There indeed was a time when San Juan Hill—an area roughly defined as Manhattan’s far West Sixties, backed up against the New York Central Railroad’s sprawling Sixtieth Street Yard along the Hudson River—was a nexus of black New York. The bohemian energy that enlivened this neighborhood’s small theaters and nightclubs also attracted artists to the Lincoln Arcade, a loft building and theater at Sixty-Fifth Street and Broadway where the Juilliard School now stands. Robert Henri, Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, and Marcel Duchamp all passed through its studios. For nine months in 1908–09, the playwright Eugene O’Neill even lived there in George Bellows’s basement studio, basing his 1914 play Butter and Bread on the experience. To its credit, articles on Lincoln Center’s “Legacies of San Juan Hill” web hub explore this history in greater detail.
But the cultural height of San Juan Hill came and went soon after the turn of the century. Manhattan’s own Great Migration saw black New Yorkers moving north from Greenwich Village through this West Side neighborhood on the way to Harlem. The “old law” tenements that filled out San Juan Hill’s narrow lots were made illegal after the city’s new code provisions of 1901 mandated greater setbacks for air and light—one explanation for why many black New Yorkers chose to move out of these overcrowded blocks. The advent of single-room-occupancy residences (after city housing law changed in 1939 to allow sros) and the conversion of several tenements into illegal business spaces further diminished the neighborhood’s housing stock. Garages, repair shops, gas stations, and utilities were intermixed into these blocks as extensions of the automobile row that still runs along Eleventh Avenue. Finally, centered among Irish, Italian, Polish, and other ethnic enclaves, the neighborhood became besieged with gang violence. The nickname of San Juan Hill, applied to an area that was officially known as Lincoln Square and Columbus Hill, may have been a reference to the black veterans who settled there after the Spanish–American War. Just as likely, the name came out of the ethnic warfare that famously inspired the musical West Side Story (which was filmed at the northern end of San Juan Hill just before demolition).
By the time New York turned its attention to redeveloping this section of the West Side, Robert Moses was not the only one who saw its deteriorating conditions and future potential. A decade before Lincoln Center ever took shape, the historical black center of San Juan Hill was leveled under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to build Amsterdam Houses, an integrated housing project to the west of what is now Lincoln Center that opened in 1947, originally for veterans of the Second World War.