Kriston Capps at CityLab: “The Harlem Renaissance was the epicenter of new movements in dance, poetry, painting, and literature, and its impact still registers in all those art forms. If you want to trace the Harlem Renaissance, though, best look to Harlem itself.
Many if not most of the buildings in Harlem today rose between 1900 and 1940—and a new mapping tool called Urban Layers reveals exactly where and when. Harlem boasts very few of the oldest buildings in Manhattan today, but it does represent the island’s densest concentration of buildings constructed during the Great Migration.
Thanks to Morphocode‘s Urban Layers, it’s possible to locate nearly every 19th-century building still standing in Manhattan today. That’s just one of the things that you can isolate with the map, which combines two New York City building datasets (PLUTO and Building Footprints) and Mapbox GL JS vector technology to generate an interactive architectural history.
So, looking specifically at Harlem again (with some of the Upper West Side thrown in for good measure), it’s easy to see that very few of the buildings that went up between 1765 to 1860 still stand today….”
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