Mapping Magic–and Mayhem–in Jazz Age Harlem

In 2016, the Beinecke Library at Yale University paid $100,000 to add Elmer Simms Campbell’s energetic profile of interwar Harlem to its celebrated collection of black history and culture. The Library described Campbell’s image as “a playful rendering” of the age, but it also captures the complex dynamics that made Harlem the cultural capital of black America.

This astronomical price for the map may even have surprised even Campbell himself. After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, he moved to Manhattan in 1929 to seek work. Though initially he faced a string of rejections due to his race, he eventually caught a break at the newly-founded Esquire magazine in 1933, where his witty caricatures and cartoons brought him national attention.

Though he initially struggled to find work, Campbell immediately found a home in the Harlem’s jazz scene. He quickly befriended Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and others, and these connections led directly to the Harlem map.

Above all, Harlem’s status as the “cultural capital of black America” resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities, which transformed Harlem from a predominantly Jewish neighborhood at the turn of the century to the heart of black life and culture.

Moreover, all of this exuberant nightlife was fueled by twelve years of Prohibition. And while it lowered the consumption of alcohol, Prohibition also created a market for illicit spirits that fed organized crime. Campbell slyly captures the chaos on the map, as whites made their way north to Harlem in search of urban thrills, while residents had little say in the permissive behavior that came to characterize their neighborhood with marijuana sales and public drunkenness.

The map was first published in early 1933, and by the end of the year Prohibition was over. Yet this twelve-year experiment vastly accelerated the development of organized crime in America, a story that Campbell’s map only hints at.

See more of the past through maps at www.america100maps.com.