By 1905, the Sophian family moved to Harlem, just north of Central Park. Jeffrey Gurock, The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline and Revival of an Urban Jewish Community (2016), documented that Harlem had become the third largest Jewish settlement in the world, after the Lower East Side and Warsaw. At its peak in the 1920s, 175,000 Jews lived in Harlem.
The older Sophian children started to peel off to start their own paths. Harry and Gussie stayed with their parents and found a home at 26 East 109th Street. Meyer, started referring to himself as Michael, married Cecelia, had a son, Lawrence, and moved to 71 East 104th Street, about a six-minute walk from his parent’s place. Rosie married Morris Rabinowitz, and moved further north, to the Bronx. Jennie married Morris Berlin and moved to Brooklyn. Abraham started medical school.
It was in Harlem that Harry and Abraham likely met Jane and Estelle Felix, the women they eventually married. In another post, we describe the Felix family emigration, but they landed in Harlem in the same time period. The Sophian and Felix families moved regularly in the ensuing years, between Harlem and the Upper West Side. Over the years, the different siblings lived with the extended family, or as a boarder, or alone.
While conditions were better than the Lower East Side, quarters were still cramped.
Laundry lines, East 107th Street, circa 1900 (Library of Congress)
Two blocks from the Sophian’s apartment
Abraham became a physician, on the fast track: Abraham Sophian won a scholarship (1902) to study and train at Cornell Medical College, directly, without an undergraduate degree. That was a lucky break for him, because by 1908, Cornell instituted a requirement of an undergraduate college degree or its equivalent to be considered for admission to medical school, just as Harvard and Johns Hopkins did. Abraham graduated in 1906. After graduation, he began a residency at Mount Sinai Hospital, founded by Jewish philanthropists when New York hospitals refused to grant privileges to Jewish physicians and kept Jewish patients out of their wards.
The hospital was first located on 28th Street. By 1904, it opened its third home on East 100th Street (where is stands today, albeit stretching many more blocks!). Its path matched the migration of the Jewish population from the Lower East Side to Harlem.
Mount Sinai Hospital
The Harlem heyday did not last long. The Jews that swelled Harlem, started to migrate to the up-and-coming neighborhood, of the Upper West Side. A new subway line was under development along the length of Manhattan on the west side. The Upper West Side saw the development of apartment building, sprouting one after the next at a startling rate. Harry and Abraham migrated to the Upper West Side as well and found a home together at 230 West 107th Street.
Harry’s early career in real estate
While Abraham was building a career as a physician, Harry started to build his career in real estate development. From that perch, Harry Sophian started his career in real estate on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Real estate transaction announcements in the New York Times, 1905 to 1912, included sales, mortgages, and rentals for multiple properties at West 107th Street to West 202nd Street. This is the time period where Harry’s sense of apartment living, posh and elegant, entirely different from the squalid tenements he once knew.