Governor Hochul signed the declaration establishing the Central Harlem North Historic District in New York County (aka, Manhattan).

This new North Historic District is primarily residential and encompasses approximately ten city blocks. The district features late nineteenth and early twentieth-century brick and stone row houses, tenement houses, apartment houses, churches, playgrounds, retail and restaurants, a library, and a school. The period of significance dates from ca. 1893, the date of the earliest known construction within the district, to 1952.

The district illustrates the historical development patterns of Harlem as a Black working-class residential neighborhood, which was heavily tied to the growth of New York City’s public transportation systems and the real estate efforts of Philip Payton Jr.’s Afro-American Realty Company. In addition, the district comprises an excellent, intact grouping of late nineteenth-century single-family row houses and new law tenements.

Long-standing community anchors include the West 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library (now known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture), Mother AME Zion Church (designed by George W. Foster Jr., one of America’s first African American architects), and the West 135th Street YMCA (an integral center of New York’s Black community and one of the most important locations of the Harlem Renaissance). The district also includes the house of one of the Harlem Renaissance’s and early twentieth century’s most important civil rights leaders: writer, lawyer, and diplomat James Weldon Johnson. Johnson was National Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was co-author of what has become the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

Learn more here (Warning, it’s an exhaustive, building-by-building analysis. FNO - For Nerds Only):

Legislative Lunch