Digital Harlem

I spent some time with the Digital Harlem map and found myself wondering how the researches responsible for its organization must have felt about the data as it presented itself. The description of the project contained in the About section details the wishes of the authors to create a sort of snapshot into the lives of the poor and working class ordinary African American denizens of Harlem during the period in question. At one point they refer to arrest and legal records that indicate the behavior not only of hardened criminals, but of first time offenders and ordinary people driven to criminal acts out of desperation. It bears noting that the jurisdictional recordkeeping of the local authorities gave criminal designations to private behavior, such as the category of “Divorce Raid”. My research found that this designation referred to the police breaking and busting up illicit unions between people married to others, most often deployed by wronged spouse to either assure or prevent the issuance of alimony.
Turnbull states:
“Any recounting, whether ancestral, historical or contemporary, is framed by a discussion of place: where events happened. Events coalesce in space rather than in time; landscape punctuates stories, and behind this is the ‘working assumption’ that human activities ‘create’ places by socialising space.” (Exhibit 5, page 2)
If this is so, then these forays into the more somber and entirely human landscape of early 20th century Harlem would demonstrate a place created almost entirely by a white power structure that sought to control and police a black population corralled by definitions. White on Black policing is far from peaceful, even today. That Harlem in the maps is defined by language more likely than not generated and issued by law enforcement officers where were not part of the community and judgments were implicit in the generation of arrest records. An overlay of the categories Gambling and Meeting reveals a correlation between social gatherings and gambling, which might have it reconsidered less as a facet of organized crime and more as an aspect of social gathering – but it is booked as a crime.

An overlay of Divorce_Raid and Prostitution creates an interesting diagram of good and bad neighborhoods in Harlem – Divorce Raids happened in every quarter and at every income level, but prostitution clusters to specific lower income areas. One must ask oneself when the two overlap, was there an automatic prostitution charge leveled on women who found themselves in these rooms as the police burst in?

Per Turnbull, human activities created these places and spaces. How and why the activities were recorded is one thing in the estimation of the people who wrote it down a hundred years ago and another in the estimation of those who sought to recreate a very specific window into early 20th century Harlem. The map opens a perspective on the human activities of the residents of that community, but the prejudices inherent to the initial recording of the events does little to give a reflection of life in the sunlight vs in the shadows. The ontologies of the moment used to categorize these activities reveal a government bent on intrusion and subjugation. While there is a great deal of beauty in the truths that are ferreted out of these records, there is too much left unsaid.
An alternate map would effect a more accurate picture of life on the ground. I imagine an image gallery that details the morning and evening commutes of the residents of Harlem. There would photographs of the home of each subject, of their commuter line (train, streetcar, morning walk) and of their workplace. The juxtaposition between where they live and where they work might tell us a great deal more about how they experienced the world. I would try also to include photographs of local merchants they might visit on the way home and as much moving image stock as possible that would detail the activity and energy of the streets and routes they took.