Reviving the Renaissance
After decades of poverty, racism, crime, drugs, disinvestment, and unemployment, few people remembered the days when Duke Ellington, A. Philip Randolph, Langston Hughes, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Joe Louis, Richard Wright, or Malcolm X could make all of Harlem and much of the rest of the world sit down and pay attention or stand up and cheer. So it was a glorious moment when, on November 7, 1989, David Dinkins was elected New York City’s first African-American mayor. Was everything finally about to change? In the 1980s, New York City had begun to recover from the economic troubles of the previous decade but Harlem was slower to share in the good news. It was only in the Dinkins era that the pattern of population loss that went back to the Great Depression came to a halt. By the end of the decade the population had actually grown by 20 percent, to about 340,000 people. This wasn’t good news for everyone. Those who deplored the deterioration of race relations in the city under Mayor Ed Koch criticized the way he opened up the uptown real estate market to white outsiders, putting thousands of city-owned properties back on the private market, where the highest bid, and not deepest commitment to the neighborhood, counted most. Then again, many longtime residents didn’t quite know what to think about the gentler wave of gentrification that was being led by middle-class African-Americans whose parents had fled decades earlier. Once again, race wasn’t the problem uptown, nor was it the solution.
David Dinkins wasn’t the only Harlemite to reach national prominence. After managing Jesse Jackson’s historic 1989 presidential campaign, Ron Brown became the first black leader of the Democratic National Committee. That same year Colin Powell, who as a child lived on Morningside Avenue, became the first black chair of the United States Armed Forces. More troubling was the rise to prominence of the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, who was still suspected uptown of having masterminded the murder of Malcolm X. The local news on race matters also wasn’t always good. Conflicts between longtime Harlemites and Korean shop owners on 125th Street and two high-profile racial murders in Brooklyn—was this more evidence that Harlem might no longer be the focal point of the nation’s African-American community?—showed how combustible things still were. Many observers wondered whether the trickle of government and nonprofit initiatives attempting to transform neighborhoods like West 129th Street between Fifth and Lenox avenues, which the New York Times famously called “Another America” in 1994, did as much harm than good, since both the criminals and their victims were being forced out. Either way, at some point in the late 1990s that trickle turned into a river, as a billion dollars in city, state, federal, and private economic development funds began flowing into Harlem. Whites began arriving, attracted by housing that remained undervalued even after quintupling in price over the past decade—even as apartments averaging about $300 per month in notorious public housing projects drew tenants from a long waiting list. That was just the start. The largest burst of commercial development and new housing construction in a century was only starting, although money for huge, showy projects and tourism gobbled up most of the funds. Only 16 percent went to small businesses, and less than a percent supported social initiatives.
David Dinkins was not the first African-American from Harlem to run for mayor. Percy Sutton, Basil Paterson, and Denny Farrell had all aspired to the office, but each was undone by a failure to capture broad support outside the city’s black community. Dinkins avoided that problem by resurrecting John Lindsay’s old constituency of mainstream minority voters and white liberals. Even J. Raymond Jones, who had for more than half a century been making sure African-American New Yorkers won elections, came out of his retirement on the Virgin Islands to lend his support.
Over his decades of service Dinkins had earned a reputation as a gallant, somewhat phlegmatic figure, but he energetically set about attempting to heal New York’s racial divisions, something that had eluded every mayor in the city’s modern history. That was made all the more difficult by a City College professor of black studies named Leonard Jeffries Jr. who had long espoused views—and a wardrobe—that smacked more of the Black Panthers than the faculty club, and who had long used his position to advance perspectives on history and culture that crossed the line into a racism that was bizarre even by the serendipitous standards of Afro-centrism. White people, and especially Jews, Jeffries claimed in a 1991 academic conference, were biologically and philosophically members of a cold and soulless “ice culture” that had somehow managed to dominate the supposedly superior African “sun people.” As offensive and absurd as his ideas were, Jeffries had strong support uptown, where homegrown, quasi-scientific theories about race that came distressingly close to mirroring white supremacy were nothing new. Though he was forced to step down as the chair of the Department of African American Studies, Jeffries remained a tenured professor and a popular figure uptown, while CCNY quietly tried to restore its credibility.
As in the glory years of the Harlem Renaissance, economic conditions were partly responsible for racial extremism. During the 1980s median income was half the city average, and the number of Harlemites on public assistance had grown from a third to nearly half. Harlem had made some measure of economic recovery in terms of its unemployment rate, but in some neighborhoods, especially East Harlem, joblessness reached four times the national average. The stock market climbed to dizzying heights, but upper Manhattan had become an economic wasteland. What development that did occur was controversial. Harlem was home to the city’s main garbage transfer stations, Manhattan’s biggest sewage treatment facility, and almost three-quarters of all of Manhattan’s bus depots, which led to dangerously high rates of asthma, especially among children, although smoking, substance abuse, poor diet, and lack of exercise all contributed. Indeed, the physical condition of Harlemites was worse than ever. The incidence of cancer in the 1990s was 300 per 100,000 residents, more than twice the national figure, and childhood obesity—once a sign of wealth—was becoming a major public health problem, with more than half of all Harlem children classified as overweight. Among adults the incidence of a new disease called AIDS was 179 per 100,000 residents, more than fourteen times the national statistic. By the end of the 1990s AIDS was the number one cause of death for Harlemites in the twenty-five to forty-four-year-old age group, and the disease was killing twenty babies each day at Harlem Hospital. The overall mortality rate was double that of the city’s white communities, while life expectancy in central Harlem, according to a famous statistic, was worse than in Bangladesh. Only 37 percent of fifteen-year-old boys in Harlem could expect to reach the age of sixty-five. Solving those kinds of problems was beyond the power of any mayor, whatever his race.
