9
Harlem’s Nadir for Blacks and Jews, 1950–1980
In the decade immediately after World War II, there was a slight uptick in the Jewish population in both East and Central Harlem. It was a growth that was perceptible primarily to statisticians and city neighborhood researchers but not to greater New York’s ever-expanding Jewish community. A Jewish population study committee’s estimate of its group’s presence as of 1940 in the black enclave west of Fifth Avenue and north of 110th Street put the figure at less than 1,000 people. Ten years later, the number was said to be to approximately 1,300, but that group was deemed less than 1 percent of the population. In 1957, some 5,500 Jews were counted as residing in the area, less than 3 percent of all those in Central Harlem. In the decades to follow, the numbers and percentages would decline again.
A similar settlement pattern reportedly obtained in East Harlem where, as of 1940, only 500 Jews lived among the predominantly Latino population. Ten years later, only 1,300 Jews were counted as dwelling in El Barrio, constituting less than 1 percent of the neighborhood. As in Central Harlem, in the mid-1950s there was an increase in Jewish numbers, up to about 8,000, even as their share of all residents was calculated as at most 5 percent. Similar to Central Harlem, here too, in the next few decades, the Jewish population would decline again.1
Comparable findings from a 1955 Community Council of Greater New York study indicated that Central Harlem was almost exclusively African American, except for “a small group of Puerto Ricans, most of whom lived between 110th and 116th Streets.” That report estimated that native and foreign-born whites constituted less than 1 percent of the area’s population. Jews were not identified as a group. Over in East Harlem, Puerto Rican migrants to Gotham were identified as the predominant group and there was an expectation that their share of the neighborhood was destined to grow as they took “the places of some persons in other cultural groups who have moved away.” Reportedly, “among the 9,500, foreign-born whites, natives of Italy, the Spanish American countries, the U.S.S.R., Eire, and the Scandinavian countries” were the principal groups. Again, whatever Jewish presence existed was not analyzed in the survey.
However, no matter what the actual number of Jews in Harlem, it is clear that they—along with everyone else there—lived in some of the worst conditions in the city. The 1950 census had revealed that in Central Harlem “the buildings were old . . . the dilapidation marked . . . and that overcrowding existed.” The same was true in Spanish Harlem, where the findings were that more than three quarters of the buildings, most of which were built before World War I, were falling apart. Many of the tenements lacked such basic amenities as private bathrooms. Reports on high rates of juvenile delinquency were attributed in a large part to the sad reality that “many of the children and youth are without a stable background in a home with both parents.” In Central Harlem, for example, more than a third of married women did not have husbands resident in their homes.
A subsequent study of conditions in Harlem schools likewise did not contribute much hope for the future generation that was growing up in these slums. As of the mid-1960s, reportedly three quarters of the pupils in the area’s overcrowded and underfunded schools were found to be reading below grade level. Those who graduated high school often earned only the general educational development (GED) certificate, which was largely useless in the coveted white-collar job market and did not qualify its holder for college admissions. Sadly, in many respects these young people were following in the faltering footsteps of their parents. In the 1950s, the median education of adults over twenty-five years of age in the neighborhood had been determined to be less than nine years of schooling.2
A major stumbling block to African American and Latino occupational advancement at this time was the change in Gotham’s economic profile. Much like after World War I, the city attracted large numbers of African Americans from the South who were escaping the poverty and overt racism in Dixie. And Puerto Ricans likewise gravitated to the city, which had fulfilled promises for earlier immigrant groups, as they fled the island’s economic distress. But they arrived at the wrong time in the history of the metropolis, for the 1950s witnessed the slow beginning of the end of New York City as a manufacturing hub, with jobs lost in both the skilled and semi-skilled sectors. Some occupations were made obsolete due to mechanical improvements. Others were ceded to sun-belt areas that—with government assistance—promised owners greater profit margins. Thus when poor newcomers to the city settled in their sections of Harlem and blacks made their way into existing African American enclaves in Brooklyn, they found that their employment opportunities had diminished. Making matters worse, segregated unions denied them equal access to the jobs that remained. In other words, existing labor groups took care of their own, denying minorities access to that all-important union card. This combination of deleterious factors meant that only the lowest-paying jobs, like “slaving” as a domestic, were left for these newcomers. In 1961, the black unemployment rate of 10 percent was twice the city average. Looking back at this unhappy early post-war era, one observer would attribute much of what was wrong in Harlem to a lethal combination of “poverty, racism, joblessness, health, education” that seemed to render “the Negro Mecca . . . beyond redemption.”3
