HARLEM STREET: EIGHTH AVENUE AND WEST 140TH STREET
MARCH 2, 1938. ABBOTT FILE 287

HARLEM STREET II
422-424 Lenox Avenue betweeb West 131st and 132nd Streets
JUNE 14, 1938. ABBOTT FILE 304

From the end of World War I until the depression, 250,000 African-Americans moved to west Harlem and established what the WPA Guide to New York City called "a cosmopolitan Negro capital which exert[ed] an influence over Negroes everywhere." In 1938, Abbott portrayed two west Harlem street scenes. The first showed an El station at the busy intersection of Eighth Avenue and 140th Street. In an effort to capture "the typical," she chose this intersection over the nearby "Striver's Row," a famous block of elegant 1891 town houses, where many of Harlem's elite lived. Returning to the neighborhood three months later, she photographed a row of houses and storefronts on Lenox Avenue between 131st and 132nd Streets, around the corner from the Church of God. The block included a church, a barber shop, a beauty salon, a photography studio, and a greengrocer. In Abbott's photograph, residents and storekeepers bide their time on stoops and at windows, as a smartly dressed shopper strides by. Of Abbott's two Harlem street scenes, the second better conveys the area's distinctive character.

The 1940 demolition of the El brought additional light to the Eighth Avenue block, which has been renovated as part of the Striver's Row urban renewal project. In 1977, Eighth Avenue was renamed Frederick Douglass Boulevard, in memory of the legendary African-American abolitionist. Refaced with tan brick, the Lenox Avenue houses are fully rented, but a similar row across the street is abandoned.

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