Dinkins’s mixed record when it came to tackling the racially inflected issues of unemployment, public dependency, and crime helped his Republican opponent in 1994, Rudolph Giuliani, win by a landslide. But Giuliani struggled to turn Harlem around. Median income did rise slightly and the number of Harlemites on welfare dropped by 50 percent, but these advances were the result primarily of federal initiatives and a roaring economy. Meanwhile, joblessness uptown increased to almost 20 percent by the end of his first term, and three-quarters of all children in central Harlem still lived in poverty. Giuliani, who had accused Dinkins of being soft on crime, took credit for a huge reduction in crime in the city. In fact, it was Dinkins who had increased the size of the police force and deployed officers on neighborhood beats, an approach to public safety that took cops out of their locked, bulletproof patrol cars and back in the faces of New York’s criminals. The number of offenses in some areas uptown dropped by almost a third. The number of burglaries below 125th Street fell by 84 percent and rape incidence dropped by 54 percent, while the murder rate dropped 80 percent. Drug dealing was still a major problem. Heroin remained a particular challenge, especially because of the crimes committed by addicts, and because of the rising incidence of AIDS among users of intravenous drugs. But the drug of choice for both dealer and user was still crack, and the money to be made in Harlem, where 90 percent of all cocaine coming into the city was processed, was astonishing. On what the Daily News called “Harlem’s worst block,” West 140th Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues, eight out of thirty-six tenements were given over to the drug trade. The city was eventually able to shut down the Dominican-dominated narcotics market there, but the dealers simply moved to surrounding blocks, which soon became known as “Cocaine City.”
Crime was falling but in the process many law-abiding Harlemites felt terrorized by the very public servants who were supposed to protect them. In addition to ongoing problems with police brutality, uptown precincts had become notoriously corrupt, with police officers stealing and dealing drugs. A 1994 sting operation by the NYPD Internal Affairs Unit caught on videotape three cops from the 30th Precinct breaking into an apartment on West 139th Street, stealing drugs and cash, and thrashing the occupant. Dozens of officers from “The Dirty Thirty” were eventually arrested, leading to more than a hundred convictions being overturned.
Giuliani’s unwavering support for the police also meant rejecting the strategy of accommodation that generations of mayors had taken when it came to public disturbances. In early 1994, police once again received a “10-13” from 102 West 116th Street, precisely the circumstance that had led to the death of a police officer at the same spot twenty-two years earlier. Now things were different. The Nation of Islam’s Mosque #7 had severed ties with the Nation of Islam, taken the name Masjid Malcolm Shabazz Mosque, and embraced traditional Islam, but Giuliani had ended a three-decade-old policy of special treatment for mosques. The police charged in, and after a confrontation in which eight cops were wounded, Giuliani backed the cops unequivocally and snubbed the self-appointed “community leaders” Al Sharpton and C. Vernon Mason. The mayor had upheld the law but wounded the sensibilities of many Harlemites.
By that time Muslims—many of them immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia—were no longer represented solely by the Nation of Islam but by mainstream sects that, starting in 1991, considered the Islamic Center of New York, on the southernmost boundary of East Harlem, to be their flagship mosque. Within a decade there were six hundred thousand Muslims in New York City. Harlem alone counted three major traditional mosques, as well as dozens of smaller ones that resembled the old storefront churches that had for a century dotted the uptown landscape, as well as a handful of Islamic schools. There was even a mosque for Latinos, the Alianza Islamica, at Lexington Avenue and East 106th Street—the flag that waved in front featured images of a Moorish warrior and the Puerto Rican native known as a Taino—which offered sermons in English, Spanish, and Arabic as well as a wide variety of social programs, including drug treatment, AIDS prevention, and a soup kitchen. The institution nonetheless got a chilly reception both from neighborhood Christians concerned about losing their own parishioners and from Harlem Muslims concerned that this Latino mosque wasn’t quite traditional enough.
It didn’t take long for Giuliani to borrow a page from nineteenth-century Tammany Hall and start considering this growing minority group as potential voters. The Nation of Islam was still the public face of Islam in America, which was rarely a good thing, especially after the NOI’s Million Youth March of September 1998 ended in public unrest on what was now officially known as Malcolm X Boulevard. But Giuliani knew that the group no longer represented most Muslims in the United States, and he began reaching out to mainstream Islamic leaders, who tended to be more conservative than non-Muslim blacks and therefore possible Republicans. In 1999 he appointed as the city’s first Muslim police chaplain Izak-El M. Pasha, a former member of the Nation of Islam who had embraced Sunni Islam and taken over the Masjid Malcolm Shabazz Mosque, attracting more than eight thousand worshippers, most from West Africa but also from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and even Russia. The prominence of this African-American Muslim Republican who drew support from a new generation of immigrants from Africa made it clear that the political rules of Harlem were changing.
