The Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP), part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal to stimulate the economy and create jobs during the Great Depression, employed thousands of artists between 1935 and 1943 to create artworks for public spaces. This groundbreaking democratic experiment celebrated and supported American art and artists by providing a source of income, enhancing public buildings, and enriching the lives of Americans in the throes of the Great Depression. The Art Commission reviewed hundreds of Federal Art Project commissions during this period, including murals, sculpture and mosaics. A significant portion of the WPA/FAP commissions in our collection were installed in public health and hospital facilities. There is a noticeable shift in theme and tone depending on the location of murals. Murals in children's wards often focused on nursery rhymes and fanciful themes, while those in nurses' recreation rooms were "relaxing" and focused on familial scenes. Murals in doctors' recreation rooms focused on the history and progress of medicine, while those in psychiatric wards sought to provide therapy for mental distress. In the late 1930s, the WPA/FAP commissioned a series of murals for Harlem Hospital, located on the east side of Lenox Avenue between 136th Street and 137th Street. It was the first major United States government commission awarded to African American artists. While the WPA approved the artists' sketches, the hospital's superintendent and the commissioner of hospitals objected to four of the proposed murals on the grounds that they included too much "Negro" subject matter. In response, the Harlem Artists Guild, the Artists Union, and the hospital's first African American physician, Louis T. Wright, worked to support the artists and publicize the controversy. With this support, the artists prevailed and their murals were submitted to the Art Commission for review and approval. In 1993, the two Harlem Hospital murals by Charles Alston were conserved through the Municipal Art Society's Adopt-A-Mural program. Starting in 2005, as part of the construction of the new Harlem Hospital Center, murals by Charles Alston, Alfred Crimi, Vertis Hayes and Georgette Seabrooke were removed from the old building and conserved. In 2012, they were reinstalled prominently in the center's Mural Pavilion, celebrating the hospital and Harlem's rich African American history and culture.

The Harlem Hospital, now the Harlem Hospital Center, ca. 1915. The Harlem Hospital was opened as a holding center for patients awaiting treatment at Randalls Island, Ward Island, and Bellevue Hospital. The facilities were opened in 1897 in a Victorian Mansion at East 120th Street bordering the East River. The 54-bed facility, which was founded under the Department of Public Charities and Corrections, had to quickly expand to accommodate an influx of new African American residents to the neighborhood of Harlem in the early 20th century. By 1907, the Harlem Hospital moved to its current location, at Lenox Avenue between 136th and 137th Street. Today, the hospital remains a symbol of pride for the Black community of Harlem: it's where James Baldwin was born, where Martin Luther King was treated after a near-fatal stabbing and a site of many of the community's great struggles. In 1998, former state judge Bruce Wright told the New York Times the Harlem Hospital was "like a mother figure." From the 1890s until the 1920s, reforms were taking place in various cities across the country, and New York was no exception. City bureaucracies such as the police force, firefighters, and medical unions vied for autonomy from city governance. African American communities, who already found it difficult to secure positions of power in the political sphere, were now barred from participation altogether by discriminatory policies of unions, societies, and "expert" groups. Autonomous bureaucracies were formed to "reduce drastically both the access of nonwhite outsiders and of their own executive and supervisory ranks," according to an essay titled: "Black Power and the Rise of Bureaucratic Autonomy in New York City Politics: The Case of Harlem Hospital." The essay also asserts that the city hospital bureaucracy, comprised of various medical societies and "lay groups" in the field "skillfully asserted their monopoly in the area of health 'expertise' in order to resist what they viewed as the intrusion of nonwhite doctors and dentists." These groups maintained an unequal distribution of wealth and benefits amongst urban populations. Black New Yorkers were barred from joining self-governing city bureaucracies, firstly due to racist policies and because these communities had little access to reach the educational or fiscal status membership required. Bureaucracy leaders feared African Americans might outrank them if they were allowed to participate in these groups in any capacity. Following the end of World War I, city politicians became suspicious of these organizations and began pushing for greater integration. By 1919, the first African American physician in any city hospital, Dr. Louis T. Wright, was appointed a visiting-staff member at the Harlem Hospital. Though he was given the lowest possible position, this opened the doors for six other African American physicians to be hired. A group of white doctors and staff members resigned as an act of protest, but this only encouraged Wright. He later became the first Black Police Surgeon, the first Black recipient of the American College of Surgeons fellowship, and the Director of the Department of Surgery in 1943. However, Wright was not the only Black medical professional that Harlem Hospital fostered. In 1923, the Hospital opened the Harlem Hospital School of Nursing to train Black nurses, who weren't allowed to train at any other city hospital. The school closed in 1977, though it played a vital role in training generations of young Black medical professionals. The Harlem Hospital saved the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on September 20th, 1958. The civil rights activist was stabbed at his own book signing at the Harlem location of Blumstein's, pictured here. Reportedly, the wound was so severe that "a sneeze could have killed him:" the letter opener which was lodged in Dr. King's chest had barely missed his aorta. A team of Surgeons, both Black and white, operated on King for over two hours, saving the young leader's life. A few decades later, in the 1980s, the New York State Department of Health and Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) found numerous instances of patient harm, violations of the state hospital and Medicare standards, and "primarily in the areas of nursing care and the building's cleanliness and safety," including an unusually high death rate, reported in "Medicare Standards at Harlem Hospital." Beginning in 1987, the HCFA has regularly monitored the conditions of the hospital and noted great improvements in the facilities and care the hospital offers. This would not be the last of the hospital's troubles: after reducing the tax subsidy to public hospitals from 228 million dollars to just 60 million dollars in 1995, Mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to lay off around 1,500 members of the hospital's staff. The Harlem Hospital, like other city hospitals, was in danger of being sold off to a private company due to its lack of profitability. ...

Harlem Hospital, ca. 1907.

Harlem native and former state judge Bruce Wright called the Harlem Hospital a "mother figure." The Harlem Hospital has provided healthcare for a majority of the area's residents for over a century. It's where a young Martin Luther King Jr. was saved from a near-fatal knife wound, which he referenced in his final public address, "I Have Been to the Mountaintop." Read on to learn the history of the Harlem Hospital.