Not all of the blacks in Harlem were ill educated and ill equipped to prosper in Gotham. There were those within the community who—despite the racism and unequal opportunities that had long stymied the rise of those of their race—had become “civil servants, teachers, nurses” and the like. In the 1950s, these members of the black middle-class exited in appreciable numbers from the neighborhood and resettled within the better outer-borough areas, while the most fortunate found places in new suburban locales. That is, if they were approved for mortgages, which were not always forthcoming as banks designated neighborhoods by race—a practice known as “redlining”—frequently led them to deny those hoping to own their first homes. One option in the city proper was southeastern Queens, in neighborhoods like St. Albans, Laurelton, and Springfield Gardens. These areas “contained single-family houses and thus exuded the kind of suburban atmosphere that blacks were prevented from enjoying outside the city.” In fact, in the case of St. Albans, prominent entertainers like Lena Horne and Count Basie had led the way out of Harlem in the 1940s. Thus, even as the hopeless inundated uptown, which was plagued additionally by criminal elements who exploited the sad state of affairs, enough of those with aspirations for their families left Harlem, yielding a net decline in population.4
The intensifying atmospherics of “squalid living conditions and barriers to employment . . . horrible ghetto conditions . . . the lack of good schools, the inadequate recreational facilities” all contributed mightily to the anger and ultimately to the rioting that consumed Harlem, and from there spread over to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, in the summer of 1964. The street violence by those whom the New York Times described as having been “condemned . . . to life on a near-animal level” was touched off by an instance of police brutality more egregious than that which had brought rioters to the streets in 1943. During that wartime conflagration, it was alleged that a police officer had fatally shot an African American soldier. Word had spread fast and property destruction ensued. Robert Bandy, in fact, survived the wounds to his back. Now, on July 18, 1964, violence began when New York City police lieutenant Thomas Gilligan killed a young African American, fifteen-year-old James Powell. After a protest at a Harlem police station, thousands of angered residents took to the streets. They reportedly “raced through the center of the neighborhood shouting at policemen and white people, pulling fire alarms, breaking windows and looting stores.” This initial outburst of anger and frustration resulted in thirty arrests. Violence continued for two days in Harlem and then, on the third day, Bedford-Stuyvesant erupted. In the aftermath of the rioting, white storeowners in Harlem and the Brooklyn black community tallied up their losses as the attacks seemingly targeted “only businesses owned by white persons.” In Harlem, the damages from the first night were estimated at $50,000.5
In the days and weeks that followed the outbreaks, both instant analyses and more detailed examinations made clear that the root cause went well beyond the police shooting. Rapacious landlords and storekeepers, “greedy white folks,” and “prejudiced employers” were identified as the malefactors whom the rioters hated the most and upon whom they sought revenge. All of these enemies were routinely characterized as part of “the white power structure” intent on “keeping us [African Americans] down.”6
However, the Harlem riot of 1964 was not a battle of blacks against Jews. For all of the raw emotions that were expressed, neither in the rhetoric of the rioters nor in the criticisms of the commentators did anyone suggest that the attacks were directed specifically against Jews, as opposed to whites, even if Jewish names abounded on the lists of local entrepreneurs whose places were looted. “No observer of any of these first series of riots to afflict great American cities [in the post-war period] recalled hearing anti-Jewish slogans,” wrote a sociologist several years later. And while Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X, in the spirit of 1930s street-corner agitator Abdul Hamid, was frequently on the record, before and after the riots, as comparing Jewish business in Harlem to “colonists . . . intent on exploiting the black community,” only his devoted followers connected with his inflammatory worldview.7
And for that matter, except for perhaps the storekeepers who were grievously affected, Jewish voices both near and far from the trouble zones did not detect any widespread anti-Jewish sentiment on the streets. The most that the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) would say is that some “anti-Jewish slogans [were yelled].” The Brooklyn-based Jewish Press, an organ hypersensitive to any manifestation of anti-Semitism, shared the JTA’s appraisal. At that point, one of the weekly newspaper’s editors was Rabbi Meir Kahane who, as the future founder of the Jewish Defense League, was destined to be the most outspoken, demonstrative, and habitually outraged respondent to black-Jewish confrontations. But back then, some weeks before the riot, when one of its headlines stated, “Racial Crisis in the U.S. Brings Increase in Anti-Jewish Bias,” the haters identified in the piece were the KKK and the American Nazi Party. A week later it highlighted that boxer “Cassius Clay had pledged to fight with the United Arab Republic in any future war against Israel.” Its July 31, 1964, edition simply reprinted the JTA release. Kahane did not comment at all on the 1964 riots. Nor did any of the Jewish Press’s readers care, in subsequent editions, to offer views on the etiology of the outbreak of urban violence.8
Arguably, the absence of a strident, or apprehensive, Jewish reaction to what had happened on those mean streets had much to do with their separation both geographically and emotionally from the uptown scene and from African Americans more than thirty years after Harlem had been Jewish. For Jews, the first two decades after World War II were an era of good times. For hundreds of thousands of them, newly constructed suburban communities on Long Island, Westchester, and over the George Washington Bridge in northern New Jersey beckoned. With their low-cost government loans in hand, thanks to the G.I. Bill of Rights, Jews settled comfortably in these salubrious settings as in most communities white gentile neighbors, also fulfilling the American dream of home ownerships, welcomed them into the new enclaves. Significantly, in these cul-de-sac locales, African Americans generally were not to be seen. Restrictive covenants—far more pervasive than those that Jews had previously faced—barred those who had the economic wherewithal, and comparable meritorious wartime credits, from making such a desirable move.