In the 1960s the Black Power movement reinvented Africanness from scratch, largely ignoring the many Africans who lived uptown, and who regarded their black neighbors with a mixture of curiosity and disappointment. Africans had lived in Harlem since the earliest period of transatlantic exploration, but it wasn’t until the twentieth century that Somali, Moroccan, and West African sailors or stowaways began to put their stamp on the Negro Mecca. A number of educated Africans had also spent time uptown, including the first president of Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and K. W. Aggrey of Ghana, who married an American woman and had a daughter who became an American ambassador. A Nigerian named Kingsley Azumba Mbadiwe ran the African Academy of Arts and Research, which sponsored concerts at which Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Max Roach had early contacts with Afro-Cuban music in the 1940s. Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, a country that was such an important symbol to Harlemites in the 1920s and ’30s, came uptown in 1954 to meet with Adam Clayton Powell Jr., giving a Coptic cross to the Abyssinian Baptist Church. In 1958 the motorcade of the Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, who had worked as a fishmonger in Harlem and slept on the subway in the 1940s, was cheered on by twenty thousand Harlemites and received by ten thousand at the 369th Armory, at Fifth Avenue and 142nd Street. Nkrumah was back in Harlem two years later, speechifying at the corner of Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street, and it was at Nkrumah’s invitation that W.E.B. Du Bois finally decided to give up on the United States and relocate to Ghana. Another pioneer of African independence, President Sekou Touré of the newly founded republic of Guinea, came to Harlem in late 1959, and the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, spoke at a Nation of Islam rally in Harlem in 1960. In the early 1960s, Harlemites became especially interested in South Africa. The coleader of the African National Congress, Oliver Tambo, came to Harlem in 1963, and the next year marked the first annual African Day parade in Harlem.
The best-known African uptown in the postwar decades was a Nigerian named Babatunde Olatunji, who more than any other figure was responsible for introducing authentic West African culture not only to Harlem but to the entire country. He came to the United States in 1950 on a Rotary scholarship intended to turn him into a diplomat, but he ended up becoming a musical emissary, appearing at civil rights events and recording Drums of Passion, which became a pop hit and led to appearances across the country, from the Apollo Theater to the Ed Sullivan Show. Education became an increasingly important part of Olatunji’s program, and in 1964 he organized the Center of African Culture at 43 East 125th Street, which for the next quarter century offered music and dance lessons, workshops, lectures, exhibits, and concerts. It was there, in 1967, that the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane played his penultimate concert, just a few blocks away from where the composers of his signature tune “My Favorite Things,” Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, had grown up.
Most African immigrants uptown were not looking for fame but fortune. After the successful colonial independence movements of the post–World War II period, many ambitious Africans looked to England and France for educational or economic advancement, but more stringent immigration laws in western Europe in the 1960s and ’70s reoriented African immigration toward the United States, and to Harlem in particular. More than eighty thousand Africans immigrated to the United States in the 1980s from Nigeria, Liberia, Ethiopia, and Ghana and, later, Mali, Senegal, Niger, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast. Most ended up living uptown, though they worked downtown as illegal street vendors, selling wristwatches, umbrellas, luggage, sunglasses, pirated music and movies, T-shirts, and caps, as well as African textiles and sculpture. Meanwhile, their wives and female relatives opened shops on West 116th Street—after a century, Harlem once again had its own “Little Africa”—featuring hair braiding ($50 for corn rows) and extensions ($10 per synthetic plait). Eventually, French, Wolof, Hausa, Malinke, Bamana, and Songhay drowned out English on West 116th Street, where diners could choose from a variety of restaurants specializing in not just West African food but the cuisines of individual geographical regions. The Keursokhna restaurant, at 225 West 116th Street, was a favorite of the Senegalese, among them the singer Youssou N’Dour, who made sure to visit whenever he was in New York City.
In the 1990s the relaxation of restrictions on immigration from West Africa, and the determination of the World Bank to force West African countries to crack down on deficit spending, inspiring the 1994 devaluation of local currencies and the halving of incomes, meant even more Africans looked to the United States. The number of Africans in New York City about doubled, from some forty thousand to more than eighty thousand, with most of them making their homes around West 116th Street. As with earlier generations of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe life wasn’t easy. The newcomers were frequently poor and uneducated, though in some respects Africans were better off than native-born black Americans. In 1990, 47 percent of African immigrants claimed a college education, compared to 13 percent of African-Americans, and average income for Africans was a third higher than that of native-born blacks. There were also cultural differences. Most African immigrants adhered to the strict behavioral practices of Islam and therefore avoided alcohol, cigarettes, and extramarital sex, while working hard at any job they could find and living abstemiously in order to send as much money as possible back home. It was a strong contrast to the substance abuse, extramarital sex, and chronic unemployment they saw around them. Such differences were the source of tensions, just like those between West Indian immigrants and native-born blacks back in the 1920s. Some native-born blacks in Harlem called the West Africans carpetbaggers whose ancestors had sold their neighbors into slavery hundreds of years before. Some Africans replied that more than a century after the end of slavery American blacks were too lazy and irresponsible to improve themselves. The truth was of course more complicated.
