“Digital Harlem,” Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University,  December 11, 2012

“Mapping Everyday Life: Digital Harlem, 1915-1930,” Digital History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, January 8, 2013

“Digital Harlem: Researching and Mapping Everyday Life in 1920s Harlem,” Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, January 9, 2013

“Harlem in Black and White: Mapping Race and Place in the 1920s,” Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, January 14, 2013

“Joining the Crowd: Connecting a Digital History Project to the Web,”  Data – Asset – Method Network Workshop – So you think you’re an expert?, University of Nottingham, January 15, 2013

There are several maps already posted on this blog that are related to the article’s arguments.  The police focus on street prostitution rather than what happened inside residences is evident in the map of prostitution arrests.  Divorce raids, which offer a glimpse of the privacy that unmarried couples could obtain in residences, are mapped in this post.  The night life venues that residents operated in their homes for a black clientele, away from the nightclubs and speakeasies frequented by whites, can be found on the map of Harlem’s nightlife.

116 West 144th St in 1920

The building I’m going to use as an example in this post is 116 West 144^thStreet.

116W144th in Google Earth

It is located in upper Harlem, right on the northern boundary of the black section in 1920.  A six-story apartment building, one of a pair, it still stands today. What drew this place to our attention was a fight that took place on West 144^th Street, a few buildings east of number 116, in June 1928. A man visiting the friends exchanged words with a 17 year old boy he believed was behaving inappropriately toward a girl, provoking a confrontation with the boy’s father, who we have given the pseudonym Morgan Thompson, that led him to cut the visitor 5 times with a knife.  When police came to 144^th Street that night to arrest Thompson, they found him asleep in his home, an apartment in 116 West 144^th Street.

Thompson lived with his wife of seventeen years, Margaret, a domestic servant and their two children, the seventeen-year-old boy, George, and fifteen-year-old Elizabeth.  The family had resided in New York City since 1917, living the whole eleven years at 116 West 144^th Street.  As late as 1910, the building and those surrounding it had been entirely occupied by whites.  By 1920, all the residents were black, and would remain so throughout the 1920s and 1930s, as the area occupied by blacks spread further north and west.  Just how many apartments there were in the building is unclear: the 1910 census recorded 29 households (as 118W144th), the 1920 census recorded 32, the 1925 State Census, 31 and the 1930 census only 25.

Long-Term Residents of 116 West 144th Street

A number of the first black residents remained for extended periods of time, as the Thompsons did.  While they moved out in 1929, four households residing there in 1920 were still in the building in 1930, 12 more remained from 1920 to at least 1925, and another five resident in 1925 were still there in 1930.  The census does not tell us anything about the relationships of those residents, but their long-term presence represents at least the raw material for some sort of community.

Address residents moved to or from

Tracking comings and goings from the building offers another perspective on community.  Its not possible to trace where most residents in the building came from, as the 1920s saw so many arrivals from outside the city, but it is possible to use census schedule to trace where many of those who left went to — 1/2 those who I can identify moved within a 7 block radius, close enough not to require the complete rupturing of any ties they had established

West Indian Households in 116 West 144th Street (highlighted in brown)

Identifying the building as occupied by blacks captures only part of its character. It is a picture drawn from one of the census questions.  Moving across the census schedule to the question about birthplace reveals diversity obscured by the focus on race:  ¾ of the building’s residents were West Indians like the Thompsons, whereas West Indians represented only about 20% of the overall population of Harlem. So this building appears to have been one in which West Indians gathered. With one in every five residents hailing from the West Indies, there was ample scope for them to live much of their lives in the company of fellow immigrants. That did not mean they were isolated from the larger African American community, but it certainly helped them retain an identity that created sometimes tense relationships with their black neighbors. West Indians could be distinguished from native-born blacks by their accent and language, and distinctive styles of worship, cuisine, and sartorial display. Color prejudice against dark Caribbeans also divided the two groups, as did the increasing prominence of West Indians as business owners, which stirred economic competition.

