Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill HD: June 27, 2000 extension: October 3, 2001 Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Northeast HD: October 23, 2001 Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Northwest HD: June 18, 2002
Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Historic District and Extension: roughly West 145th to West 150th Street, Edgecombe Avenue to between Convent and Amsterdam Avenues
Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Northeast Historic District: roughly West 151st to West 155th Street, west of St. Nicholas Avenue to between Convent and Amsterdam Avenues
Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Northwest Historic District: roughly West 151st to West 155th Street, east of St. Nicholas Avenue to Edgecombe Avenue[2][6]
The Federal district was listed on theNational Register of Historic Places in 2002.[1] The Federal district has 414 contributing buildings, two contributing sites, three contributing structures, and one contributing object.[7]
Langston Hughes wrote about the relative affluence of the neighborhood in his essay "Down Under in Harlem" published inThe New Republic in 1944:
Don't take it for granted that all Harlem is a slum. It isn't. There are big apartment houses up on the hill, Sugar Hill, and up byCity College – nice high-rent-houses with elevators and doormen, whereCanada Lee lives, andW. C. Handy, and theGeorge S. Schuylers, and theWalter Whites, where colored families send their babies to private kindergartens and their youngsters toEthical Culture School.[9]
Terry Mulligan's 2012 memoirSugar Hill, Where the Sun Rose Over Harlem[10][11] is a chronicle of the writer's experiences growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in the neighborhood, where her neighbors included future United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, early rock n' roll legendFrankie Lymon, and New York baseball greatWillie Mays.
Among the many notable buildings in the Sugar Hill area are:[2]
Nicholas C. and Agnes Benziger House, 345 Edgecombe Avenue (William Schickel, 1890–91) - has also been used as a hospital, nursery and housing for the homeless
555 Edgecombe Avenue. Several noted big band leaders lived here in the 1940s including Count Basie, Andy Kirk, Don Redman, Erskine Hawkins, Benny Carter and Cootie Williams.[12]
There is also a song byRex Stewart and his Fifty-Second Street Stompers – one of the fourDuke Ellington small groups – called "Sugar Hill Shim-Sham", which was recorded on July 7, 1937.
The 1978 filmCindy, a modern retelling of Cinderella set in Harlem, includes a scene at the Sugar Hill Ball.[20]
^abTaborn, Karen Faye (2018-05-21).Walking Harlem : the ultimate guide to the cultural capital of black America. New Brunswick, New Jersey.ISBN978-0-8135-9458-3.OCLC1038016815.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^O'Connor, John J."TV: Harlem Setting for Cinderella",The New York Times, March 24, 1978. Accessed December 28, 2022. "With the story's setting switched to Harlem during World War II, Cinderella is transformed into an ebullient, naive country girl brought to the big city by her father.... She finally gets to go to the famous Sugar Hill Ball only with the help of Michael, who lives on a fire escape of the tenement next door."
"Hamilton Heights - West Harlem".westharlemcpo.org. Hamilton Heights - West Harlem Community Preservation Organization. Archived fromthe original on 2008-12-21. Retrieved2009-01-04.
