In many places, the errors have more to do with punctuation than with wording. You will have to insert commas when two independent clauses are connected with a coordinating conjunction (but, or, yet, so, for, and, nor). In the places where commas need to be added, the area is in red. Other corrections have been made in blue.
For most people Harlem evokes contrasting images of poverty, African-American pride, and memories of the art and jazz that marked the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Few people realize that real estate developers originally envisioned Harlem to be something else. It was planned to be an exclusive, mostly white suburban community.
As Manhattan grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was a greater demand for housing. The city pushed north from midtown, and farmland and old dumps were cleared for development. Almost all the buildings standing in Harlem today were built in the boom of the 1870s-1890s. Developers advertised Harlem as a quiet residential zone. The streets featured shade trees and flowerbeds. Elegant town houses were built with private garages, elevators, and servants' quarters. Harlem soon had an active and prosperous community with a yacht club and a philharmonic orchestra.
Speculation in Harlem properties reached fever pitch. Investors bought more and more land, driving up the prices. In 1905 there was a bust. People realized that there were simply too many luxury buildings for the market to bear. The new apartments stood empty, and experts realized it might take years to rent them out. Banks refused to finance projects in Harlem, and developers faced ruin.
New York landlords traditionally charged blacks higher rents than whites. Seeking to capitalize on blacks' desires for better housing, Harlem landlords lowered their color bar. The large houses were subdivided into apartments and rented out to blacks. Rents were too high for many families, so many took in boarders which led to overcrowding.
Harlem's original black community had been made up of business owners, doctors, lawyers, and ministers. As the black population grew, a thriving community developed. Segregated restaurants and theaters opened to blacks, and many black institutions became rooted in Harlem. IN the early 1900s black leaders saw an opportunity to create a kind of urban utopia for people who had traditionally suffered discrimination and poverty.
But the instability of the real estate market, the steady influx of poorer people, and the flight of investor capital doomed these dreams. Within a decade Harlem became much like other New York neighborhoods at the turn of the century. It
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