Many Africans came on their own, but most were subsidized by their families or by local businessmen back home. The Hausa of Nigeria and Niger—distinguishable by their long, white robes, their attachment to Islamic scholarship, and their centuries-long tradition of restless wandering in hostile territories as they sold kola nuts—sponsored dozens of peddlers on 125th Street. Also prominent were immigrants belonging to the Mouridi, a Sufi sect founded in Senegal in 1898 by Ahamadu Bamba, whose descendant Cheikh Amadou Bamba saw peanut farmers losing land to the ever encroaching Sahara in the 1970s and counseled his followers: “Go forth and work.” Though some left their families behind for good, most sent money back regularly and worked toward bringing them to the United States. By the turn of the twenty-first century the uptown Mouridi, most of them married men, with wives and children back in Africa, were sending more than $4 million back home from Harlem each year, according to some estimates. But it would take years of work—often illegal—as cabdriver, security guard, grocery store clerk, or delivery boy to make enough money to bring their families over. It was a challenge that generations of Harlem immigrants had overcome. These Africans lived in the very same slums that had housed new arrivals a century earlier. Like those immigrants, they often shared living quarters and even beds with those from the same family or region. Home for many francophone Africans was the Park View Hotel, at 55 West 110th Street, nicknamed Le Cent Dix. In the 1990s it was a dilapidated single room occupancy hotel, its two hundred units filthy with vermin and overflowing with housing violations but home to five hundred or more Africans, almost all of whom worked as street vendors. Conditions at the hotel may have been less than ideal, but it provided a relatively cheap and commitment-free place to live, not to mention the chance for people from the same region to live together. Since most of these immigrants were illegal, fearing any contact with banks, police, or hospitals, sticking together was imperative. Just like Harlem’s Jews and Italians a century before, and uptown’s West Indians after World War I, these Africans formed cooperative organizations to help with personal crises or offer low-interest loans.
By the early 1990s many African street vendors had moved their operations closer to what was now home, with West 125th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues becoming a collegial and chaotic postcolonial bazaar. At the corner of Lenox Avenue, presided over by the spirit and image of the father of black capitalism, Marcus Garvey, Gambians and Senegalese sold incense, beads, leather goods, and jewelery made of leather and shells, while merchants from Mali specialized in textiles. The most popular fabrics were crudely woven cotton bedspreads and tablecloths from Mali graced by bold geometric patterns in black and white, known as mud cloth. Another big seller was kente cloth, a brightly striped yellow, green, blue, and red silk item from Ghana worn only on ceremonial occasions, though Harlem’s newest entrepreneurs favored a cheaper version made of cotton—ironically, this potent symbol of African civilization was now made by Korean manufacturers in New Jersey—and stitched it into everything from baseball caps and T-shirts to watchbands and neckties. Farther west were merchants from Niger and Kenya selling watches, videos, sunglasses, T-shirts, and baseball caps from China as well as leather and straw hats, baskets, and bags from Turkey. Also popular was anything decorated with the X that signified Malcolm X, a connection that many of the peddlers were unaware of, even though some of them worshipped at the Masjid Malcolm Shabbaz Mosque. Next were African-Americans selling the Qur’an as well as Afro-centric books, music, and videos, most of which were, incongruously, bought from Israelis, Arabs, or Dominicans. Near Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, Ugandans sold posters and Senegalese sold earrings and eyeglasses, while Jamaicans capitalized on the demand for blackness by selling “African”-style sculptures that aesthetically were closer to the negrophilia of the 1920s than the glorious past of the mother continent. Closer to Eighth Avenue, the market petered out until it was just a few stands with rap and hip-hop mix tapes.
The situation on West 125th Street was clearly unlawful. Most of the hundreds of peddlers were unlicensed, paid no taxes, and sold pirated or even stolen goods. Social Security cards were available for $500. They blocked streets and sidewalks during the day and left behind piles of trash at night. But not too many people were complaining, so Harlem’s cops were ordered to focus on violent crime, not on these quiet, respectful, dapper Africans who might gross up to $700 on a typical Saturday night in good weather. Eventually, though, the established merchants on 125th Street grouped together as the Harlem Business Alliance and complained to the mayor. The vendors also had a group, the 125th Street Vendors Association, which was soon unmasked as a vehicle for some of the most unsavory political elements uptown: the association was less a cooperative than a shakedown operation, one that resembled the dubious organizations that sprang up in the same place half a century earlier in the name of economic justice. Its leader, a Florida native named Morris Powell, who had compiled a lengthy police record that included ten arrests and four convictions on weapons charges in his years of selling aromatic oils and bean pies on 125th Street, collected $20 per month from each vendor in return for “protection.” It was a small price to pay since, as illegal immigrants, many of the vendors could hardly go to the police.
