WELCOME

The Year of the Riot website presents information, drawn from legal records, newspapers and other archival and published sources, about the riot and everyday life in New York City's Harlem neighborhood in 1935. The site is primarily a research tool that allows you to explore and map those sources. It also contains links to short narratives about the riot and life in the neighborhood.Interpretations of these sources can be found in our presentations and publications

The panel on the left allows you to search for events and places, and generate interactive web maps based on the search results. You can also or select from a list of people, and generate maps of locations where they spent time in Harlem. Multiple layers of results can be displayed on the same map, and each can be toggled on and off. A legend identifying the symbols used on the map can be found to the right. Clicking on a symbol on the map will open a window containing further information about that item. The panel on the right also offers a series of maps combining several different searches related to a particular topic, including a map of the events of the riot, and of the home addresses of those arrested or injured during those events.

For more information on the Sources used in this site, and About the project of which it is part, and How to conduct searches and create maps, click on the buttons above the map.

A more detailed, illustrated guide to how to use the site, and updates and news about the project, is available on the Year of the Riot blog.

This web application is built with Heurist, an academic knowledge management system developed at the University of Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences under the direction of Dr Ian Johnson.

Year of the Riot forms one part of a collaborative research project on Harlem in 1935 undertaken by three historians in the Department of History at the University of Sydney, in Australia, Shane White, Stephen Robertson, and Stephen Garton, with the assistance of Conor Hannan, and Anna Lebovic.

This project examines the riot that exploded in Harlem in 1935, the first example of a new pattern of racial violence that recurred throughout the twentieth century, one centered not on interracial attacks but directed at property and the police, and contained in black districts. Building on our award-winning Digital Harlem website, we map and reconstruct the neighborhood, and develop an innovative spatial analysis, that provides an interpretive key to understanding such violence. The map draws on a range of sources, with legal records, Harlem's black newspapers, and the records of the Mayor’s Committee on Conditions in Harlem providing most of the information. Locating the riot in everyday life offers a unique view of a year of economic upheaval, and an opportunity to access what changed in the 1930s, and to what extent Harlem became a slum and ghetto. More on the research project

This website is a customised view of our research database which uses the Heurist knowledge management system (HeuristNetwork.org), developed by Ian Johnson and Artem Osmakov (University of Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences). It builds on the Digital Harlem website built by Damien Evans, Ian Johnson, and Andrew Wilson of the Arts eResearch unit at the University of Sydney.

Acknowledgements

This project was supported by a Discovery Grant, DP110104268, from the Australian Research Council, and a University of Sydney Bridging Support Grant.

How to adjust the size of the map

The Bromley Real Estate Map overlay

The overlaid map of individual buildings is made up of plates from our copy of the Atlas of the City of New York, Borough of Manhattan, Vol. 4 & 5, published by G W Bromley & Co. in 1932. Our copy of the atlas was updated to 1940 - which means that changes that took place were literally pasted on top of what was present in 1930. We have replaced all the changes we could identify with what was present in 1930; changes that took place during the 1920s are noted in the records of each address. The map displays the footprint of each building in Harlem, together with information on the number of floors, the presence of shops, and the material from which the building was constructed. See the key below:

District Attorney's Closed Case Files

• These records are held at the Municipal Archives in New York City.

The DA's files -- the files of the officials responsible for prosecuting offenders -- include all the felony cases in which a Magistrate held the defendant for trial. Each case file includes the Magistrate's Court forms, and can include witness statements, transcripts of trials and grand jury hearings, the prosecutor's notes and memos, and items of evidence. Rather than hardened criminals, most of those who appear in these records are ordinary blacks who had been caught once breaking the law, usually acting out of desperation or poverty. The files also shed light on the lives of witnesses and others only incidentally involved in the alleged crime.

Our sample consists of ???? cases, which constitute all those that occurred within the boundaries of Harlem in 1935.

Probation Department Case Files

• These records are held at the Municipal Archives in New York City.

The Probation Department was created in 1927, but for two years prior to that the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York funded a bureau to establish the value of probation. Each file contained a 3-4 page investigation report detailing a convicted individual's family, education, leisure, religious practice, and residential and employment histories. If the judge subsequently placed that individual on probation, the file would also contain a record of his supervision, consisting of brief notes about those facets of his life for a period of anywhere from 1 to 5 years. Those placed on probation were first offenders deemed not to be anti-social.

According to A Decade of Probation: A Study and Report, a book written by the Chief Probation Officer, Irving Halpern, in 1939, almost 7000 blacks were investigated from 1927 to 1936, all aged over sixteen years, and all but 5% men. The percentage of blacks among those investigated climbed steadily from 23% in 1927 to 38% in 1936. Just how many blacks were placed on probation is unclear: twenty-two percent of all those investigated were placed under supervision, but the available records do not break down that statistic by race.

We gathered all the files from 1935 for residents of Harlem finding ??? individuals, ?? of whom were placed on probation. These records provide the information for maps of individual's lives on the website.

