ABSTRACT
In April 1969, a group of students-black, Puerto Rican, and white-took over the South Campus and Klapper Hall of the City University of New York, demanding more diversity among the faculty and in the curriculum. New York's population had spiraled upward between 1820 and 1850, and already by the 1830s the city's reservoirs were insufficient and unsanitary. A city park in Harlem was developed shortly afterward. Mount Morris Park was designed by the city's chief landscape gardener, Ignatz A. Pilat, and built on a wedge of Manhattan schist-the bedrock of the island. Physical violence was never far from the minds of black New Yorkers. It kept folks hemmed in to particular Negro jobs and physical spaces. In 1904, the local real estate bubble burst in Harlem just as thousands of southern rural Negroes-especially from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia-hit the city in search of work.
