Book Review: ‘Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill: Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries’ by Davida Siwisa James

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Harlem’s Sugar Hill and Hamilton Heights neighborhoods boast tree-lined blocks and mansion-like brownstones. They have long been desirable neighborhoods that inspire locals to step back and recognize the sophistication and complex culture that surrounds them.   

In her new book, “Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill: Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries,” Davida Siwisa James recalled her shock every time she witnessed “the pitying looks and remarks that greeted me whenever I mentioned that I had once lived in Harlem…Trying to convince people that Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill were beautiful neighborhoods, with stunning architecture and mansions, fell on deaf ears,” she writes in the book’s preface.

James makes a concerted effort to document the history-rich trajectory of Sugar Hill and Hamilton Heights in her book. “Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill” is a detailed account of the growth of these Harlem neighborhoods—and how that growth was in line with the overall development and increasing significance of Manhattan.

Referencing documents that point to the arrival of the Dutch in the 1600s and detail their construction of stone houses, farms, and forts as they moved throughout the Lenape people’s Mannahata island, the book explains how Harlem started out as faraway farmland, miles from downtown Manhattan; was incorporated as the Village of New Haarlem in 1658; and came to be seen as a country retreat for the wealthy in the 1700s.

The area’s earliest Black residents were enslaved farmworkers although, over time, “Freed Blacks who were still working uptown had begun to form pockets of communities,” James writes. Harlem Heights (as the combined areas of Sugar Hill and Hamilton Heights were then called) is where George Washington and his Revolutionary War soldiers were sequestered at the Morris Mansion after fighting the Battle of Harlem Heights. By 1800, Alexander Hamilton had meticulously planned and had his only home, the Grange, constructed at 141st Street and Amsterdam and Convent Avenues.

In the 20th century, Harlem was home for Victor Hugo Green, author of The Negro Motorist Green Book, when he lived at “938 St. Nicholas Avenue at 158th Street in Sugar Hill, across the street from Duke Ellington.” Madame Stephanie St. Clair—“Harlem’s Policy Queen,” who fought to keep Mafia figures like Dutch Schultz from controlling Harlem—lived at 409 Edgecombe Avenue;other residents of this building included New York Yankees’ baseball player Babe Ruth, future United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and civil rights activists Walter White and W. E. B. Du Bois. In 1943, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited the home of civil rights activist/politician Hubert T. and Willetta Delany at 467 West 144th Street as they tried to drum up support for the Harlem Activities Committee of the Colored Orphan Asylum.The book ends with a sweeping account of the buildings, businesses, and streets that have been affected by modern-day gentrification, and looks at how this has changed Sugar Hill and Hamilton Heights—and Harlem as a whole. James offers an encyclopedic accounting of two of Harlem’s historic neighborhoods—and a reminder of why area residents should never bow their heads when naming these neighborhoods as their home.