Harlem, which becomes East Harlem east of Fifth Avenue, is Manhattan's foremost residential black neighborhood. Many people of Hispanic origin have settled in East Harlem, renaming it El Barrio ("the neighborhood"). The two Harlems take up six square miles from West 110th Street north to the Harlem River and bounded on the east by the East River. (See the Maps section for more details.)

The Dutch started the settlement of Nieuw Haarlem in 1658. In the early 19th century, affluent Manhattanites, including James Roosevelt, built estates and plantations here. It was also a haven for the poor, with Irish immigrants among those who built shantytowns on the East River.

Harlem began to develop as a suburb for the well-to-do when the New York and Harlem Railroad started service from Lower Manhattan in 1837. More railway lines followed, and as handsome brownstone, schools, and stores went up, immigrant families who had achieved some degree of success, many of them German Jews, moved up from the Lower East Side.

The announcement that work was starting on the IRT Lenox subway line touched off another round of development, but this time the boom went bust. When the subway was completed in 1905, most of the buildings were still empty. Blacks began renting, often at inflated rates, after having been squeezed out of the other parts of the city by commercial development. Eventually the only whites that remained were poor and lived on the fringes, and Harlem became the black community in the United States.

The Harlem Newsgirls Lodging House was founded in the summer of 1898. Originally, there had only been a newsboys lodging house in Harlem, but space started getting tight as the area became more populated and pretty soon, there were a good ten or so girls at the newsboys lodging house and talk began circulating of a house for the girls.

After the new lodging house was formed, territory lines had to be redrawn. Fighting began to break out over who was allowed to sell where. However, the Harlem and East Harlem areas had plenty of space, making all the fighting very senseless indeed. In the end, the Harlem newsgirls and Harlem newsboys agreed to split the territory. The girls retained Harlem and the boys East Harlem. Morningside Heights, which is west of Harlem (see the Maps section for more details) was dubbed neutral territory.

The Harlem Newsgirls' Lodging House is run by Mrs. Victoria Evans and is located on 125th Street. The house is three stories high with an attic, bunkroom, parlor, dining room, and kitchen. There are 18 bunks, all full at the moment. The Harlem girls and boys sell mostly New York Journals. Blue Skies Costello and Flash McAllen are the leaders of the Harlem girls as well as best friends, not to mention long-time veterans of carrying the banner.