The radio came on at six, set somewhere on the second floor, and a trumpet line spilled down through the fire escape onto 116th Street. By the time the man at the corner unlocked the bodega and the El going overhead at Park Avenue shook a few flakes of paint off the tin ceiling, the whole block was awake. The smell off La Marqueta, four blocks long under the viaduct, was bacalao and oregano and frying plantains. They called it El Barrio. The official maps said East Harlem. Nobody you knew used that name.
East Harlem, The Place
East Harlem sits in upper Manhattan, north of 96th Street and east of Fifth Avenue, running up to about 142nd Street where Harlem proper begins on the west side and the East River closes off the rest. Central Park ends at its southwest corner. The Upper East Side ends at its southern edge, a line so sharp that for decades 96th Street worked as a class border.
Two pieces of transit run the spine of the neighbourhood. The 6 train under Lexington Avenue, and the Metro-North viaduct on Park Avenue, the steel-and-brick structure that gave the eastern blocks their factory-yard feel and gave the whole place its rhythm.
The housing tells the rest of the story. Surviving five and six-storey tenements from the 1880s, interrupted by enormous brick towers from the 1940s and 1950s when the city tore down whole blocks and built NYCHA public housing on the cleared ground. East River Houses opened in 1941, Wagner Houses in 1958, Jefferson Houses in 1959. The population in those years pushed above 200,000.
How East Harlem Became Puerto Rican
Before the Puerto Ricans
Before it was El Barrio, East Harlem was Italian. By the 1920s, the blocks between 96th and 125th Streets held the largest Italian-American community in the United States, roughly 100,000 people, three times the size of the more famous Little Italy down on Mulberry Street.
Italian Harlem was organised by village. On East 112th Street there was a settlement from Bari. On East 107th between First Avenue and the East River, people from Sarno near Naples. Each pocket kept its own dialect, its own saint, its own bakery. Smaller German and Jewish populations filled in the rest, with a Jewish core around the eastern blocks below 110th.
The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, still celebrated every August by the Giglio Society of East Harlem, is what is left of that earlier neighbourhood. After the Second World War, the Italian families moved out: to the North Bronx, to Queens, to the southern edge of Brooklyn. The tenements they left behind filled up almost immediately.
The Puerto Ricans Arrive
The legal door opened in 1917. The Jones-Shafroth Act made all Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens, which meant a ticket on a boat from San Juan to a New York pier, no passport, no quota. The first wave was small. A few thousand people, mostly young men, settling first in the Lower East Side and then drifting north to a thin strip around 110th Street and Lexington Avenue, where rent was cheap and the Italians had not yet started to leave.
That early enclave was called Spanish Harlem before anyone called it El Barrio. By the 1930s the bodegas and botánicas were established, and the Puerto Rican Merchants Association formed in 1946 to defend them. The neighbourhood was bilingual but still mixed.
Then the door swung wide. After 1945, Pan Am and other carriers cut the New York to San Juan fare to under fifty dollars. Air travel turned a slow boat ride into a four-hour flight. Between 1946 and 1953, 173,500 Puerto Ricans arrived in New York. By 1960, the Puerto Rican-born population on the mainland had jumped from under 70,000 to over 615,000. Most of them came through East Harlem first.
El Barrio at Its Peak
The push was Operation Bootstrap, launched in 1947, the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments’ plan to industrialise the island. Factories went up in the coastal cities. Sugar and coffee collapsed. People in the mountain towns who had grown coffee for three generations woke up to find the market gone.
By the 1950s the Puerto Rican population in East Harlem hit 63,000 and kept climbing. La Marqueta, the long market that Fiorello LaGuardia had built in 1936 under the Park Avenue viaduct to give the old pushcart vendors a permanent home, became the cultural centre. At its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, more than 500 vendors worked the five glass-and-steel halls between 111th and 116th Street, serving 25,000 customers a day. The Jewish and Italian sellers stayed, working alongside the new arrivals.
The sound of the neighbourhood was changing too. In an East Harlem walkup, a fourteen-year-old Eddie Palmieri formed a group called The Mamboys with his classmates. Tito Puente had grown up a few blocks away on 110th.
By the mid-1960s, when Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci founded Fania Records, the music that would soon be called salsa was already spilling out of the bodegas and the corner barbershops. Willie Colón called the trombone sound “the roar of elephants.” You heard it from the Lower East Side to El Barrio to the South Bronx.
And then there were the Young Lords. Originally a Chicago street gang, the New York branch turned political in the summer of 1969. Within months they had become the most visible Puerto Rican civil rights organisation in the city.