During this same era of Jews on the move, tens of thousands of New Yorkers left the snow-covered streets of Gotham and environs to find houses and jobs in emerging sun-belt communities, especially Los Angeles and Miami. Such was the case with Herbert and Florence Spitz and their by then seventeen-year-old daughter who, in 1948, departed Floral Park and relocated to Sherman Oaks, California. There Herbert became an “importer of laces and fabrics”; selling those products was one of the jobs that he had pursued during the Depression when he was not trading stocks out of his own home back in Nassau County. The family has remained in California for the past seven decades. The Harlem roots of the descendants of Israel and Emma Stone are well-nigh unknown to Marilyn Spitz Maxwell and her two Los Angeles–born children.
At the same time that “golden cities” in the West and South beckoned, many Jews who a generation earlier had left Harlem for neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn saw no reason to leave their still-hospitable urban environs. In 1960, an admiring Fortune magazine article spoke glowingly of the “Jewish Elan” in Gotham that still “contributed mightily to the city’s dramatic character—its excitement, its originality, its stridency, its unexpectedness.” The report emphasized a “condition of non-crisis” among post-war Jews, “occupying as they frequently do in a residential area or in an industry a majority position and exercising such wide influence.” Neighborhood persistence was visible almost everywhere. For example, the “main Bronx artery” of the Grand Concourse—which in the 1920s had replaced Lenox Avenue as a Jewish mecca for former Harlemites—housed “a solidly middle-class society inhabiting large old-fashioned apartments in large old-fashioned buildings.” Meanwhile, Queens became a desirable midpoint for Jews who wanted new housing for their families and did not want to deal with the burdens of daily suburb-city commutation. Queens Boulevard, for example, joined “the great boulevards of Brooklyn [and] the Bronx” as “essentially ‘Jewish’ avenues constructed by Jewish developers for a Jewish clientele.” And Forest Hills Gardens, which was once off-limits to Jews, finally did away with its restrictive covenants.
Certainly, not all New York Jews experienced such favorable circumstances. Late in the 1950s, the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway that cut through the heart of the then still-vibrant Bronx’s East Tremont neighborhood decimated its working-class Jewish community. Eventually, those who were unable to move out were forced to deal with many unsavory criminal elements, including blacks who squatted in dilapidated buildings. Over in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the construction of city-financed high-rise projects augured to—and in time did—change the economic, social, and racial profile of that area of Gotham. But a more compelling fact on the ground was that black-Jewish encounters and palpable tensions were minimal because racial segregation characterized New York City. At least it was possible for most Jews to feel that way. Blacks were a small minority in the predominantly Jewish Bronx communities. Almost no African Americans lived in Brooklyn’s Boro Park. Similarly, as of 1957, some 123,000 Jews lived in nearby Flatbush, with only 3,000 blacks. By contrast, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, 166,000 of its 253,000 residents (66 percent) were black, while only 6 percent of the denizens of the very poor neighborhood were Jews.
Sometimes racial issues bubbled to the surface. Such was the case late in the 1950s when the NAACP initiated a campaign against liquor stores in Harlem—most, they said, owned by Jews—that were “closed to Negro salesmen.” Reportedly, local residents expected more out of Jews because “the Jewish attitude on integration [was] more liberal than [that of] Protestants and Catholics.” Indeed, protestors “expressed amazement” that given what the spokesmen for the group believed to be “the closeness that has existed between Jews and the Negro community,” that Jewish storeowners did not immediately accede to their requests. More significant in light of the major contretemps that would soon pit Jews against blacks, was an Amsterdam News report in 1958 that “denounced the Jewish principal of a Bronx school in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood for accepting five classes of Negroes from a nearby school, but isolating them on a separate floor.” Still, during the 1950s and early 1960s, the two groups, living largely apart, rarely confronted or even engaged one another. In most parts of town, there were few pressure points to produce conflagrations. Thus, while most New York Jews may have felt sympathy for those whose businesses were looted in July 1964, the riots did not immeasurably change their lives in the city nor their attitudes towards the minorities who neither resided nor worked among them.9
In 1968, the two groups confronted one another in a widely publicized and protracted battle that not only hit home in local neighborhoods but also resonated throughout the city and beyond. Although most Jews and blacks lived in different places in Gotham, substantial and ultimately vocal elements of both communities met on an ongoing basis, as teachers, parents, and pupils, in New York City’s school system. The battle royale that then ensued centered in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn over the contentious issue of community control of the metropolis’s educational enterprise. It pitted the largely Jewish United Federation of Teachers (UFT) against black parents who were abetted by a radicalized leadership that came to Brooklyn from all over the city. However, there had been a dress rehearsal for this attitude-changing struggle in Harlem just a few years earlier when local parents took their youngsters out of local schools. They organized a boycott to make clear that they had had enough of a system that was dominated by white educators who, to their minds, were not properly educating their youngsters.
