailed from the West Indies, and two children, George, and fifteen-year-old Elizabeth. The same four bedroom apartment at ??? West 144th Street had been their home for all eleven years they had resided in New York City.  Part of the attraction would have been that West Indians  made up three quarters of those who lived in the building.  Thompson also sought out fellow immigrants in his leisure time, joining the Victoria Society, a West Indian social club with rooms on West 137th Street, and occasionally attending an Episcopal Church on 140th Street, whose members would have been overwhelmingly West Indian.

In April 1929, the family were evicted from their apartment, unable to pay their rent due to the injuries that kept Thompson from working.  In relocating, Thompson refused to consider cheaper apartments, which he considered uninhabitable, and chose instead a six room apartment on West 143rd Street, close to their old home and community.  The family rented the extra rooms, with several individuals and a married couple occupying them in the ensuing years.  Taking in lodgers was a common strategy to help pay the rent; one third of the other tenants in the building also had lodgers in 1930.  The Thompsons also relied on the wages of the two children; George had a position in a dress factory, and later as a scarf maker, and his sister Elizabeth was employed in a hat factory.  Any surplus money they had George deposited in an account at the Empire State Bank on 125th Street. When the children too lost their jobs as the Depression worsened, Morgan was able to obtain work through relief agencies, allowing the family to remain in their new home at least until 1933, when his probation ended.

A more detailed account of Morgan Thompson’s life in Harlem can be found in our article, “This Harlem Life: Black Families and Everyday Life in the 1920s and 1930s,” which will appear in the Spring 2011 issue of the Journal of Social History.

Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History

I’m pleased to announce that Digital Harlem has been awarded the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History.

The citation for the prize reads:

Digital Harlem: Everyday Life, 1915–1930 presents the social history of a particular time and place in an elegant way that encourages exploration and new discoveries. The team behind the site draws on the strength of the primary sources and uses digital techniques to allow the viewer to see elements and patterns during the Harlem Renaissance that would be difficult to characterize in narrative. In addition to being open access, Digital Harlem is open-ended: researchers can explore themes of interest to them, layering experimental searches upon each other to envision the character and interactions of everyday life. The site also powerfully shows what can be done with the combination of common technology (Google Maps) with deep archival research and outstanding web design and functionality.

We will be using the funds to upgrade the layer of building footprints on the map.  The first fruits of this work have already been added to the site: the partial layer of hand drawn footprints has been replaced with images of maps from an atlas produced by G W Bromley & Co., currently covering the area from 110th to 145th Street, with further images covering the area up to 155th Street to come.

The atlas we own is a 1932 map which has been updated to reflect changes that occurred up to 1940, so in coming weeks we will be working to correct it to reflect conditions in the 1920s.  Thanks to Andrew Wilson and his colleagues at the ACL for their work on this project

The receipt of this award does bring with it some sadness. I had the privilege of briefly being Roy Rosenzweig’s colleague, and he was an inspiration for my subsequent work in digital history.  Roy was also a good friend of one of my collaborators, Shane White.  We miss him.

Digital Harlem at the SSHA Conference

I’ll be giving a presentation on Digital Harlem — “Mapping Everyday Life: Digital Harlem, 1915-1930” — in Long Beach, California, on November 13, 2009, as part of the Social Science History Association Conference.

Divorce Raids

Divorce raids were a staple of the Amsterdam News throughout the 1920s, and featured a cross section of respectable Harlem, from physicians, dentists, attorneys, insurance agents, musicians and bandleaders, to clergymen, prominent lodge members, churchgoers, and individuals simply identified as “well-known Harlemites,” caught throughout the neighborhood in bed with people other than their spouses.  Private detectives, most notably the West Indian Herbert Boulin, led the raiding parties, which consisted of the aggrieved spouses and several friends and relatives, brought along as witnesses who could provide testimony of the adultery they witnessed.  Many of the couples involved were already separated; what was at issue was alimony, which one party either wished to obtain or avoid paying.

Divorce Raids (Search Event type = Divorce Raids)

The raids take place at addresses scattered throughout the neighborhood, but concentrated in the areas of better housing, particularly on the western boundary of Harlem.  This pattern is made more obvious if prostitution arrests are overlaid on the map: there are no raids in the slum district west of Lenox Avenue in which prostitution arrests are concentrated.  If that juxtaposition, on the one hand, highlights a class based distinction in the sexual geography of Harlem, on the other hand it shows that illicit sexuality was not limited to one part of the neighborhood, but instead took different forms in different places.

Divorce Raids & Prostitution arrests, 1925 & 1930

Prostitution arrests

Prostitutes were among the blacks who migrated from the San Juan Hill neighborhood to Harlem.  As early as 1919, according to reformer Willoughby Waterman, they had relocated from West Side Ave between  34^th and 56^th Streets to the area of 7^th Avenue from 132^nd to 143^rd Streets.  The number of black prostitutes arrested by police was out of proportion with their presence in the population, according to figures we found in the bulletins of the Committee of Fourteen, the private white anti-prostitution organization: the proportion of blacks fluctuated between 20% and 40% of the women arrested through the 1920s.  One reason why so many were arrested was that most black women were among the poorest and cheapest prostitutes and solicited on the streets, making them easily detected by police.

