Sixty Years of Sylvia’s Restaurant

Black business leader Sylvia Woods lived through an era of racial oppression and poverty, yet accessed financing and established her financial independence within the restaurant community in Harlem when she founded Sylvia’s Restaurant in 1962. She cultivated a safe, warm community within the walls of her family restaurant, and sixty years later it continues to live on—one of the longest operating restaurants in New York City—as does her legacy.