The flash point uptown between 1964 and 1966 was a plan to build a new school, Intermediate School 201 at the corner of Madison Avenue and 128th Street, which supposedly was to be well integrated, with white students brought in daily to Harlem. The perceived advantage of a mixed student body was that schools with white students received more attention and money from the centralized Board of Education than those that were predominantly black. However, as the plans for the institution moved towards fruition, it became clear to neighborhood observers that the advantaged white students slated to be bussed over the Triborough Bridge from Astoria and Long Island City would not be arriving. Families in the Queens neighborhoods were not taken at all with the opportunity to avail themselves of education pitched towards “successful living in a democratic, multi-cultural and multi-racial city.” As frustrations built, Harlem parents began to assert that the only way they would get a fair shake would be if they had control of the schools. Collaterally, the protesters began to assert that the curricula that their children were being exposed to failed to instill in them a sense of pride in their African American identity and heritage. Civil rights activists as well as leaders of the incipient Black Power movement championed this latter complaint. By 1966, Mayor John Lindsay had acceded to their demands and sections of Harlem were designated “experimental school districts,” under which neighborhood schools would be administered by community boards. This decision angered and frightened the predominantly white administrators and teachers who had long worked in the area. Effectively, all the elements that would make the 1968 Brooklyn battle so contentious and vituperative were in place except for one critical dimension. In Harlem, the white villains of the piece as the protesters portrayed them were not roundly identified as Jews. In the Brooklyn battle, the confrontations elicited strident anti-Semitic and racist sentiments from many quarters. The ideological fires set in Brooklyn involved allegations that Jews controlled the schools, which was just one part of a larger narrative of Jews undermining African Americans’ survival. Those ideological fires quickly spread back to Harlem.10
Concisely put, the times of troubles in Brooklyn began when City Hall designated Ocean Hill–Brownsville likewise as an experimental school district and soon thereafter the new district unit supervisor, reputed to be a follower of Black Nationalist Malcolm X, moved to fill administrative vacancies with fellow African Americans who shared his sentiments. Jewish leaders of the UFT saw their positions in great jeopardy and, as important, were outraged by statements that the new school administrators, leaders of the African-American Teachers Association, made about the “death of the minds and souls of African-American children” due to “the systematic coming of age of the Jews who dominate and control the educational bureaucracy of the New York public school system.” Unknown to protestors—or conveniently forgotten—was the history of the UFT’s predecessor, the Teachers Union, which in the 1930s had worked with black educators against the tide of racism of that era to improve the lot of Harlem’s schoolchildren. But then again, the members of the predominantly Jewish UFT were not radicals, even if some of them quite recently had demonstrated their civil rights bona fides. Most notably, union president Albert Shanker, whom protesters pilloried persistently, had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama. On guard to protect its members’ rights and positions, the union was quick to respond when nineteen teachers and administrators were summarily dismissed on the grounds that they were deemed to be “unsupportive or ineffective.” All but one of those removed were Jews. Charging that the dismissals were made without due process, the UFT turned for relief to the courts, which ruled that the terminated teachers had the right to stay on. When the mayor refused to implement the decision—clearly siding with the black community—the union called out its rank and file on the first of three strikes that effectively closed down the entire city’s public school operations for close to three months. Amid these labors actions, Brooklyn’s air was further fouled by a letter that found its way into the mailboxes of UFT members at one district school. It declared, among other canards, that so-called “Middle East Murderers of Colored People”—meaning Jews—could not teach “African-American history and culture to our black children” for they lacked “the insight, the concern, the exposing of the truth that is a must.”11
In 1969, even as the Brooklyn school crisis dragged on, another controversy over race further stoked the tensions and ill will between Jews and blacks. Though it did not take place in Harlem, the neighborhood was very much invoked as a metaphor. At that point, with the city in turmoil, the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned the mounting of an exhibition entitled “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968.” Its director, Thomas P. F. Hoving, seemingly with the best of intentions and recognizing a growing “communications . . . gap between people and particularly between black people and white people,” hoped that the show would engender “a discussion . . . a confrontation, an education” between groups. But rather than achieve an “intervention,” he and his associates ended up having to cope with animosity from all sides.