Black prostitutes less often took men back to rooms than did their white counterparts, resorting instead to hallways, taxicabs and other ‘semi-public’ spaces.  When they did take men into residences, it was most often not to their homes, but to rooms that could be rented briefly as a place to entertain a ‘friend.’  Of the 78 prostitutes who solicited the Committee of Fourteen’s black investigator in 1928, and offered to take him to a room, only 16 (20%) offered to take him to their homes. Black prostitutes’ practice of not taking men to rooms led police to conduct fewer jump raids — in which officers who saw a woman solicit a man in the street followed the couple when they went to a room, and then burst in on them — in Harlem than in white neighbourhoods.

Information on the addresses at which arrests were made can be found in a card file index kept by the Committee of Fourteen.  We collected information for January, April, July and October 1925 & 1930.

Arrests for Prostitution in 1925 (Search Event type= Prostitution)

The addresses where police did make arrests were clustered between 127^th Street and 135^th Street, off the avenues that ran north-south through Harlem, with the densest grouping in the poor quality tenements east of Lenox Avenue.  This was the area that writer Wallace Thurman described as Harlem’s “slum district,” with Lenox Avenue in this area “dirty and noisy.” Few arrests took place in addresses in the blocks of better standard housing north of 135^th Street and west of Lenox Avenue.

Arrests for Prostitution, 1930 (Search Event Type = Prostitution)

The greater spread of arrests in 1930 is largely a consequence of the spreading boundaries of black settlement in Harlem: arrests appear on 8th Avenue and further uptown and in greater numbers near 125th Street as blacks move to these area.

Prostitution arrests 1925 & 1930

“This Harlem Life” in the Journal of Social History

Our article “This Harlem Life: Black Families and Everyday Life in the 1920s and 1930s” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Social History.  It will appear in the Spring 2011 issue.

The article uses the Probation Department files to reconstruct the lives of five men “to highlight what the black metropolis offered those outside the elite, to show how ordinary blacks negotiated the challenges, and drew on institutions and organizations, to establish and sustain new lives.  We offer the kind of individualized perspective on everyday life that other scholars have provided for high culture, but which does not exist for Harlem, even in early twentieth century sociological studies of black life.”   Relationships with spouses, children, siblings and cousins sustained individuals faced with the social reality of living in overcrowded, deteriorating, disease infested housing, subject to the racism of white police, politicians and employers; so too did friendships made in nightclubs, speakeasies, dances and movie theatres, and membership of churches, fraternal organizations, social clubs, and sports clubs and teams.

There are blog posts about two of the men we discuss –  Fuller Long* & Morgan Thompson*.  The other men — Perry Brown*, Frank Hamilton* & Roger Walker* — can also be found in the database.  Watch out for blog posts on each of them.

*These names are pseudonyms, as required by Municipal Archives

Digital Harlem in Melbourne

I’ll be giving a presentation on Digital Harlem — “Digital History & Digital Harlem” — in Melbourne, on June 5, 2009, as part of the “Writing American History Conference” organized by the the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne

Harlem Undercover – the maps

My article, “Harlem Undercover: Vice Investigators, Race, and Prostitution, 1910-1930,” is now available in the May 2009 issue of the Journal of Urban History. The abstract is below:

In 1928, the Committee of Fourteen, New York City’s leading private antivice organization, employed a black teacher to conduct a five-month undercover investigation of Harlem’s nightlife.  It had been ten years since the committee had subjected the neighborhood to such intensive surveillance. Typically explained as the result of racism, that neglect also reflected white investigators’ increasing inability to gather information in Harlem. This article explores the work of investigators and the racial dynamics of undercover investigations to show how those difficulties grew from the congregation of waves of new black migrants in the neighborhood and, as Prohibition drew whites to Harlem, blacks’ retreat into private spaces, buffet flats, for their leisure. It uses the rich snapshot offered by the black investigator’s reports to reveal how, in the 1920s, black prostitutes, rather than being successfully regulated, blended into these new black spaces.

The article does not include maps, but the buffet flats that Claymes investigated, and nightclubs and speakeasies, are among the locations included in the ‘Digital Harlem’ database, so it is possible to generate maps of the spaces that it discusses.

What is a buffet flat?  An apartment that in the evening, and after nightclubs closed, operated as a venue offering alcohol, music, dancing, prostitutes, and, commonly, gambling, and, less often, rooms to which a couple could go. Their location in residential buildings offered a degree of protection from policing, and from whites: most proprietors and patrons of buffet flats were black.  Rent parties have become the best known of the entertainments on offer in 1920s Harlem, but buffet flats were more widespread and more central to black nightlife.  They did not charge admission, as the hosts of rent parties did, nor advertise widely, but they were ongoing concerns that offered privacy that parties did not.

Mapping the buffet flats identified by Raymond Claymes shows that they were spread throughout Harlem:

Buffet Flats

Adding nightclubs to the map reveals a different geography: those public venues, many of which admitted white as well as black patrons, were clustered below 140th Street and on and to the east of Seventh Avenue.  That area was both the core of Harlem, the area of the original black settlement, and close to New York’s white neighborhoods, and the commercialized leisure of West 125th Street, patronized largely by whites until the end of the 1920s:

Buffet Flats & Nightclubs

Adding speakeasies to the map shows that they were spread throughout the neighborhood, including  on Eighth Avenue and above 140th Street.  But above 140th Street, a largely residential district distant from slumming whites, buffet flats predominated:

Buffet Flats, Nightclubs & Speakeasies