Urban Renewal and the Displacement of Puerto Ricans in Lincoln Square

This report focuses an overlooked Puerto Rican community in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, called Lincoln Square, during the 1950s, where more than 3,000 Puerto Ricans had lived prior to the Lincoln Center urban renewal project. As part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts  “Legacies of San Juan Hill”  initiative, the Lincoln Center archives offered CENTRO’s Data Hub access to 2,130 digitized site occupation records pertaining to 165 distinct addresses of tenants residing within the site of what would become the city’s premier performance center. These records invite a necessary retrospective reassessment and reframing of the scripts that bolstered dispossession of vulnerable populations in the name of development across mid-20th-century New York City. Urban renewal projects, like the one implemented in Lincoln Square were considered essential for the public good. The records and data analyzed in this report raise the question of how exactly “public good” is defined. Who is the public benefiting from slum clearance and displacement? By delving into the lived experiences of the community’s residents as well as leveraging archival materials with records from the Lincoln Square urban renewal project, this report shines light on the Puerto Rican community that had made Lincoln Square their home and were subsequently removed from it as well as the impact of urban renewal projects on Puerto Rican communities.