Harlem in the context of "Manhattan"

Upper Manhattan is the northern section of the New York City borough of Manhattan. Its southern boundary has been variously defined, but some of the most common usages are 96th Street, 110th Street (the northern boundary of Central Park), 125th Street, or 155th Street. The term Uptown can refer to Upper Manhattan, but is often used more generally for neighborhoods above 59th Street; in the broader definition, Uptown encompasses Upper Manhattan.

Upper Manhattan is generally taken to include the neighborhoods of Manhattan Inwood, Washington Heights (including Fort George, Sherman Creek and Hudson Heights), Harlem (including Sugar Hill, Hamilton Heights and Manhattanville), East Harlem, Morningside Heights, and Manhattan Valley (in the Upper West Side).

The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural movement of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics, and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeastern United States and the Midwestern United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African-American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.

Though geographically tied to Harlem, few of the associated visual artists lived in the area itself, while those who did (such as Aaron Douglas) had migrated elsewhere by the end of World War II. Many francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris, France, were also influenced by the movement. Harlem had also seen significant Black immigration from British, French and other colonies in the Caribbean. The zenith of this "flowering of Negro literature", as James Weldon Johnson described the Harlem Renaissance, took place between approximately 1924—when Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance—and 1929, the year of the stock-market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. The Harlem Renaissance is considered to have been a creative crucible for African-American art-making and its institutionalisation within white-dominated museums and cultural institutions.

Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday made significant contributions to jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly influenced by jazz instrumentalists, inspired a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. Holiday was known for her vocal delivery and improvisational skills.

After a turbulent childhood, Holiday began singing in nightclubs in Harlem where she was heard by producer John Hammond, who liked her voice. Holiday signed a recording contract with Brunswick in 1935. Her collaboration with Teddy Wilson produced the hit "What a Little Moonlight Can Do", which became a jazz standard. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Holiday had mainstream success on labels such as Columbia and Decca. However, by the late 1940s, she was beset with legal troubles and drug abuse. After a short prison sentence, Holiday performed a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall.She was a successful concert performer throughout the 1950s, with two further sold-out shows at Carnegie Hall. Because of personal struggles and an altered voice, Holiday's final recordings were met with mixed reaction, but were mild commercial successes. Her final album, Lady in Satin, was released in 1958. Holiday died of cirrhosis and heart failure on July 17, 1959, at age 44.

Fifth Avenue is a major thoroughfare in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The avenue runs south from West 143rd Street in Harlem to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. The section in Midtown Manhattan is one of the most expensive shopping streets in the world.

Fifth Avenue carries two-way traffic between 143rd and 135th Streets, and one-way traffic southbound for the rest of its route. The entire avenue carried two-way traffic until 1966. From 124th to 120th Streets, Fifth Avenue is interrupted by Marcus Garvey Park, with southbound traffic diverted around the park via Mount Morris Park West and northbound to Madison Avenue. Most of the avenue has a bus lane, but no bike lane. Fifth Avenue is the traditional route for many celebratory parades in New York City and is closed to automobile traffic on several Sundays each year.

The West Side of Manhattan refers to the side of Manhattan Island that abuts the Hudson River and faces the U.S. state of New Jersey. The major neighborhoods on the West Side are (from north to south) Inwood, Hudson Heights, Washington Heights, West Harlem, Morningside Heights, Manhattan Valley, the Upper West Side, Hell's Kitchen, Chelsea, the West Village, SoHo, and Tribeca. The 8th Avenue and West Side subway lines connect all parts of the West Side.

The main north–south roads servicing the West Side are the Henry Hudson Parkway in the north and the West Side Highway in the south. The Hudson River Greenway separates these highways from the island's western shore.

Madison Avenue is a north–south avenue in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, New York, that carries northbound one-way traffic. It runs from Madison Square (at 23rd Street) to meet the southbound Harlem River Drive at 142nd Street, passing through Midtown, the Upper East Side (including Carnegie Hill), East Harlem, and Harlem. It is named after and arises from Madison Square, which is itself named after James Madison, the fourth President of the United States.

Madison Avenue was not part of the original Manhattan street grid established in the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, and was carved between Park Avenue (formerly Fourth) and Fifth Avenue in 1836, due to the effort of lawyer and real estate developer Samuel B. Ruggles, who had previously purchased and developed New York's Gramercy Park in 1831, and convinced the authorities to create Lexington Avenue and Irving Place between Fourth Avenue (now Park Avenue South) and Third Avenue in order to service it.

African Americans constitute one of the longer-running ethnic presences in New York City, home to the largest urban African American population, and the world's largest Black population of any city outside Africa, by a significant margin. As of the 2010 census, the number of African Americans residing in New York City was over 2 million. The highest concentration of African Americans are in Brooklyn, Harlem, Queens, and The Bronx. New York City is also home to the highest number of immigrants from the Caribbean.

Since the earlier part of the 19th century, there has been a large presence of African Americans in New York City. Early Black communities were created after the state's final abolition of slavery in 1827. The metropolis quickly became home to one of the most sizeable populations of emancipated African Americans. But Blacks did not receive equal voting rights in New York until the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution in 1870. New York City and other northern cities saw a sharp rise in their Black populations in the wake of Jim Crow in the South. In the early 1900s, many African Americans moved to Harlem, due to a number of factors, including many Black migrants relocating from the South to the North. But the demographic shift would change once again in the 20th century. In 1936, overcrowding in Harlem caused scores of African Americans to leave and move to Bedford-Stuyvesant, which eventually became the second largest Black community in New York City.