By Scot McFarlane

Recently, I led the first digital history walk of the Harlem River, with Duane Bailey-Castro and Nathan Kensinger. Using their photos to explore the river’s history, we focused on how the Harlem has been disconnected from its community, and what can be done to reconnect with it. But I also used the experience to clarify the value of river history more generally. If there’s one thing the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear, it’s that the virus has exacerbated existing inequalities in our country. Rivers also reflect histories of inequality, and the Harlem is no different.

The Hudson is often cited as the nation’s most historic river, alongside the Mississippi. But few history books mention the Harlem. Considering such things as the Hudson River School (arguably, the nation’ first native school of painting) or the heavily publicized environmental battles of the mid-to-late 20th century, it is perhaps obvious why the Hudson is an important site of historical study. But as Bailey-Castro explained in his presentation, the Harlem River Bridges were part of a much older tradition, that also produced its share of famous artists (including, for example, Edward Hopper). Part of reconnecting with the Harlem begins with recovering this history.

View of the Harlem River and Washington Bridge connecting Manhattan and the Bronx while the wide railroad tracks cut off access to the river from the Bronx side.

New York City’s oldest bridge is located on the Harlem River. Completed in 1848, the High Bridge supported the Croton Aqueduct, which provided the first steady clean source of water into Manhattan, from the Catskill Mountains, upstate. The engineers who designed the bridge contemplated a smaller, cheaper overpass, but ultimately decided to build a high one because it needed to allow ship travel on the waterway. Once a popular sightseeing location, the bridge’s promenade was open to Bronx and upper Manhattan residents until the 1960s. When that stopped, it meant even less park space for the adjacent neighborhoods, and the loss of a major view of the river itself. Community members pushed the Parks department to reopen the bridge, which finally happened in 2015, after significant renovations. Today anyone living in or visiting the city can once again walk across it.

But despite the bridge’s reopening, most of the people who live near the Harlem River remain physically disconnected from it. In part this reflects the history of transportation and industrialization: railroads, and later highways, were constructed along the river, blocking public access. Some residents found holes in the fences or crossed tracks to swim in the Harlem. Danny Chervoni, in an interview done for the Mott Haven Oral History Project, recalled swimming the Bronx Kill (which connects the Harlem with the East River) as a child in the 1960s — alongside eels, navigating hazards caused by trash dumped into the water. Industry was not only along the Harlem, but unlike the Hudson, when industrialized sections of the river have come up for rezoning, they have not been converted into open space. Instead the Bronx’s waterfront has been repurposed for new industrial uses, such as the Fresh Direct hub in the South Bronx.

Last fall, I designed a course for Columbia’s history department called “Rivers, Politics, and Power in the US.” Near the end, my students and I took the classic Circle Line boat tour that circumnavigates Manhattan on the Hudson, East, and Harlem Rivers. The first thing they told us when we got on was that we might not go up the Harlem at all because of high tides. And then, when we did end up going, the guide took a break from narrating as soon as we entered the River — highlighting emphatically that this waterway was deemed by the Circle Line to be less significant and of less interest to visitors than the East and Hudson rivers. This treatment of the Harlem stands in stark contrast to the past. During the early 20th century, postcards of New York City often included the High Bridge as one of the city’s major attractions. Tourists and locals alike visited the Harlem River as a site of beauty and historic importance.

While the Circle Line guides assume that riders are less interested in the Harlem River, the overlooked waterway offers surprises that do not exist on the lauded Hudson. A number of small “pocket” parks exist along the Manhattan side of the Harlem River. Swindler Cove, located near Dyckman and Harlem River Drive, was once an illegal dump but has now been cleaned up. It includes a small beach and salt marsh where you can view migrating warblers and sandpipers. These sites provide important refuge for wildlife, and have few human visitors compared with the Hudson parks.

1865 map of the Harlem River overlaid with the (red) current course of the river.

In the late 19th century, the Harlem River was rerouted around Marble Hill and connected with Spuyten Duyvil Creek in order to develop it as a shipping route. Because it has been engineered, it is sometimes referred to as a “manmade” river, in contrast with the naturally occurring Hudson. But these terms are misleading. In fact, the Harlem is no different than any other river in being a product of both humans and the natural world. Historian Richard White’s description of the Columbia River as an “organic machine” could be applied to the Harlem as well. When my students and I went canoeing on the river, we battled strong tidal currents that cannot be said to be “manmade.” Conversely even rivers that are much less engineered than the Harlem cannot be said to be entirely natural. Climate change makes this point very clear: there is no river whose cycle of flooding has not been affected by people generally, or by global warming specifically. To a large degree, it’s foolish to say one is a natural river and the other unnatural.

Today, the Harlem River is also notable as a site of local advocacy and a range of efforts to ensure a more sustainable future. The Harlem River Working Group brings together a wide range of organizations, including the Bronx Council For Environmental Quality, to improve both water quality and access. And the Harlem River is also a part of the Urban Waters Federal Partnership in order to harness the resources and expertise within the federal government. One particularly exciting project is an effort to reclaim one of the tributaries of the Harlem River, Tibbetts Brook, in a process known as daylighting. Currently Tibbetts Brook flows into the NYC sewer system, which means during periods of high rainfall large amounts of raw sewage flow into the Harlem River via the combined sewer overflow. Opening up Tibbetts Brook to the sun would create new greenspace in the Bronx while improving water quality in the Harlem River. However, given the Harlem River’s long history of environmental injustice, many neighborhood groups such as South Bronx Unite are equally focused on the issue of gentrification. As they write, their goal in acquiring property as a community land trust is to “preserve a stake in a neighborhood profoundly impacted by decades of environmental injustice and economic neglect and to promote pathways to meaningful self-determination.” Rather than continue a narrative of inequality through displacement, they are working to ensure that the river’s long term residents benefit from cleaner water and new park space.

Scot McFarlane is a PhD candidate in History at Columbia University.

Reconnecting with the Harlem River