Wanderlust World Wanderlust World Harlem traces its European settlement to 1658, when the Dutch established the village of Nieuw Haarlem (named after Haarlem, Netherlands) as part of the New Amsterdam colony.
The settlement occupied what's now East Harlem, centered around present-day First Avenue and 125th Street. For nearly two centuries, it remained a rural outpost with farms and country estates for wealthy New Yorkers.
Elevated railroads in the 1880s sparked residential development. By the early 1900s, Harlem had become a middle-class white neighborhood. The Great Migration (1910s-1930s) brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South, establishing Harlem as the cultural capital of Black America and birthing the Harlem Renaissance.
Street names like Haarlem, Amsterdam, and St. Nicholas preserve the Dutch heritage. The original Nieuw Haarlem boundaries roughly corresponded to today's East Harlem/El Barrio.