What was Harlem like when Langston Hughes lived there?

At the time of his writing, Hughes and other members of
the Harlem Renaissance had seen Harlem as the center of the Black experience.  Thinkers
like Hughes found Harlem to be a cultural center from which composition on issues of
race/ ethnicity, identity, and sociological reality would be possible.  Hughes'
attendance at Columbia allowed him to use Harlem as the canvas upon which some of his
finest work would be rendered: 

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The move was a watershed event in Hughes’s life,
not because of college, which he found uncongenial and quit after his first year, but
because it brought him to Harlem, Manhattan’s teeming African American district and the
locus for the Harlem Renaissance, a burgeoning cultural revival in which Hughes soon
immersed himself. Hughes also explored Harlem’s vibrant
nightlife.

It is in this
light that Hughes' vision of Harlem helped him to develop his own voice as both poet and
person of color in America.