After the vendors announced plans to hold a march that would shut down West 125th Street, the Dinkins administration, ever eager to avoid the kind of confrontation that the previous mayor thrived on, chose not to shut them down. The march did proceed and Harlem’s main artery did indeed come to a standstill for several hours, but there were no major incidents. Still, many merchants deplored the decision as an act of accommodation to racial extremists, and they looked forward to more decisive action from a new mayor. Once in office, Rudolph Giuliani worked out a plan in which four hundred vendors could relocate to a vacant lot on West 116th Street on a site owned by the Masjid Malcolm Shabazz Mosque. For a $100 registration fee and $7 per day rent—the mosque also promised to give the city 30 percent of revenues in lieu of taxes—the peddlers from 125th Street could set up shop in a new space that would be clean, safe, and comfortable, with electricity and bathrooms. The Vendors Association refused the offer, while the Nation of Islam called for a boycott of non-black shops on 125th Street, and a shadowy group of race agitators called Concerned People for the Development of Harlem began issuing threats about retaliation against a white government supposedly invading black territory and putting black people out of work. On the morning of October 17, 1994, police set up barricades on West 125th street between Lenox Avenue and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and prevented peddlers from setting up. A small protest resulted in the arrest of twenty-two people, including Powell, who was charged with illegal use of a bullhorn. Several dozen vendors dressed in army surplus gear gathered behind a UNIA flag and marched down to the new market, but many of the Africans declined to participate, fearing arrest and deportation. Within a few days things were quiet again. City Hall had won, and the Malcolm Shabazz Harlem Market, a $1.3 million project on a 22,000-square-foot lot on the south side of West 116th Street, just east of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, opened two months later, with room for 115 stores and booths, just in time for the Kwanzaa and Christmas shopping season. Soon the market had become the best place in the city to buy African and Africanesque textiles and art, attracting tour buses whose operators, naturally, got kickbacks from the merchants. This negrophilic mall, where the global economy met the universal fascination with blackness, showed that Harlem was no longer just the capital of black America but a focal point of the global black diaspora.
The struggle over West 125th Street was amicably resolved, especially since the African vendors were soon back on 125th Street, but the broader battle against racially motivated economic injustice was not over. Sometimes it wasn’t even clear who the enemy was. Not long after the eviction of the illegal merchants from West 125th Street, Sikhulu Shange, a former dancer from South Africa who had for decades sublet a music shop in the Blumstein’s building from a Jewish businessman named Fred Harari, received an eviction notice. Miles Davis, James Brown, and Michael Jackson had all shopped at Shange’s store, located in a complex called Freddy’s, but the star of the protest that followed was none other than Morris Powell, assisted by the professional race agitator and secret FBI informant Al Sharpton. The battle to desegregate 125th Street had supposedly been won decades earlier on that very spot, but a study by the Harlem Business Improvement District found that only 158 of 322 businesses on 125th Street were black-owned. Still, it was hard to believe that the protesters were, as they claimed, acting in the spirit of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” actions after the protests degenerated into anti-Semitic death threats. Picketers shouted that Harari was a “bloodsucking Jew” and called black shoppers who refused to honor the boycott race traitors. Protesters pantomimed lighting matches and throwing them at the store.
On the morning of December 8, 1995, one of the protesters, a fifty-one-year-old Harlem-born ex-con turned black nationalist street vendor named Roland J. Smith Jr., who also went by Abugunde Mulocko, entered Freddy’s brandishing a gun. He told all the African-Americans to leave and took seven hostages—including Latinos, Guyanese immigrants, and one black Harlemite—before shooting four white people, dousing stacks of clothing with paint thinner, lighting them on fire, and shooting himself in the chest. When the smoke cleared, Smith’s hostages had died—the store’s sprinkler system hadn’t worked and the only emergency exit had been bricked up. Despite the ferocious rhetoric of the boycott, Powell and Sharpton denied any link to Smith or his actions and dismissed the claim that the boycott had inspired Smith’s actions. Powell was out on 125th Street the very next day urging shoppers to pass by a neighboring Jewish-owned store, Bargain World. Powell and Sharpton had less to say when it became clear that it was not Harari who was behind Shange’s eviction but a Washington, D.C.–based, black Baptist congregation that was planning to renovate and expand. Powell and Sharpton were eventually cleared of any responsibility for the arson and murder, and Freddy’s eventually reopened, as did Shange’s record store, but the episode had made many Harlemites pessimistic about the future of a 125th Street in which skin color was still the biggest seller.
Fears that incidents like the fire at Freddy’s would restrain Harlem’s comeback were unfounded. From 1994 to 2001, more than $1.2 billion from a variety of public and private sources, buoyed by a strong national and local economy, poured into Harlem. Much of that money went into business development. Storefronts that had been vacant for decades were suddenly occupied by national retailers, and downtown developers attracted public and private development money for shopping malls and hotels. The rest went into housing. Half of the thousands of buildings that had been abandoned and taken over by the city, representing more than half of all of Harlem, began coming back on the market. Indeed, it was the upward creep in the mid-1980s in housing prices in the loveliest of the old neighborhoods, such as Striver’s Row, Hamilton Heights, Mount Morris, and Sugar Hill, and those near Central Park, that told most Harlemites that a revival was in the works. A huge, unsightly condominium complex called Towers on the Park appeared in 1987 at the northwest corner of Central Park, but the real action was in the renovation of Harlem’s older housing stock. Many brownstone blocks had been preserved through the nightmare years largely because of what Harlem’s premier architectural historian Michael Henry Adams calls “fortuitous neglect.” Hard times kept away the wrecking balls. So did City Hall: between 1999 and 2004 a wave of landmark designations resulted in five hundred buildings, about 16 percent of all Harlem’s structures, receiving official protection. Among the