As with neck bones, they generate a delicious broth that’s great for rice. They’re easy to make: just boil them long enough and then season them up with red pepper flakes. This 1927 photo may give something of the flavor of Harlem’s street life and its vendors: John opened a news stand, and Lillian, now known to the public as “Pig Foot Mary,” sold pigs’ feet and other southern specialties from a steam table next to John’s news stand on West 135th St. Then both of them moved uptown to Harlem. In the 1910 Census, she is described as a mulatto.īy then, she had married John Dean, who in 1910 was a postal clerk, and they lived on 59th Street. Invariably, she wore a starched, checked gingham dress. Terms like “Goliath” and “Amazonlike” have been used to describe her.
She was a large woman, with a deep voice. She worked out an arrangement with a neighborhood saloon, probably Rudolph’s, to use its kitchen for boiling the pigs’ feet, and then she sold them from the baby carriage. But as soon as she’d saved up five dollars, she spent it on an old baby stroller, a wash boiler, and a bunch of pigs’ feet.
When Lillian arrived, she followed the standard employment path generally open to black women, north and south: She became a domestic. By the time Lillian Harris arrived in 1901, the neighborhood probably didn’t look much different than it did in this photo from the early 1940s: It is said that there were as many as 5000 people crowded into just one block.
It is said that these gang wars inspired the musical West Side Story, and the film’s opening scenes were shot there in 1961, just before the area was demolished. It is just as likely that it got its name from the ongoing street battles between rival gangs, with Irish gangs from Hell’s Kitchen to the south and Italian gangs to the east and north battling with the neighborhood’s African American gangs. Some say the San Juan Hill name came in honor of the Buffalo Soldiers, the all-black regiment that played a vital role in winning the Spanish-American War battle of San Juan Hill in 1898. This 1939 map shows the neighborhood in proximity to the piers But beginning in the 1880s, it attracted a large number of migrants from the south, especially from the Carolinas, many of whom worked on the Hudson River piers. In the early 1960s, it was bulldozed as part of an “urban renewal” project, and replaced by the new buildings of Lincoln Center. The neighborhood covered several blocks west of Columbus Circle, from W.59th to W.65th, between Amsterdam and 11th Avenues. Lillian settled first in the San Juan Hill neighborhood. Dean, came from Virginia), but whatever path she took, Lillian wound up in New York. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit, while people from the southeast commonly went to east coast destinations such as New York (Lillian’s future husband, John W. People from the delta region commonly went to midwestern cities such as St. Tens of thousands of African Americans left behind the oppression and danger of Jim Crow, and the grinding poverty of the rural south, for better prospects in the north. In any case, in the fall of 1901, Lillian arrived in New York City, in the vanguard of the Great Migration. I can’t prove that they’re the same people, but there also aren’t an infinite number of Lillians or Lillies in the delta region in the 18 Censuses. In the 1900 Census, there’s a Lillie Harris, born 1874, working as a cook in Belzoni, Mississippi. Lillian Harris (c.1873-1929) was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, and went on to Harlem to create one of the great “rags to riches” stories.
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