Sugar Hill (Manhattan)

Sugar Hill is a neighborhood in the northern part of Hamilton Heights, which itself is a subdivision of Harlem, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan. The neighborhood is defined by 155th Street to the north, 145th Street to the south, Edgecombe Avenue to the east, and Amsterdam Avenue to the west. The name originated in the 1920's, when the area became a popular place to live for wealthy African Americans.

Named to identify the "sweet life" in Harlem, it was a popular residential area of rowhouses for wealthy African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance, including W.E.B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall, Adam Clayton Powell, and Duke Ellington. Langston Hughes wrote about its relative affluence in relation to Harlem in his essay "Down and Under in Harlem" published in the The New Republic in 1944.^[1]

Sugar Hill was made a municipal historic district by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2000.

Rap group The Sugarhill Gang and rap record label Sugar Hill Records pay homage to the neighborhood in their names.

Notes

↑ "If you are white and are reading this vignette, don't take it for granted that all Harlem is a slum. It isn't. There are big apartment houses up on the hill, Sugar Hill, and up by City College -- nice high-rent-houses with elevators and doormen, where Canada Lee lives, and W. C. Handy, and the George S. Schuylers, and the Walter Whites, where colored families send their babies to private kindergartens and their youngsters to Ethical Culture School."
-- from "Down Under in Harlem" by Langston Hughes, New Republic (March 27, 1944): 404-5