On 28 December 1969, after the pastor of the First Spanish Methodist Church at 163 East 111th Street refused to let them use the building for community programs, the Young Lords occupied the church. They held it for eleven days. Inside, they ran a free breakfast program, basic health testing, a daycare and Puerto Rican history classes. They renamed it the People’s Church.
That occupation is the moment most often pointed to as the start of the Nuyorican movement. The poets came right behind. Pedro Pietri, Miguel Algarín, Sandra María Esteves, Miguel Piñero. The Nuyorican Poets Café opened in Algarín’s East Village apartment in 1973 and later moved to 3rd Street, but the worldview was forged in El Barrio. “Nuyorican” had started as an insult on the island. By the mid-1970s it was a flag.
The Change
The peak did not last. From the 1970s on, two things happened. Puerto Rican families began leaving East Harlem for the Bronx, for Connecticut, for central Florida, for Pennsylvania. Some moved back to the island. Return migration was real, and so was outward chain migration to the next place that was a little quieter and a little cheaper.
At the same time, new arrivals filled in. Dominicans first, then a large wave of Mexicans starting in the 1990s. The Mexican population of East Harlem went from 2,450 in one count to over 10,000 a decade later. Today the taquerias along Lexington and the Mexican bakeries on 116th are as visible as the cuchifrito places that came before them.
And from the south, gentrification. The line at 96th Street, that hard class boundary, has been moving north for twenty years. Upper East Side rents push tenants up. Investment dollars push tenement buildings to be renovated, sold, flipped. The Puerto Rican share of the neighbourhood, once well over half, is now around a fifth.
The Landmarks of Puerto Rican East Harlem
El Museo del Barrio (1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street). Founded in 1969 by the artist and educator Raphael Montañez Ortiz with a coalition of Puerto Rican parents, teachers, and artists who were tired of mainstream museums ignoring Latino work. It started in a classroom inside P.S. 125 on West 123rd Street. In 1977 it moved into the neo-classical Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue and helped found the Museum Mile. It is still the oldest U.S. museum dedicated to Latino art.
La Marqueta (Park Avenue, 111th to 116th Streets). Built in 1936 under Mayor LaGuardia to bring the pushcart trade indoors. Within four years it was serving 25,000 people a day. By the 1950s it was the daily market of Puerto Rican New York, a place to buy bacalao and yuca and recao and a recording of Cortijo y su Combo on the same trip. Most of the original sheds were lost or shrunk over the decades. Two remain, and the city is still trying to figure out what to do with the rest.
Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center (1680 Lexington Avenue at 106th Street). The neo-Grec building was originally Public School 72, built in 1879 by David I. Stagg with an annex by C. B. J. Snyder in 1911. The Board of Education closed it in 1975.
In the mid-1990s it reopened as a cultural centre and was named for the Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, who lived intermittently in El Barrio from the 1930s to the early 1950s. It is now a city landmark and home to El Taller Boricua and Los Pleneros de la 21.
The People’s Church / First Spanish Methodist Church (163 East 111th Street). The Young Lords occupied this church for eleven days at the end of 1969 and a second time the following year. Inside they ran the free breakfast, the lead-poisoning screenings, the political education. The building is still standing. A street co-naming in 2014 designated the corner of 111th and Lexington as Young Lords Way.
The Graffiti Hall of Fame (East 106th Street and Park Avenue). Started in 1980 by Ray “Sting Ray” Rodriguez as a safe wall for graffiti writers to practice, set inside the playground of the Jackie Robinson Educational Complex. The mural has been repainted, repainted again, taken over by a rotating cast of international street artists, and is still going forty-five years later. The motto: Strictly Kings or Better.
The Three Kings Day Parade. Organised by El Museo del Barrio every January since 1977, the parade runs from 106th Street and Park Avenue up to 115th and Park, with kids, camels, giant puppets, and a celebration at the museum after. It is the largest and longest-running Three Kings Day event in the city.
The casitas. In the 1970s, when entire blocks of tenements were burning out and being demolished, Puerto Rican neighbours in East Harlem and the South Bronx began building small wooden shacks on the vacant lots. They were copies of the rural balloon-frame houses of the Puerto Rican countryside.
The casitas in El Barrio were gathering places. They had gardens, plena music, dominoes. Most are gone now. Rincón Criollo, the most famous of them, lives on in the South Bronx at 158th and Brook Avenue.
Where the East Harlem Puerto Ricans Came From
Every region of Puerto Rico sent people to East Harlem. But the migration was uneven, and the dial points clearly at two zones.