Households with Lodgers (highlighted in purple)

Neighborhood of 116W144th (click to enlarge)

Another feature obvious feature of 116 West 144^th Street was the presence of lodgers. The building went from having lodgers in almost half of the thirty-two households in 1920, to in over 2/3 in the depression year of 1930. As the black population of Harlem expanded and spread, the area of black residences did not keep pace with the number of newcomers. Rising demand for housing produced skyrocketing rents, encouraging landlords to subdivide apartments, and forcing families into fewer rooms, and into sharing that limited space with lodgers. Higher proportions of black households contained lodgers than did whites living in New York City, with the blocks between Lenox and Seventh Avenues became among the most densely packed residential streets in all of New York City, as crowded as the better known tenements of the Lower East Side.  The abundance of lodgers led to large numbers of cafeterias, cheap restaurants, tearooms, cabaret and movie theatres to cater to them. 116 West 144th Street was well-situated in this regard, located within 2 blocks of the Odeon, Roosevelt and Douglas Theatres, and the Lincoln Recreation Center, with an auditorium and swimming pool, and with the Savoy Ballroom and the Renaissance Ballroom and Theatre two blocks further away, and restaurants and other businesses on Avenues and 145^th Street.

Proportion of West Indian Households in 100-164 West 144th Street

116 West 144^th Street shared many of these features with the 14 other buildings neighboring it on the block between Lenox and 7^th Avenues. In total, 49 of the 322 households remained throughout the 1920s, just over 15% of the total, compared to 12.5% in #116 – although none did so at two addresses. West Indians resided in disproportionate numbers in those 14 buildings, with only 4 having less than double the proportion of West Indians in the population – but none had a larger proportion than number 116.  This block was evidently an area of Harlem in which West Indians gathered. The picture in regard to lodgers is more muddled. Number 116 had a slightly smaller proportion of households with lodgers in 1920 than the average for the street (44% vs 47.5%), and a significantly higher proportion in 1930 (69% vs 51%), with a wide variation among individual buildings in both years (27%-62% in 1920, 23%-81% in 1930).

The recently released 1940 census schedules reveal significant changes at 116 West 144th Street and the neighboring buildings. At #116, none of the households resident in 1920 or 1925 remained in 1940, and only 2 of those resident in 1930 remained in 1940, together with 6 households resident in 1935. As the Depression hit Harlem, many residents (including Morgan Thompson and Perry Brown) faced eviction and changed circumstances that dissolved the residential stability of the 1920s. The proportion of West Indian households at #116 dropped to only 42%, with the proportion including lodgers also dropping to 42%. The rest of the block had also changed significantly by 1940: across all 14 of the other buildings, only 9 households remained through the entire 1930s (3% compared to 15% in 1920-1930).  The West Indian population of the block dropped, from 46% of households to only 30%.  At odds with the change at #116, the proportion of households with lodgers increased, with only 3 of the 14 buildings having lodgers in less than 50% of households.

What I hope this example demonstrates is how census schedules individualize data about locations as well as their residents, allowing the focus to be narrowed from enumeration districts of several blocks to individual buildings.  As much as we think of the census as a source of information about individuals, it is also a picture of the places that made up the United States in the past.

This post is based on my presentation to “The 1940 Census as Digital Data,” a roundtable discussion organized by the Digital Innovation Lab at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill on April 10, 2012.

Session Abstract:

This session will explore historical analysis using virtual cities, that is, online reconstructions of historical urban spaces.  The presentations will feature projects that use a humanities approach rather than the social science methodology long associated with historical GIS. Whereas the later approach employed proprietary software such as ARC GIS, which aggregates data and opens it to statistical analysis, but cannot easily be disseminated online, a humanities approach uses new web friendly location-based tools such as Google Earth and Google Maps, and Flash software, to map data and generate visualizations and animations, and to query the patterns that are revealed. The shift in approach has brought a change in scale, from aggregates to individuals, posed different questions, and shifted the focus from the descriptive to the explanatory.  Those differences fuel the challenge virtual cities pose to our understanding of urban history.  The presentations will address the ways in which the creation of virtual cities changed how each scholar saw and understood his subject, and how he undertook and disseminated his research.  In this way, it will probe the substance of the spatial turn that has begun to occur in historical scholarship.

