So you want to learn about Harlem?

Books on Harlem's real and fictional histories

- By MICHAEL HENRY ADAMS

Some might imagine that one book can tell all there is to know concerning Harlem.

Impossible! Because, though often long forgotten, before it was Black, or even gentrifying, the storied neighborhood involved myriad inhabitants of varied backgrounds, occupying the same place, bearing that name across time — that history is all Harlem too. The Lenape’s summer waterfront resort and planting ground gave way, after a shaky start, to the town Dutch imperialists christened Nieuw Haarlem. Its chief function was to grow food to feed residents of the more important commercial port of Nieuw Amsterdam. Ten miles apart, the settlements had the same sort of geographic relationship as their namesakes in the Netherlands.

Sometime later, like folks out East in the Hamptons of today, Harlem was mostly home to a few rich people who spent the cold months downtown but came here when it got hot. Enslaved Africans made life pleasant. These stately mansions of the elite on landscaped estates were easy to get away to.

Not long before African Americans claimed Harlem, circa 1920, there were sections that were German and Jewish, Irish and Catholic, and Italian and Roman Catholic.

Elegant or rustic, a tangible, specific, and concrete Harlem can be explored in the book, “Harlem Lost and Found: An Architectural and Social History, 1795-1915” by yours truly, Michael Henry Adams (New York: Monacelli Press, 2002).

But, there's another amorphous, more spiritual, sometimes imaginary Harlem as well. It can better be encountered in “Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America” by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011).