Harlem

Harlem borrows its name from a Dutch town, Haarlem, carried to Manhattan by seventeenth-century settlers and then transformed into something wholly its own: the capital of Black American culture, the neighborhood of Hughes and Hurston, of the Apollo and the Cotton Club, of the Renaissance that reshaped twentieth-century art. As a given name it carries that whole map. Ranked 1012 and unisex, it's a place-name that reads like an anthem, two syllables with a little brass in them. Harlem is a name of rooftops and sidewalks, of sax solos and stoop conversations, a name that knows exactly where it's from.