The session will feature presentations on three projects, including the first two winners of the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History. Stephen Robertson, of the University of Sydney, will discuss Digital Harlem, a site that maps everyday life in the neighborhood in the 1920s, focusing on places, events and individuals drawn from a range of legal records, newspapers and other archival sources.  Robert Allen, of the University of North Carolina, will discuss Going to the Show and its spin-off, Main Street Carolina, sites which use Sanborn maps and other material from the North Carolina collection to provide a comprehensive picture of movie-going in early-twentieth-century North Carolina, and to provide a platform for projects that gather and map data on the state’s downtowns.

We had hoped to solicit questions in advance, but that feature did not make it into the program.  If you do have questions you think I should address in the presentation, please ask them in the comments.

Abstract:

This paper examines Digital Harlem and what it reveals about the kind of place Harlem was in the 1920s. The site employs a database that integrates a diverse range of archival and published material on the basis of geographical location, and connects that material with a detailed map of the neighborhood overlaid on Google Maps, capturing something of the complexity of everyday life.

The site is dynamic, allowing the results of users’ searches for events, places and individuals to be displayed on the map, searches to be limited in various ways, including by date, and different searches to be layered on the same map to allow comparisons and show change over time. Events that occur at a sequence of locations, such as parades, are linked by lines; lines also link the locations of an individual’s activities with their residence. In both cases, the lines convey a sense of how people moved through Harlem and the rest of the city.

The site differs from traditional GIS in employing a qualitative approach, promoting a spatial analysis that highlights the variety of different places that made up the neighborhood, and locating the events and individuals found in 1920s Harlem in the context of those places.

One feature revealed by our analysis of the Digital Harlem is that whites remained a prominent presence in the neighborhood. To be sure, there were a multitude of places within Harlem controlled by blacks, mostly residences, but also churches, fraternal lodges and some dance halls and theatres. But white controlled businesses, public places and visitors are present throughout Harlem, fragmenting the black district in ways obscured by maps that represent the district as a solid, segregated area of black residences, and making Harlem a place of racial contestation, negotiation, resistance, and accommodation.

Recently, other digital scholars have begun to discuss engaging with this online encyclopedia. Eric Meyer, in the Joint Information Systems Committee report on the usage of digital resources published last year, suggested including appropriate links in Wikipedia as a way to increase discovery of digital projects. University of Houston librarians reported earlier in 2011 on a project to ‘evangelize’ the content of their digital library on Wikipedia by uploading images and inserting them into appropriate articles. Engaging with Wikipedia is relatively straightforward for libraries and archives with images and other media they are prepared to put into the public domain. For digital humanities projects that involve something more than digitization, however, the task is more complex, requiring editing Wikipedia entries. The Writing History in the Digital Age collection to which I recently contributed includes several insightful chapters on writing for Wikipedia. But much of the discussion has focused on contributions by students, not scholars. One reason is that an author cannot straightforwardly claim credit for a contribution in the ways to which academics are accustomed. It is also the case that historians feel they have little meaningful to gain from engaging with Wikipedia. However true that might be for some scholars, it is not the case for those creating digital history.

