Harlem’s Sugar Hill and Hamilton Heights neighborhoods boast tree-lined blocks and mansion-like brownstones.
Book Review: ‘Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill: Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries’ by Davida Siwisa JamesGet the top Racial Equity stories of the day from America’s most influential oldest continuously published Black newspaper, serving the nation’s largest Black and brown community. Sign up to stay connected.
In her new book, “Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill: Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries,” Davida Siwisa James recalled her shock every time she witnessed “the pitying looks and remarks that greeted me whenever I mentioned that I had once lived in Harlem…Trying to convince people that Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill were beautiful neighborhoods, with stunning architecture and mansions, fell on deaf ears,” she writes in the book’s preface.
James makes a concerted effort to document the history-rich trajectory of Sugar Hill and Hamilton Heights in her book. “Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill” is a detailed account of the growth of these Harlem neighborhoods—and how that growth was in line with the overall development and increasing significance of Manhattan.
Referencing documents that point to the arrival of the Dutch in the 1600s and detail their construction of stone houses, farms, and forts as they moved throughout the Lenape people’s Mannahata island, the book explains how Harlem started out as faraway farmland, miles from downtown Manhattan; was incorporated as the Village of New Haarlem in 1658; and came to be seen as a country retreat for the wealthy in the 1700s.
The area’s earliest Black residents were enslaved farmworkers although, over time, “Freed Blacks who were still working uptown had begun to form pockets of communities,” James writes. Harlem Heights is where George Washington and his Revolutionary War soldiers were sequestered at the Morris Mansion after fighting the Battle of Harlem Heights. By 1800, Alexander Hamilton had meticulously planned and had his only home, the Grange, constructed at 141st Street and Amsterdam and Convent Avenues.
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