First, the black community was alienated long before the exhibit opened because while it had been promised that the show would be “created with the direct participation of members of the Harlem community of all levels and all ages,” in fact the planning and execution had become largely the province of Allon Schoener, noted widely as “a white and a Jew.” The African American community’s sentiment was “that whites (on their own) could not even begin to know the African-American experience.” If anything, the choice of artistic leadership was but another example of the powerful imposing their will upon the lives of the people of Harlem, much like whites and Jews, they believed, had long controlled their employment, housing, and education of their children.
Confirming their worst fears that they were to suffer from “patronizing racial politics” was Schoener’s decision not to include any paintings or sculptures by black visual artists. In other words, there was no evidence shown “that contributions had been made since 1900” by some of Harlem’s foremost talented people. The work of renowned black photographer James Van Der Zee was exhibited, but his shots of Harlem lives and its great leaders were shown as “documentation” of uptown life, not as artifacts of cultural creativity. Schoener had naïvely—or effetely—determined that paintings, of any sort and by any group, had “stopped being a vehicle for valid expression.” His conceit supposedly was to produce a “multi-media extravaganza.” But critics swiftly noted that just two years earlier Schoener had been the curator of an exhibit on Jewish life downtown called “Portal to America: The Lower East Side, 1870–1925.” And in that exhibit, in addition to his multimedia elements, Schoener found room for lithographs, paintings, drawings, and one sculpture. Moreover, to supplement “Portal,” its sponsoring organization, the Jewish Museum, put out an anthology of essays that lauded the immigrant Jewish neighborhood experience. No such volume was planned or executed for “Harlem on My Mind.” For black artists, the Met’s Harlem exhibit was little less than “a slap in the face . . . an uncomfortably familiar scenario, corresponding to a painfully long history of close doors in the art world.” The pain for them was acute, “just as the issues of discrimination, blocked opportunities and exclusion had tremendous currency for blacks generally.” The museum’s director and the curator would come under withering attacks for their failure to portray and extol the values of struggle and survival that were foremost in the minds of the black people of Harlem.12
When the exhibition was close to completion, Jews stepped up with their own searing complaints. Their palpable anger and distress was directed at the Met over the tone and content of the introductory essay that accompanied the show’s catalogue. Its author was Candice Van Ellison, a black high school student and a resident of Harlem, who had initially written her piece as a term paper in a class at Theodore Roosevelt High School. Schoener—again perhaps acting quite naïvely—wanted to include her thoughts as the voice “of an ordinary citizen, a true representative of the people.” But if her words really reflected the feelings of those in her neighborhood—and a subsequent public opinion poll found that by a substantial majority “the young girl’s feelings were shared by most other young black people”—then her manifesto bespoke long-simmering community antipathies towards those whom they believed had brutalized them or exploited Harlem economically.
Van Ellison surely took some hard shots at the “strong Irish influence exerted on Harlem through the city’s police force” and spoke graphically about “police brutality” that started back in 1900 with the “arresting of Negroes and beating them senseless inside the precinct” during the Tenderloin riot. It was that traumatic event which, ironically, had initially brought so many African Americans uptown. But she had much more to say about the Jews who, she claimed, now dominated their lives. In her recounting of Harlem’s Jewish history, she asserted that as African Americans “pour[ed] into lower-income areas of the city . . . they push[ed] out the Jews. . . . [T]he Jewish shopkeepers [were] the only remaining ‘survivors’ in the expanding Black ghettoes. This is especially true in Harlem where almost all of the high-priced delicatessens or other small food stores are run by Jews. . . . The lack of competition in this area allows the already badly exploited black to be further exploited by Jews.”13
Predictably, Jewish defense organizations of all stripes were outraged. The usually even-tempered ADL heatedly called the essay “something akin to the worst hatred ever spewed out by the Nazis.” Its leaders were only partially placated when Mayor Lindsay called the work “racist” and requested that the catalogue not be sold. However, they were less than satisfied with the atmospherics around City Hall because Hoving—who had previously served under Lindsay as the city’s parks commissioner—defended Van Ellison. They were troubled by his assertion that what she wrote “is her personal observation of life in her block. . . . It is not inflammatory. It is the truth. If the truth hurts, so be it.” For the executive director of the Synagogue Council of America, Hoving’s statement was “politically speaking . . . far more serious” than the words in “a confused black girl’s essay,” for his remark “implied that it is indeed the Jew who is the villain of the piece.” It constituted “a subtle shift from the tolerance of anti-Semitic rhetoric to an acceptance of its substance.” Meanwhile, Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League rallied in front of the Met, demanding that the exhibit itself be taken down. In due course, after veiled and overt threats within and without government-funding circles, Hoving walked back his statement and Van Ellison partially retracted at least the most problematic implications of her critique of life in Harlem. In an insert that was placed inside the catalogue, the young black woman claimed “the facts were organized according to the socio-economic realities of Harlem at the time, and that any racist overtones which were inferred from the passages quoted out of context are regrettable.”14