The 5 Pillars (fundamental principles) of Wikipedia

Making a contribution to an entry that connects it to a digital history project is not straightforward.  Most fundamentally, where sites like Digital Harlem place a premium on providing access to primary sources, Wikipedia guidelines suggest limited use of such material – the governing principle is that  “articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources….A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements that any educated person, with access to the source but without specialist knowledge, will be able to verify are supported by the source.”[1]  At the same time, in a particular problem for Digital Harlem, the policy against including copyrighted material prevents the inclusion of screenshots of maps from the site in Wikipedia entries as Google Maps is copyrighted. Both those disconnects between Digital Harlem and Wikipedia’s approach can be mediated by this blog. Wikipedia‘s guidelines do state that blogs “are largely not acceptable as sources,” as they are self-published. Moreover, citing yourself is identified as a potential conflict of interest. However, the guidelines allow some leeway to those editing in an area in which they have academic expertise, for who it is the case that, “Using material you yourself have written or published is allowed within reason, but only if it is relevant and conforms to the content policies. Excessive self-citation is strongly discouraged.” In addition, it is possible for me to edit entries using the Digital Harlem Blog as a source on the basis of the exception for “Self-published expert sources…produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications.” To date, while I have been queried about using this blog as a source, I have not been challenged nor have my contributions been removed, in large part because the editors I’ve encountered have been appreciative of my willingness to contribute my expertise, which is not always the case. [2]

Wikipedia entry on Harlem

The remaining issue is identifying articles to edit that connect a project to Wikipedia. There is a single Wikipedia entry on Harlem, of which one section is devoted to the history of the neighborhood, with an organization that confusing spreads historical content across the historical and thematic sections.  My contributions on everyday life in the 1920s could have gone in a section on the neighborhood as a ‘center of black life,’ or one on the 1920s focused on the Harlem Renaissance and Prohibition, ending up in the later after discussions with the editors most involved with the entry.  I’m still trying to work out how to edit the sections on culture, crime and politics to connect them to Digital Harlem; hopefully other editors will undertake a reorganization of the entry that will make that task easier.

Wikipedia entries related to 1920s Harlem (click to enlarge)

With much of what is dealt with in Digital Harlem not easily incorporated into the Harlem entry, I have had to identify a variety of narrower topics.  To date, I have found twenty-nine entries related to 1920s Harlem, of which I have edited eight. The challenge of fitting in with an entry’s existing organization and approach is exacerbated in the case of such topics, which attract less attention from editors and consequently generally have so many pieces missing that there is no obvious place for what I had to contribute.  One example is numbers gambling, which has an entry so confusing in its organization and content that it requires a major rewrite to accommodate the material in this blog — which for the moment would take more time than I have to give this endeavour.

I’m obviously still in the early days of crowdsourcing with Digital Harlem, so it is still too soon to assess its impact on either Wikipedia or in bringing traffic to this blog and the site. In the later case, just over 200 visitors to the blog have been referred by Wikipedia in the last 3 months, almost 1/10 of the total who have been referred by links, but only about 3% of all the visitors in that time.  Those numbers are not particularly significant, but they come from only a small proportion of the entries to which this project has something to contribute, and they don’t measure how many people have read the content from Digital Harlem that I have contributed to Wikipedia – the Harlem entry alone has been viewed over 48,000 times in just the last 30 days.

Numbers Arrests, 1925 (Arrests on the street in blue)

Numbers gambling formed part of the rhythm of Harlem’s street life. A map of arrests for playing the numbers in 1925 features almost every corner on Fifth, Lenox, Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Those arrests generally took place in the morning, when players seeking to place bets on their way to work and before before the publication of the daily number at 10 a.m. created a flurry of activity.  By all accounts, making such arrests would not have been difficult: the New York Age reported that runners and collectors followed “a regular schedule each morning, picking up their collections and there is nothing clandestine or hidden in their movements,” as they walked “boldly and openly along, picking up the slips with the money from the players on the streets.” (1)

Few details of what occurred in these cases appear in the legal record, with the clerks in the Magistrate’s Courts generally concerned only with recording the number of slips found in the defendant’s possession, but they occasionally included some mention of the circumstances of the arrest, such as one officer’s statement that the he had watched a man “accept a slip of paper and some money in coins from an unknown man” on the corner of 5th Avenue and 130th Street, and then followed him to 5th Avenue and 129th Street and seen a similar transaction take place. (2)  Other officers observed individuals being approached by a series of people, entering into conversation with them, and then accepting money and slips. Neither police or observers got close enough to hear the conversations between runners and players, but those exchanges constituted a crucial part of playing the numbers.  One exchange that did make it into the record, as part of a statment describing the lead up to an assault, began when a runner called over the superintendent of the building outside which he was collecting bets:

“Fellow ain’t you playing?”