grand old apartment buildings that remained intact was Graham Court, where Zora Neale Hurston once lived. Fifty percent vacant in the 1980s, the building stood in for a run-down and dangerous drug warehouse in the 1990 film New Jack City. Just ten years later prices there were rising, and rumor had it that celebrities—for instance, the actor Danny Glover—were among the building’s new residents. A downturn in the New York City real estate market in the mid-1990s did slow things down, but it also brought in speculators. In 1996 the average price for a brownstone in Harlem was less than $200,000, but not for long. The row house at 4 West 122nd Street, built for $15,000 in 1889, and sold for only $7,500 in the 1940s, found a buyer willing to pay almost $1 million in 2000, though that situation was hardly representative. At that time, anyone with $400,000 could still buy a rundown, four-story, 4,500-square-foot carriage house with six fireplaces. By 2002, brownstones in good condition in less distinguished areas were going for up to $1 million. Those in need of major renovation were still available for as little as $200,000, but within two years row houses in move-in condition on Hamilton Terrace were going for $2 million or more, and houses in need of major renovation were becoming scarce at any price. In 2004 the market began to take off, starting with a wave of speculation in Hamilton Heights. The house at 20 Hamilton Terrace that sold for $600,000 in mid-2004 was flipped for more than $1 million before the end of the year. Soon owners of houses on the street were getting daily, hand-written million-dollar offers slipped under their front doors, a practice seen as predatory even by the empress of uptown real estate Willie Kathryn Suggs, who had long worked Harlem almost without competition. Now she was facing off against giants like Corcoran, which opened an office on Frederick Douglass Boulevard and brought in seventeen full-time real estate agents to start pushing uptown real estate, which still cost a third less than elsewhere in Manhattan. Particularly popular was the practice of splitting up row houses and brownstones into three or four condominiums that could sell for up to $1 million each. In 2005 the sale of a town house on West 138th Street for $2.6 million was a new record, but it was smashed the next year when a Yale economics professor agreed to pay $3.89 million for an eight-bedroom row house on Convent Avenue, which had been purchased in 1993 for under $300,000.
After a decade of steeply rising real estate prices—10 percent or more each year—a second wave of speculation began, as developers put up luxury co-ops and condominiums, many with a balcony, wood-burning stove, parking garage, gym, and concierge and valet service. That was what the developers envisioned for the Lenox, a seventy-seven-unit luxury high-rise that began rising in 2005 at the corner of Central Park North and Lenox Avenue. The advertisements referred to “The New Harlem,” and with two-bedroom apartments going for almost $700,000 it was clear that few residents of the old Harlem would be among the buyers. Mixed-income developments were also part of the picture, in part because they could use tax breaks and other forms of public funding to subsidize construction, when in fact it was the market-rate portion of the building that was supposed to help finance the low-income apartments. The Kalahari, a $100 million project started in 2006 on West 116th Street between Fifth Avenue and Malcolm X Boulevard, was financed through an agreement in which half of the 249 condos would go to middle- and lower-income families. These units would be subsidized by the other half, which were sold at market rate to buyers attracted to amenities like indoor parking, squash courts, and a movie theater showing “culturally specific” films—uptown code for “black.” The fact that any racial code at all was necessary was telling. More altruistic, at least in principle, were ventures sponsored by nongovernmental but nonprofit development organizations. The Harlem Community Development Corporation was organized in 1995 by the Empire State Development Corporation from the remains of the Harlem Urban Development Corporation, which had been conspicuously unsuccessful at stimulating Harlem’s economy, despite having attracted almost $90 million in state money. The HCDC took over 1-10 Mount Morris Park West, which had started out a century earlier as row houses for upper-middle-class Jewish families but which had become a burned out and abandoned block known as the “Ruins”—the city and state had been unable to overcome neighborhood opposition to its plans for a drug addiction treatment facility there in the 1960s or plans for a minimum security prison for women there in the 1990s. HCDC ran into no such opposition a decade later in renovating the Ruins and selling them as town houses at market rates. There was of course a flip side to all the change. The overheated market led to rising rates of harassment and eviction, and since the city typically took little interest in landlords who stopped providing heat and hot water, failed to maintain frontdoor locks, or fight rodent problems, Harlemites once again took it upon themselves to fight back. The Harlem Tenants Council, run by the indefatigable Nellie Bailey, was one of many grassroots groups formed to help uptowners fight for their housing rights.
Some Harlemites were kept out of the booming real estate market not by their incomes but by racism. The banking industry had long openly discriminated against blacks, denying loans on the basis of both race and neighborhood, a process known as red-lining. Only 6 percent of Harlemites were home owners in the 1990s, the lowest figure for any major black community in the country, though the numbers were creeping upward, thanks to federal housing money aimed at more than eight hundred city-owned abandoned structures in Harlem. By 2003 the city was in charge of half that many buildings. Most of the buildings were renovated, but the city also built thousands of new units aimed at low- and middle-income families, most in partnership with nonprofit organizations. The Malcolm Shabazz Gardens, a $16.5 million development of more than forty three-unit town houses on West 117th Street, was a joint venture between J. P. Morgan Chase Community Development; the city’s Department of Housing, Preservation, and Development; and Imam Pasha’s Malcolm Shabazz Mosque. City officials bragged that they had sponsored housing for ten thousand people in Harlem from 1994 to 2000, but one of the city’s signature housing renovation programs uptown, called Homeworks, which targeted vacant city-owned brownstones starting in 1995, set financial requirements that put most Harlemites out of the running and then allowed the new owners to divide the buildings up into two or three units that could be rented out at market rates. Whatever the long-term goals, the city was effectively subsidizing the profits of well-to-do landlords and helping to drive up the rents in the surrounding neighborhood.
