Harlem Hospital Center

Harlem Hospital Center is a 272-bed public, municipally owned teaching hospital in New York City founded in 1887. It is located at 506 Lenox Avenue at 135th Street in the Harlem community of Manhattan.

Administratively, Harlem Hospital Center is a member of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. It is designated as a Level 1 Trauma Center and an Area Wide Burn Center that includes a specialty in plastic and reconstructive surgery to reduce the scarring unique to the African-American community. It is also designated as a Heart Care Station by the American Heart Association and participates in the 911 Receiving Hospitals Advisory Committee. It is affiliated with the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University since 1962.

The Harlem Hospital Center has engaged in many innovative programs specialized for its inner-city location, such as one of the few specialized asthma centers. While four percent of the national population suffers from asthma, that figure approaches 20 percent in Harlem.

The hospital provides health care to an economically disadvantaged community; the median family income for its primary service area of Central Harlem is $24,230. Harlem Hospital Center is an important social, political and economic force within the community, and one of the largest US training centers for minority and female physicians.

Harlem Hospital Center provides 450,000 outpatient visits, 76,000 emergency department visits, and 13,000 inpatient admissions per year, and operates a School of Nursing and a Physician assistant program.

May Edward Chinn, the first African-American woman to graduate from Bellevue Hospital Medical College, was also the first African-American woman to intern at Harlem Hospital.

WPA murals
The hospital owns a splendid set of Works Progress Administration murals. The artists were Charles Alston, Alfred Crimi, Georgette Seabrooke and Vertis Hayes.