“No, but I had a dream last night.”

“What did you dream.”

“I saw a clock and the hands of the clock, one hand on five and the large hand on eight.”

“Yea. You ought to play five eighteen.”

“I don’t play numbers but give me 18, I’ll play a combination. Five and five is ten and eight is eighteen.”

The superintendent placed a bet of 18 cents, and his number came up, a win that should have been worth $16.50, but the runner said his banker had gone broke and could not pay. (3)

In addition to placing bets, residents discussed numbers on the streets.  “It is a common sight, of mornings, to see two or three individuals, and they are not always of the lower strata, putting their heads together over slips containing presumably the numbers they have played,” according to one observer. (4)  Further evidence of the ubiquity of such discussions can be found in cartoonist E. Simms Campbell‘s widely reproduced 1932 “Nightclub Map of Harlem,” which featured illustrations of street life alongside its better known images of Harlem’s performers and venues.  The map features four different, widely dispersed groups whose involvement in numbers gambling is indicated by the captions, “What’s de numbah?” and “What’s th’ number?”

"A Nighclub Map of Harlem" (1932), E. Simms Campbell

The dispersion and diversity of the four groups capture the ubiquity of numbers in Harlem:

Nightclub Map of Harlem, Detail #1

(#1) A pair of men (perhaps one is a runner?) on the corner of 131st Street and Lenox Avenue, identified as one of the seedier parts of Harlem by the nearby garbage and the illegal marijuana sale taking place just down the street.

Nightclub Map of Harlem, Detail #2

(#2) A woman shopping for dinner (with a chicken in her bag) and a clergyman, alongside a collection of street vendors and street speakers.  These figures are clearly represent respectable Harlem, with the churchman’s involvement a dig at the hypocrisy of many clergy’s opposition to playing the numbers.  Their location amongst street vendors, and the bag indicating that the woman is in the midst of grocery shopping, intertwines numbers gambling with everyday activities.

Nightclub Map of Harlem, Detail #3

(#3) A fashionably dressed woman and man (perhaps a runner) on Seventh Avenue, Harlem’s main street, which is captioned “or heaven,” just uptown from the most famous nightclubs.  This couple are very different in character and location from #1 and #2, indicating the reach of numbers across the strata of Harlem’s places and population;

Nightclub Map of Harlem, Detail #4

(#4) Two officers playing cards in the police station, almost certainly intended to indicate their involvement in, rather than policing of, numbers.  That one officer is white highlights the spread of numbers beyond the black community in the 1930s

—

SOURCES:

(1) Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson and Graham White, Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars (Harvard University Press, 2010), 67-68

(2) Ibid, 135

(3) Ibid, 88; and DA File 181888 (1930)

(4) Ibid, 67

In the 1920s, as Harlem emerged as the largest black city in the world, a significant white presence remained in the neighborhood.  Whites not only frequented nightlife, they owned and operated the vast majority of Harlem’s businesses, policed its streets, staffed its schools and hospital, drove its public transport and most of the vehicles travelling its streets, delivered goods, collected rent and insurance payments, and patronized sporting events. Scholars have only made briefly mention of this presence and its impact on everyday life, portraying race relations as harmonious and inconsequential in a neighborhood represented as a segregated refuge from whites.  Drawing on black newspapers and legal records, and using the Digital Harlem site to map and visualize that evidence of the white presence, reveals a very different picture, of interracial encounters that often led to conflict, and of Harlem as a place of contestation, negotiation, resistance, and accommodation.

The map below captures part of the white presence in Harlem, locating the institutions staffed by whites, some of the posts patrolled by police, and the routes traveled by the buses and streetcars driven by whites.  The streets serviced by public transport also featured the neighborhood’s businesses, most staffed as well as owned by whites.  Other maps relating to the white presence in Harlem are already on the blog, in posts on traffic accidents, street vendors, and ice dealers.

Whites in Harlem (Bus routes, Streetcar Routes and Police Patrols appear in the list of Event Types)