The trend that tripled the price of residential real estate in Harlem in the 1990s also had its effects on commercial real estate development. The creation in 1993 of a Business Improvement District on West 125th Street from Fifth to Morningside avenues, resulting in improved sanitation, lighting, landscaping, and maintenance, was certainly a factor. By the time Michael Bloomberg, a lifelong Democrat who was elected as a Republican, came to occupy the mayor’s office in 2002, Harlem was attracting businesses such as H&M, Marshalls, Staples, Krispy Kreme, the Body Shop, Starbucks, and Modell’s on the west side and Seaman’s furniture, a Duane Reade drugstore, a Payless shoe store, and Fleet Bank on the east side. But many Harlemites would date the revitalization of the uptown economy to 1994, when President Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development identified Harlem as one of six Empowerment Zones nationwide, meaning that over the next decade the area would be eligible for more than $100 million in federal development funds and $250 million in tax credits, as well as help in running programs devoted to job training and creation, small business assistance, and support for cultural organizations. Immediately, the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, as it was officially called, became a major player. More than two dozen Harlem churches received reconstruction funds from UMEZ, including the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which got a new roof and windows. UMEZ funding—along with the support of Bill Clinton’s Small Business Initiative and a grant from the philanthropist Eugene Lang, who had grown up in Harlem and attended P.S. 121—helped a native of Sugar Hill, Sharon Lawrence, transform the old Alhambra Ballroom into the Harlem Lanes bowling alley. But UMEZ tended to be drawn toward more ambitious, flashier ventures. The most successful was the $11.2 million investment in a 275,000-square-foot project called Harlem USA, which in 2001 filled most of the block between West 124th and West 125th streets from Frederick Douglass Boulevard to St. Nicholas Avenue, with businesses including a Disney Store, Old Navy, and HMV. The Harlem USA project also included a film multiplex named after the former basketball star Magic Johnson, who was also personally involved in its development. Not all of the Harlem USA project consisted of huge businesses. When the radical Liberation Books closed in 2003, unable to afford a 700 percent increase in rent, a Denverite named Clara Villarosa stepped into the gap, getting a $425,000 loan to open the Hue-Man Bookstore, specializing in African-American culture, the first bookstore to open in Harlem in decades, followed just two years later by Kurt Thometz’s Jumel Terrace Books, at 426 West 160th Street, which also specialized in black culture and Africana. UMEZ also gave a $575,000 loan to Alvin Reed, the owner of the Lenox Lounge, the last remaining jazz club from Harlem’s glory days, at 288 Lenox Avenue, just south of West 125th Street. Reed, who had come to Harlem from Virginia in 1945 and bought the club in 1988, made sure to preserve Billie Holiday’s favorite seat from the days when the owners exempted her from the racial segregation that otherwise prevailed.
UMEZ’s most ambitious plan was to tear down the six buildings of the old Washburn Wire Factory in East Harlem and build a million-square-foot commercial development called East River Plaza, to be anchored by a massive Target discount department store. Commitments from commercial tenants and the state Department of Motor Vehicles also guaranteed the viability of Gotham Plaza, a $23 million initiative of the New York City Economic Development Authority and UMEZ consisting of a three-story building with 120,000 square feet of commercial space on East 125th Street between Third and Lexington avenues. Virtually next door were plans for another UMEZ initiative called Harlem Center, a 300,000-square-foot, twelve-story project undertaken by the developer Bruce Ratner’s Forest City corporation. Yet another high-profile UMEZ initiative, though the most questionable, was called Harlem Park, a 660,000-square-foot, $236 million project at Park Avenue and East 125th Street, on a vacant lot owned by the ailing New York College of Podiatric Medicine. The development was to be anchored by a fifty-one-story-tall, 222-room Marriott Courtyard Hotel designed by the much in demand Mexican architect Enrique Norten, which included a promise to offer a quarter of its 2,800 construction and permanent jobs to locals. Harlem Park would also feature 160,000 square feet of office and 57,000 square feet of commercial space, as well as one hundred units of luxury condominiums and include a health club and a parking garage. The 2002 deal was celebrated by the usual contingent of politicians, and even the Amsterdam News hailed the project. Troublingly, the developer of what was to be the first major hotel in Harlem since the Theresa shut down in 1966 had no experience in such a project. Instead, his major qualification seems to have been a close relationship with the head of the State Economic Development Agency, which allowed him to qualify for an extra state loan at well below market interest rates. The plans were also able to satisfy the cash-hungry college, which had seen its enrollment dwindle to fewer than three hundred students. Work on the project, which broke ground in 2005, went ahead slowly, impeded by the discovery that the site was contaminated by toxic waste. The developer was then indicted for allegedly defrauding the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development by underpaying workers at a public housing development in Rockland County. By 2008, two years after the project was scheduled to have been opened, with potential tenants, among them Major League Baseball, were fleeing.
