When some nineteenth-century New Yorkers said “Harlem”, they meant almost all of Manhattan above Eighty-sixth Street. However, toward the end of the century, a group of citizens in upper Manhattan wanting, perhaps, to shape a closer and more precise sense of community – designated a section that they wished to have known as Harlem. The chosen area was the Harlem to which Blacks were moving in the first decades of the new century as they left their old settlements on the middle and lower blocks of the West Side.