No, Morningside Heights Is Not Harlem
Activists brazenly refer to Morningside Heights as Harlem. The problem? They are ignoring our community’s rich history to manufacture political talking points.
In December, as Columbia students gathered for the yearly Tree Lighting Ceremony, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) protesters took to College Walk to protest the event. In an Instagram post advertising the demonstration, CUAD called the annual ceremony a “distraction” from Columbia’s gate closures, which they claim “lock Harlem residents out of a public campus and shut off acres of land in the middle of Harlem.”
There has been no shortage of controversy (and justifiably so) surrounding Columbia’s new Manhattanville campus and its estimated displacement of up to thousands of West Harlem residents. However, the claim that even Morningside Heights, the home of Columbia University since 1897, is in the middle of Harlem has gained traction in recent years.
“‘Morningside Heights’ is gentrified Harlem,” Columbia Engineering Apartheid Divest declared in an infographic posted to Instagram in August 2024. Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) addresses their press releases from Harlem, and so does CUAD. They are not just labeling Columbia’s expansions north of 125th Street as part of Harlem—they consider the main campus between 114th and 120th Streets as part of Harlem as well.
The problem is that Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus, where the Tree Lighting Ceremony occurred, is exactly that: a campus in the middle of Morningside Heights, not Harlem.
Last spring, I was a guest columnist for the Columbia Daily Spectator, where I wrote extensively about the history and character of New York neighborhoods. The history of upper Manhattan shows that Morningside Heights has always been a distinct neighborhood from Harlem.
Morningside Heights’ cliffs and steep topography made it a relatively remote piece of land in Manhattan for much of the 17th and 18th centuries, and few Dutch settlers lived in the area. This changed in 1816, when the Society for New York Hospital purchased the land where Columbia’s main campus sits today and constructed the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum in 1821.
In 1843, a second asylum, the Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum, opened on land purchased from the Society in 1831. With the construction of these institutions, speculators began to purchase and hold land in the area. Yet, even as the Upper West Side and Hamilton Heights began to develop, Morningside Heights’ terrain meant that the area was still secluded for the rest of the 19th century.
In contrast, Harlem’s flat and farmable land made it a center of Lenape agriculture as well as a desirable destination for later Dutch settlers, who named the area after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands. The land, like Morningside Heights, remained remote until the late 19th century, when droves of Jewish and Italian residents fled the discrimination and poverty of Lower Manhattan for the more spacious area north of Central Park.
In the first few decades of the 20th century, one of the largest mass migrations in American history took place as six million black Americans moved from the south of the country to the north. Harlem’s black population rose rapidly—they went from comprising 10 percent of the neighborhood’s residents in 1910 to 70 percent in 1930. This rapid growth ushered in the Harlem Renaissance, and the neighborhood developed a unique cultural and architectural legacy that is still visible today.
As for Morningside Heights, which got its name from nearby Morningside Park (built in 1895), development also began around the turn of the 20th century with the rise of educational institutions in the area. Facing pressure to move uptown, the asylums sold their land to Columbia University in 1888, which was located near where today’s Rockefeller Center is.
In 1897, Columbia opened its Morningside Heights campus. Seven years later, the first line of the New York City subway opened, with stops on Broadway at 110th and 116th Streets. These two events spurred a rapid increase in new educational institutions (Barnard College, Teachers College, and Jewish Theological Seminary) and residential developments in the neighborhood. Catering to this growing population, developers built grand towers in the Georgian and Renaissance styles, defining Morningside Heights’ unique architectural character.
Today, both neighborhoods face growing pressures against their historic characteristics. Harlem, which at one point was the undisputed “Black Capital of America,” lost 10,000 black residents and gained 18,000 white residents during the 2010s. The proportion of black residents in the neighborhood fell from 55 percent in 2010 to 44 percent today.
Meanwhile, Columbia’s expansions have torn down nearby apartments and displaced local residents. While locals overwhelmingly call the neighborhood around the new 125th Street campus West Harlem or Harlem rather than Manhattanville, the University chose to name the campus after the latter, highlighting the tension between the school and its nearby residents.
Both Morningside Heights and Harlem experience the struggles of gentrification, but that does not make them the same neighborhood. Neighborhoods are living entities that exist at the intersection of their environments and their residents’ lived experiences—Morningside Heights and Harlem are quite different in both respects.
Incorporating one into the other for political purposes undermines the unique legacies and histories that both neighborhoods hold. Moreover, it seeks to instill an unjustified sense of guilt in Columbia students, painting the neighborhood that they live and learn in as illegitimate.
CUAD has a track record of advertising different struggles—be it the Palestinian cause, Yemeni Civil War, or gentrification in Harlem—as one and the same. After all, delegitimizing Columbia’s Morningside presence and deeming it an “occupation” of Harlem may compel students to also call out the alleged Israeli “occupation” of Palestinian land.
But that conflict should be a separate conversation, and war on the other side of the world should not blind us from the history of our neighborhood. Conflating Morningside Heights with Harlem is not only intellectually dishonest, but also does a disservice to both neighborhoods and to the city of New York.
Mr. Baum is a sophomore at the School of General Studies and the Jewish Theological Seminary, studying economics and Jewish history. He wrote the column “Hidden Corners of New York City” for the Columbia Daily Spectator in spring 2024.