Most Jews remained unmoved by this weak apology and some saw even darker days ahead in inter-group relations. Statements like those from Charles Kenyatta of the Harlem Mau Mau Society that “Jewish leaders were blowing the Museum incident out of proportion and that this was itself an indication of Jewish anti-Negro feeling” did little to calm the controversy.15 However, as in all social and political issues, Jews were not of one mind on how they were to come to grips with such tensions in Gotham. There were those who sympathized with black complaints and questioned their own group’s behavior whether in Harlem and elsewhere in the metropolis. One articulate liberal voice went so far as to suggest that while “Jewish merchants [in Harlem] should not be thrown out on the street simply to satisfy legitimate black aspirations . . . tensions [could be] resolved if for instance, the large Jewish organizations [bought] out the Jewish merchants in Harlem and then turn over the stores—at a loss—to black merchants.” He also thought that it was the “responsibility of the Government to subsidize this effort, because it is not the fault of the Jew that he is found as a merchant in Harlem.” When all was said and analyzed, it was clear that to a great extent, attitudes towards race depended on where a Jew lived in the city. There certainly was a very hard core of the worried and disaffected—particularly those who lived in or who had moved from “changing neighborhoods”—who were frightened and appalled by black anti-Semitism, unhappy with the prospect of minorities living among them, and chagrined that City Hall seemed not to be on their side.16
But in the decade that followed—that is, the 1970s—while racial tensions citywide did not abate, the streets of Harlem would not see any dramatic conflicts between Jews and blacks. Daily interactions between unfriendly neighbors, and with them racially tinged misunderstandings, were minimal because the Jewish presence in the area was almost nonexistent. Although hard numbers are difficult to come by, estimates from census reports place, as of 1970, the percentage of whites, inclusive of Jews, in the Central Harlem neighborhood at approximately 4.25 percent, fewer than seven thousand people. A decade later, a Jewish communal survey of its poor in the city estimated that in both East and Central Harlem, there were no more than one thousand Jews.17 These numbers are exclusive of the Jewish merchants who still worked in Harlem even after the neighborhood and their stores suffered through that hot summer night of trouble when during the evening of July 13, 1977, a regionwide electrical grid failure caused the entire city to lose its lights. During the blackout, criminals roamed the streets all over town, breaking into stores and setting fires indiscriminately. If the Harlem experience entered at all into Jewish communal discussions at this point in Gotham’s history, it might be referenced as a lament that that once proud enclave, now long gone, had declined so completely. When it came to Harlem, the more pressing point of concern for middle-class New Yorkers—be they Jews or other whites or blacks—was their apprehension that the neighborhood was a crime-riddled trouble spot to be avoided at all costs.
For generations, uptown had been among the poorest of New York’s enclaves. But now a lethal combination of social and economic factors conspired to make many of its streets quite treacherous. First, there was dismay and worry in the neighborhood because Harlem’s African American working class was continuing to suffer from the city’s ongoing decline as a manufacturing center. Extending a downward spiral that had started in the 1950s, New York’s garment trades and printing industries, as well as food processing plants, continued to migrate south, in many cases on the way to leaving the country entirely. Located near superhighways, these businesses had plenty of room to expand operations and goods could be easily transported to, rather than from, old city markets. And owners’ profits benefitted from the labor of nonunionized employees. As the city’s revenue base declined due to out-migration of businesses, short-sighted increases in municipal corporate taxes on the firms that remained and the always annoying permit and inspections fees further exasperated manufacturers. Second, Harlem’s group of recently hired civil servants was hit hard by municipal job retrenchments. During a worldwide recession that began in 1973, the administration of Mayor Abraham Beame instituted a wide range of budget cuts in a failed attempt to right the city’s budget. Blacks who had come on board to city agencies “as a result of pressure in recent years to provide more opportunity to minorities” were among the first to receive layoff slips. Job seniority meant that those who were the last to be employed were among the first to lose their coveted positions.18
The numbers computed early in the 1970s—as jobs were lost or never secured—told a grim tale as the proportion of families on welfare in Central and East Harlem was two and a half times the overall city rate, while median incomes were the lowest in the metropolis. Observers, from the police to social commentators, were also quick to note how, as one report put it, a “deepening recession especially as it affects employment for young non-whites could ignite more crime in slum areas,” like Harlem. “[A]t a critical disadvantage in the job market . . . this age group is the most likely to have trouble with the police.”19
