For several decades last century, Sugar Hill was a place so sweet that African Americans from all over the city aspired to live there. Michael Scotto has more on the neighborhood in part 5 of his "What's in a Name" series.
It's been immortalized by Duke Ellington and written about by authors such as Langston Hughes.
Sugar Hill once was an enclave of influential African-Americans - a place so desirable it was likely named by those who couldn't afford to live there.
"Probably the blacks in the valley would look up on the ridge, and they would say," 'That's where blacks who were living the sweet life lived,'" said Jacob Morris of the Harlem Historical Society.
Morris took us on a tour of the neighborhood, roughly located between 145th and 155th streets, though some of Sugar Hill's most iconic spots are located farther north, along the rise of Highbridge Park.
Edgecombe Avenue is named, some say, because it was on the edge of a hill. Combe means valley in old English. It was home to the area's most sought-after addresses. 555, a national historic landmark, and 409 once boasted a who's who of intellectual and cultural firepower, like Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Paul Robeson and Thurgood Marshall, to name just a few.
"I can only imagine what it was like to ride in the elevator or walk through the lobby and interact with your neighbors," Morris said.
Harlem dates back much further than the 1900s. When the Dutch came here in the 1600s, they established a farming community called Nieuw Haarlem, named for a city in the Netherlands.
By the early 20th century, Sugar Hill was a segregated residential neighborhood of upper-middle-class whites, until blacks started moving in.
"Starting in 1914 with the great migration, the neighborhood started to change, and African-Americans started to move into the beautiful apartment buildings and row houses and brownstones that formed the area of Sugar Hill," said Dr. Sylviane Diouf, curator of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
While the neighborhood saw a decline in the '70s, it's remained for many a place of sweet aspiration.