The first is the central mountain range, the coffee belt. Utuado, Lares, Adjuntas, Yauco, Jayuya, Maricao. Coffee had been the island’s premier export crop into the early 1900s, but a hurricane in 1928 and a second one in 1932 broke the back of the small farms. Operation Bootstrap finished the job after 1947. Whole villages emptied, and a lot of those families bought one-way tickets to Idlewild Airport in Queens, then took the subway up to 116th Street, where a cousin or an aunt was waiting.
The second is the south coast, the old sugar belt. Ponce, Yauco, Guayanilla, Guánica, Salinas. The big sugar centrales mechanised through the 1940s and 1950s and the cane cutters lost their work in waves.
Many were recruited directly into seasonal contracts on East Coast farms, and many of those contracts ended in a New York City address. San Juan and the Bayamón metro area sent people too, often the more educated and white-collar arrivals. The connection between them and the mountain people, who had been strangers on the island, became closer on 116th Street than it had ever been at home.
If your family came through El Barrio, there is a strong chance the line runs back to a coffee farm in the central mountains or a sugar town on the southern coast. Those are the two places on the island where the twentieth century broke hardest.
East Harlem Today
The honest count first. Puerto Ricans are now a minority in East Harlem, around a fifth of the population by recent estimates, down from a clear majority in the 1960s. The younger Latino demographic in the neighbourhood skews Mexican and Dominican. The 6 train still runs the spine, but the gentrification line from the Upper East Side has crossed 96th Street and is working its way up.
And yet. El Museo del Barrio is still on Fifth Avenue. The Three Kings Parade still steps off in January with a camel and a brass band. The Graffiti Hall of Fame still gets repainted every spring. Los Pleneros de la 21 still teach plena and bomba out of the Julia de Burgos centre. The Boricua flag still hangs in apartment windows from 116th up to 125th, and the cuchifrito places, fewer than they used to be, still serve alcapurrias at three in the afternoon.
A diaspora neighbourhood does not have to be a closed museum. The Puerto Rican East Harlem of 1962 will not come back, but the institutions and the names and the holidays are anchored. The story continues in two directions at once. Outward, to wherever the great-grandchildren of the Operation Bootstrap generation are now. Inward, to the people who stayed, and to the new arrivals who are starting their own version of the same chapter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Puerto Ricans settle in East Harlem?
East Harlem already had a small Puerto Rican enclave around 110th Street and Lexington Avenue by the 1920s, formed after the Jones Act of 1917 made Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens. When the Great Migration began after 1945, families followed the chain to cousins and friends already there. The Italian community was leaving for the outer boroughs, leaving cheap tenement rentals behind.
Is East Harlem still Puerto Rican today?
It is still culturally Puerto Rican but no longer demographically dominant. Puerto Ricans are roughly a fifth of the population today, down from a clear majority in the 1960s. Many families moved to the Bronx, Connecticut, Florida, or back to the island, and Mexican and Dominican arrivals now make up a larger share of the younger Latino population.
What are the most famous Puerto Rican landmarks in East Harlem?
El Museo del Barrio at 1230 Fifth Avenue, La Marqueta under the Park Avenue viaduct between 111th and 116th, the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center at 1680 Lexington Avenue, the People’s Church at 163 East 111th Street where the Young Lords held their 1969 occupation, and the Graffiti Hall of Fame at 106th Street and Park Avenue. The annual Three Kings Day Parade is the largest cultural event.
Where in Puerto Rico did the East Harlem Puerto Ricans come from?
From across the whole island, but disproportionately from the central mountain coffee region (Utuado, Lares, Adjuntas, Yauco, Jayuya) and the southern sugar coast (Ponce, Yauco, Guayanilla, Guánica). Both economies collapsed in the mid-twentieth century, the coffee farms first after the 1928 hurricane and the sugar centrales later through mechanisation, leaving little work behind. A smaller, often more educated group came from the San Juan and Bayamón metro area.
When did Puerto Ricans first arrive in East Harlem?
The first Puerto Ricans settled in East Harlem in the years after 1917, when the Jones Act granted U.S. citizenship and allowed travel without a passport. A small enclave formed around 110th Street and Lexington Avenue in the 1920s. The much larger Great Migration ran from the late 1940s into the 1960s, peaking in the 1950s, and is what made El Barrio the Puerto Rican capital of the mainland.
If your family’s story passed through East Harlem, or a coffee farm in Utuado, or a sugar town on the southern coast, Atlas of Home can help you trace the line. From the village in Puerto Rico, to El Barrio, to wherever the journey has taken you since.