Making matters worse, Harlem, along with the other poor neighborhoods citywide, suffered from a decline in decent, affordable housing. A 1974 study of Harlem’s close to one-quarter million housing units, which included “brownstones, tenements, walk-ups, and multiple-dwelling buildings constructed” before the Great Depression, revealed that one in five was “badly deteriorated and need replacements soon.” But relief was not in sight as the building of replacements was moving at about two thousand units a year while three thousand units were lost annually through “demolition, abandonment or conversion to non-residential use.” The reality was that in many cases “landlords walked away from their buildings rather than pay outstanding mortgages, taxes and other outstanding expenses.” The housing crisis was even worse in the South Bronx and in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, Brownsville, and East New York. There far more of the most unscrupulous of owners, on the way out of the deteriorating neighborhoods, were complicit in torching their investments to collect insurance compensations. Nefarious “finishers” found lucrative opportunities to help complete the job. Before the suspicious fires were set, these criminals stripped the buildings of salvageable parts. Still, even if Harlem did not look nearly as much like an area that “had experienced wartime air raids,” its physical decline was readily apparent to a historian who had chronicled its rise as a black nexus. Gilbert Osofsky would comment mournfully, “Harlem was unique. Its name was a symbol of elegance and distinction, not derogation; its streets and avenues were broad, well-paved, clean and tree-lined, not narrow and dirty. . . . Harlem was not a slum.” But now, with “some buildings, technically abandoned . . . hous[ing] squatters or becoming drug centers,” the neighborhood was in existential crisis.20
Although the problem of drugs was not unique to Harlem, since so many other poor enclaves suffered from this manmade epidemic, not only were junkies seemingly everywhere needing money and committing crimes for a “fix,” but the industry of heroin was readily apparent on uptown streets and growing both in volume and in sophistication. One frustrated city prosecutor declared late in 1975 that “it’s wide open again. We’ve got more heroin than ever before. The quality has increased and the price has stabilized.” A narcotics rehabilitation worker reported with similar angst, “I’ve never seen it the way it is now. Walk up Eighth Avenue and you can hear the pushers calling out brand names.” Four years later, in 1979, a state senator from Harlem reported sadly that Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard (Seventh Avenue) was a “free trade zone, an open-air supermarket for drugs.” Cutbacks in crucial city services, most notably law enforcement, certainly did not help matters. Left largely free to operate without police interference, African American and Latino organized crime syndicates had come to the fore. Indeed, an evil form of ethnic succession was underway in both East and Central Harlem as “black and Hispanic importers and distributors nudged the Mafia out of its dominant position.” One of their headquarters was the Gold Restaurant on Seventh Avenue near 123rd Street, where the “Council of 12” met to coordinate their “game plan to avoid violence among themselves” and to root out “cowboys,” independent operators who “attempt to rob or kidnap members of existing narcotics groups.” Meanwhile, it was reported that “the people of 123rd Street contend that the problem has taken over their block and has made life virtually intolerable for them.” For the law abiding, having to cope with “aggressive” dealers who “pursue potential heroin sales (as well as cocaine and other drugs) with many passersby,” selling name-brand drugs, these streets were no place to be.21
A 1973 Louis Harris poll found that Harlem’s hard-pressed black residents were devastated by the crime and violence all around them and “gloomy on [the] future of [their] area.” Economically depressed and fearful of conditions around them, an overwhelming majority said that they lived “in Harlem because they had no other choice.” Stuck where they were, interviewees enumerated “crime in the streets, drug addiction, burglarizing of apartments, youth unemployment,” not to mention “dirty streets, pollution and poor housing,” as key impediments. Only the most optimistic of respondents believed that while existing conditions had “reached rock bottom . . . the only way to go is up.” Reacting to the study, African American intellectual Orde Coombs opined that Harlem was more than a physical entity, “it is also a state of mind and it lacks a philosophy to face the future.” In his jaundiced view, “it has stopped being a showcase for chocolate dandies. It has wiped the phony grin from its face and replaced it with a scowl.” In this environment, “the poor working class . . . [lived] in the ghetto, coiled against attack, while the underclass, released from hoping for the future, see[s] every person as a potential mark.”22
Several months later, an African American member of the New York Times editorial board walked one evening through the streets of his old neighborhood and found that “fear” radiated up from Harlem’s sidewalks. He depicted “the image of a community of some half-million people barricaded until daylight behind double and triple-locked doors.” When Roger Wilkins stopped to query a local barber about the “major changes that occurred” since the journalist had left Harlem some years earlier, the “short and clear” response was, “mainly it’s the fear. Up here, people don’t go out at night any more unless it’s urgent.”23
