"New Guinea at One End, and a View of the Alms-House at the Other": The Decline of Black Salem, 1850-1920

Abstract

IN March 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne introduced his newly completed novel Scarlet Letter with a short piece entitled The Custom-House. In it, Hawthorne offered to guide his audience through this old town of Salem ... its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and at one end, and a view of the alms-house at the other.' To contemporary readers from the urban North, New Guinea was a familiar phrase commonly used to refer to black neighborhoods in cities such as Boston, Haven, Philadelphia, and York. Yet most of the novel's readers-and Hawthorne himself--likely did not know that contemporary Salem had no New Guinea to speak of.2 Salem was home to a significant number of black