Harlem is a large part of northern Manhattan in New York. For much of the last century it was a centre of African-American city life — churches, street life, and especially jazz. In the 1920s and 1930s writers and musicians made a famous flowering there, still called the Harlem Renaissance. Later, many people who did not live there — especially white people — talked about Harlem as poor and dangerous. That picture was never the whole truth, and it is even less true now: some streets are costly, and neighbours argue about who is being pushed out. East Harlem, also called Spanish Harlem, has long been a Puerto Rican and Latino neighbourhood. The Dutch named it Nieuw Haarlem, “new Haarlem,” after Haarlem in the Netherlands.