Needless to emphasize, for whites during the 1970s, the era of slumming in Harlem was a distant memory. For them, Harlem was largely off-limits day and night. For example, it was an unwritten rule among the overwhelmingly white Columbia University students who studied and resided on Morningside Heights—on the bluff, running from roughly 110th to 120th Street, that overlooked the black neighborhood—that Morningside Park had to be avoided. This once bucolic preserve, which Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux had designed in 1877, was now “a run-down park” with garbage strewn everywhere and overgrown with “weeds and underbrush” that “chok[ed] existing shrubs and trees” but provided excellent hiding places for muggers. This “raw no-man’s land between a ghetto and affluence” was considered the “most dangerous place in the city.” So concerned were Columbia University and “other educational, medical and institutions” around it that visitors might mistakenly take the wrong subway line uptown and “wind up in Harlem . . . east of the [Morningside] Heights” and then “cross through Morningside Park” that in 1975 they pressed the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) to post signs as far south as 42nd Street to alert those “naïve, or unaccustomed to New York . . . that it is dangerous to walk through Morningside Park.” A year later, a New York Times feature article called the “Metropolitan Baedeker” was certain to indicate at the beginning of its guide to Morningside Heights’ “impressive concentration of cultural and educational institutions” that “if you are taking the subway from downtown, be sure to take the Broadway local to 110th Street–Cathedral Parkway, not the express train.”24
The subways that generations earlier had played such a defining role in Harlem’s growth and ebullience now testified to the neighborhood’s nadir. In 1941, Duke Ellington had invited the world to visit uptown when his band played “Take the A Train.” Now, reportedly, “spreading unemployment, declining neighborhoods and fear of crime” all contributed to a substantial drop in ridership to Harlem. The “most spectacular loss,” according to the financially strapped MTA, took place at the 125th Street station, close to where Ellington once held sway before swaying audiences of all races. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, that stop lost two thirds of its riders, mostly white straphangers.25
Meanwhile over in East Harlem, in another sign of unhappy times, Latino storeowners and residents were “angry and frustrated” that construction on the promised Second Avenue subway that had begun in 1968 was going nowhere. This conveyance was designed to replace the Second Avenue El, so much part of Harlem’s early history, which had been torn down in 1942. The source of complaints ranged from those who were injured by construction accidents to those who were robbed by “youths who hid in the underground passageways” to merchants who lost business because patrons could not park on the now narrowed avenue. With the city suffering its fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, the projected completion date was pushed back to 1981. Some thirty-five years later, the project remained unfinished.26
As a Columbia University undergraduate, Steven Schleifer was certain to avoid Morningside Park. Upon graduation in the spring of 1971, he was accepted into Mt. Sinai Hospital’s Physicians Program. On October 11, 1971, he and a fellow medical trainee walked north and then west from Fifth Avenue and 105th Street towards his girlfriend’s apartment on Riverside Drive. Their peaceful stroll ended, however, at 110th Street and Central Park West, just one long block from Morningside Park. They were accosted by six high school and junior high school students whom the police would later say had been “responsible for four to five robberies a day in the Harlem area.”
What made this encounter somewhat unusual was that Schleifer, an Orthodox Jew, had no money on his person since that day was a Jewish holiday and he adhered to his religious tradition. Denied their demand for twenty-five cents, the perpetrators shot Schleifer in the back. Fortunately for the victim, after immediate treatment at Metropolitan Hospital, the low-caliber bullet was removed and Schleifer soon recovered.27
For the young man, there was no real aftermath to this unfortunate encounter and he was subsequently “busy with other stuff . . . getting back to school, getting married.” But back in his home neighborhood of Kew Garden Hills, Queens, there was some chatter among “some JDL types” that this was a black versus Jew confrontation and some sort of retribution was in order even if no epitaphs were mouthed. However, no one actually moved in that violent direction. Additionally, there was some talk in Orthodox Jewish circles—in light of this incident and other such occurrences on Jewish holy days—that those who passed through minority neighborhoods might be allowed to carry a limited amount of money with them, in case of a potential holdup. Such was the tenor of ongoing tension that was part of the city’s fabric during a difficult era in Harlem’s and Gotham’s history.28
However, Harlem’s history and its Jewish stories would not end in the cul-de-sac of the early 1980s. In the generation and more that followed, the neighborhood would take part in, and benefit from, the revival of New York City as an increasingly safe, secure, and desirable urban center. Uptown would become one of the gentrified old inner-city locales and a welcoming spot for young people of all races, religions, and nationalities, many of whom were doing quite well economically. The newcomers would reside in restored brownstones or in rehabilitated apartments or find their places in newly constructed high-rise luxury buildings. And they all liked the short subway commute to their jobs and to entertainment in midtown. In this renewed environment, suburbanite Steven Schleifer would have no compunction about walking through Morningside Park on the way to a Columbia University reunion up on the bluff. And perhaps his children, if they desired to return the family to the city from their New Jersey hometown, might rent or buy in Harlem’s upscale real estate market. Presently, Harlem’s Jewish history has begun to repeat itself within a dynamic and ever-changing metropolis.