Newspapers

• These records are available on microfilm at the New York Public Library and/or online in Proquest's Historical Newspaper Collection or at Newspapers.com.

Two major black newspapers were published in Harlem in the 1920s, The New York Age and The New York Amsterdam News. Both were published weekly, the Age on Saturdays, and the News on Wednesdays. The Age was 8 pages in length in 1920, expanding to 10 pages by 1930. Edited in these years by Fred Moore and associated with Booker T Washington, it devoted considerably less space to Harlem news than its competitor, and promoted middle-class respectability. The News was twice the length of its competitor, and published more sensational stories. (What issues around the riot are missing). Our database contains every location mentioned in the all issues of both those newspapers from 1935: we examined not just the news stories, but also the sports pages, social pages, news from churches and fraternal organizations, and advertisements. The only information we did not enter was the classified advertisements, which included very large numbers of rooms and apartments for rent that would have been too time consuming to enter. For reports of the riot, in addition to all the publications in Proquest's Historical Newspaper Collection and Newspapers.com, we also examined the following newspapers available on microfilm at NYPL:

Papers of Mayor LaGuardia

• These records are available on microfilm at the Municipal Archives in New York City.

The papers of NYC's mayor include material related to the Mayor’s Committee on Conditions in Harlem, together with clippings collected from NYC newspapers. Among this material is a census of businesses in Harlem gathered in the second half of 1935. All of the information on individual businesses recorded in this census has been entered in the database.

W.P.A. Writers Program Collection (WPA)

• These records are available in the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture, New York City, and online through the NYPL.

Research on institutions and life in Harlem, compiled in the late 1930s, but referring to the history of the neighborhood

Selecting a person from the pull down menu produces a map of that individual's residences and activities in Harlem, with the activities linked to the individual’s residence at the time they occurred. Those lines are an thus an indication of where the individual was traveling through Harlem and the city. This detailed information is only available in two sources: Probation Department case files. See Sources & FAQs.

SELECTED PERSON ON THE MAP

DETAILS OF SELECTED PERSON

Digital Harlem offers a faceted search, which allows a user to progressively narrow the selection of events to be displayed on the map by selecting various criteria: the type of event, the start date of the event, the general start time of the event, and the source for the event.

SEARCH

WORKING WITH SEARCH RESULTS

SEARCH RESULTS ON THE MAP

Selecting a person from the pull down menu produces a map of that individual's residences and activities in Harlem, with the activities linked to the individual’s residence at the time they occurred. Those lines are an thus an indication of where the individual was traveling through Harlem and the city. This detailed information is only available in two sources: Probation Department case files. See Sources & FAQs.

SELECTED PERSON ON THE MAP

DETAILS OF SELECTED PERSON

Search results include a timeline that displays when the events or a person's residence and activities occurred or when a location was a specific kind of place.

• NOTE: Records with only a general time (morning; afternoon; evening; night) appear on the timeline at 12 am on the day they occurred.

About the Year of the Riot site

• “Toward a Spatial Narrative of the 1935 Harlem Riot: Mapping and Storytelling after the Geospatial Turn,” New Approaches, Opportunities and Epistemological Implications of Mapping History Digitally: An International Workshop and Conference, German Historical Institute, October 20, 2016

About Harlem in 1935

• "Mapping the 1935 Harlem Riot: Visualization and Narrative after the Geospatial Turn," McMaster University, Hamilton, October 26, 2016

Is Digital Harlem about crime not everyday life?

• No. Although many of the events in the database are crimes, there are more records related to places as to events, and those locations are where residents of Harlem spent their time. Places reveal the shape of everyday life at least as clearly as events. While many of the places in Digital Harlem were made visible through the window that legal records open on the neighborhood, only two of the more than 150 location types are defined by criminal activity: brothels and call flats.
• Even if we look at events in isolation, the largest single category of events is social club meetings, not a crime. Looking beyond a simple count, then, criminal events in Digital Harlem are interwoven with everyday life.

Why can you map only a small number of people?

• We had planned to enter information on all the individuals who we could associate with an address that we found in our sources, on the assumption that people would appear in more than one source. After taking several months to enter only a few hundred records and not finding such connections, we decided to prioritize entering information about places and events. (Individuals who have been entered appear in records of events). As all the information has to be manually entered in the database, not entering information about people allowed us to enter more of the information about the events and places that had generated the most research questions.
• The only set of sources we used that offered more than a single location for an individual were the Probation Department case files and the records of women paroled from Bedford Hills Prison (see Sources). Using these records, it is possible to map the residences, workplaces, and leisure of individuals over a period of years. We have several hundred of these files and hope to enter more of these individuals into the database in the future.

Why does Digital Harlem not include copies of its sources?

• Our intention in building Digital Harlem was to visualize our sources rather than build an online archive. One reason we took that approach is that the sources we use are covered by copyright and licensing restrictions, and cannot be included in a freely accessible database like Digital Harlem. As an alternative, we have included brief notes and quotations from the records, as well as full citations that allow you to consult to original records yourself