During the Harlem Renaissance, Sugar Hill became the address of choice for Black America's intellectual and cultural elite. W. E. B. Du Bois lived here, as did future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and bandleader Cab Calloway. At 555 Edgecombe Avenue, some of the greatest names in big band music kept apartments in the 1940s: Count Basie, Benny Carter, Cootie Williams, Andy Kirk, Don Redman, and Erskine Hawkins all called the building home. Langston Hughes captured the neighborhood's distinction in his 1944 essay "Down Under in Harlem," reminding readers: "Don't take it for granted that all Harlem is a slum. It isn't. There are big apartment houses up on the hill, Sugar Hill... nice high-rent-houses with elevators and doormen." The families who lived there sent their children to private kindergartens and the Ethical Culture School.

What made Sugar Hill extraordinary was not just wealth but proximity -- the density of talent and ambition packed into a handful of blocks. In her 2012 memoir Sugar Hill, Where the Sun Rose Over Harlem, Terry Mulligan recalled growing up in the 1950s and 1960s with neighbors who included Thurgood Marshall, rock-and-roll pioneer Frankie Lymon, and baseball legend Willie Mays. Arturo Schomburg, the Afro-Puerto Rican historian whose book and manuscript collection became the foundation of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, was another resident. Civil rights leader Roy Wilkins and NAACP executive Walter Francis White lived blocks apart. Jazz tenor Sonny Rollins grew up here, practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge before returning to the neighborhood that shaped his ear.

Sugar Hill's cultural gravity gave its name a life beyond geography. Henry "Red" Allen recorded "Sugar Hill Function" in 1930. Rex Stewart and his Fifty-Second Street Stompers -- one of Ellington's small groups -- cut "Sugar Hill Shim-Sham" in 1937. Decades later, when Sylvia Robinson was looking for a name for the rap group she was assembling in Englewood, New Jersey, she borrowed the neighborhood's cachet: The Sugarhill Gang released "Rapper's Delight" in 1979, the first rap single to crack the Top 40, and although none of its members actually lived on Sugar Hill, the name carried the right connotation of Black style and swagger. The 1974 film Claudine, starring Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones, was shot on these streets. The 1994 Wesley Snipes film Sugar Hill set its story of drug dealers and ambition against the same backdrop.

Sugar Hill's physical elevation -- the neighborhood sits on a ridge of Manhattan schist that rises sharply above the Harlem plain -- has always been part of its identity. The higher ground offered better air, better views, and a literal sense of being above it all. That geography attracted Alexander Hamilton in the eighteenth century (his Grange sits nearby, giving Hamilton Heights its name) and African-American professionals in the twentieth. Today, the neighborhood's rowhouses and apartment buildings are protected as part of three overlapping New York City historic districts. The streets are quieter than the avenues below, and the architecture -- brownstones and limestones with ornate cornices -- testifies to an era when Sugar Hill was the most aspirational address in Black America.