Harlem Park was for most uptowners yet more evidence that outsiders were putting uptown development dollars into their pockets, all the while advancing their own careers. One of UMEZ’s attorneys, a former employee of the city Department of Housing, Preservation, and Development, went on to become the CEO of Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement, a nonprofit foundation founded in 1986 and including representatives from most of Harlem’s churches, mosques, and synagogues. Another executive used UMEZ as a stepping-stone between HPD, the New York City Housing Partnership, and the Carver Bank. Even worse, in 2001 UMEZ was implicated in a massive scandal involving unscrupulous developers attracted by federal financing. So hasty was the greed that at one point contractors began the demolition of 58 Edgecombe Avenue while residents were still in their beds. Another scandal broke when the public learned that more than five hundred buildings in Harlem and Brooklyn were used as part of a conspiracy of appraisers, engineers, and mortgage brokers to get federally guaranteed mortgages for properties bought from nonprofit organizations for purposefully inflated prices. The conspirators, who charged unusually high fees, would then default on the loans—$60 million in total—take the money, and abandon the properties, many of which were still occupied. UMEZ’s indirect involvement in many of these properties couldn’t help but leave many Harlemites doubtful about its commitment to change. It came as no surprise to these critics that by 2002 the organization had distributed only about a third of its funds, much of it to the already profitable conglomerates Disney and Chase Manhattan Bank, with very little to show for it as far as the big developments went.
Yet, there were some successes. Among the very first signs of positive change in East Harlem was the arrival in 2000 of a 45,000-square-foot Pathmark on East 125th Street between Lexington and Third avenues, achieved through the cooperation of a number of organizations, including Randy Daniels’s Metropolitan Economic Revitalization Fund and Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement which would be neighbors with a Hyatt Hotel, Whole Foods market planned by football Hall of Famer Emmitt Smith. On East 117th Street’s East river Plaza, on the site of the old Washburn Wire Factory, shoppers began crowding into a Costco that opened in 2009, though the store refused to honor food stamps and two months after opening laid off 160 employees. The Target store that opened in the same complex in 2010 got off to a better start, and the city was determined to renovate and expand La Marqueta. On the other side of town, the Aloft Hotel opened at West 124th Street and Frederick Doublass Boulevard, the first hotel to open in Harlem in decades. The opening of such basic neighborhood amenities may seem a meager indicator of progress, but Harlemites had long complained about the lack of full-service, affordable food stores.
Harlem’s churches had been major forces in the development of housing since the 1920s, and in the 1970s they formed nonprofit organizations that built thousands of apartments. Although the most visible effort of HCCI was the Pathmark in East Harlem, the organization quietly built or renovated thousands of units of housing, including thirteen hundred apartments on Fifth Avenue between 110th and 115th streets, as well as Bradhurst Court, a $52 million development at Frederick Douglass Boulevard and West 145th Street that included six thousand square feet of retail space, a soul food restaurant, and room for 118 cars in an underground garage. Such a development may have seemed out of character for the neighborhood. After all, in 1990 fewer than 1 percent of families in the immediate area had incomes over $50,000. But HCCI knew which way the entire neighborhood was developing. By 2000 more than 10 percent of the families there were making over $75,000 per year. In addition to housing, HCCI also branched out into health care services for people with AIDS, literacy initiatives, and job programs. One of HCCI’s most prominent affiliates, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, spun off a community-based, nonprofit development organization in 1989. Backed by the very considerable moral, political, and financial power of the Reverend Calvin Butts and his four-thousand-plus-member-strong congregation, the Abyssinian Development Corporation attracted and invested more than $300 million in housing and developments.
Realizing such ambitious goals didn’t come easily, and sometimes they didn’t come at all. Around 2001 word got out about a proposal called Uptown New York, which would take up most of the block between Second and Third avenues along East 125th Street. The billion-dollar plan called for fifteen hundred apartments and 700,000 square feet of commercial space. Residents of East Harlem, already disturbed by the opening of Manhattan’s largest automobile mall just to the north, weren’t bought off by the promise that Uptown New York would include a complex devoted to Latino entertainment. They were relieved when Mayor Bloomberg withdrew support for the project in 2006: The plans were soon replaced by a proposed $700 million East Harlem Media, Entertainment, and cultural Center, with a hotel, office and retail space, and 800 housing units. But even before the national financial crisis that began in 2008, the boom in construction was turning into a glut that resembled the speculative wave of construction that had swept over Harlem a century earlier, with similarly mixed results.
New York magazine famously claimed as early as 1998 that Harlem’s revival was largely nonexistent, because the neighborhood still had no big supermarket, no video store, and nowhere to buy a television. In fact, the revival of small business activity outside the 125th Street corridor had already meant large food shops, video stores, and plenty of places to buy consumer electronics, many of them admittedly gray market. There were also some interesting surprises, especially in the culture business. In 2005 the fashion designer Malcolm Harris debuted his new collection in a show at his Convent Avenue town house, and Harlem fashions were also on display at the Brownstone, a fashion showcase and café at 2032 Fifth Avenue. That same year, the Jumel Terrace neighborhood became home to the Museum of Art and Origins, started by George Preston, a Harlem native and professor at City College, at 430 West 162nd Street. Also in 2005, the white filmmaker Albert Maysles moved to Harlem and founded an all-documentary movie theater that included a program to teach underprivileged youngsters how to make movies. There were even two new theater companies, the Faison Firehouse Theatre, on West 124th Street, founded by George Faison, who was the original choreographer of the Broadway show The Wiz, and the Classical Theatre of Harlem, founded at the Harlem School of the Arts by two white dramatists in 1999. The company was soon being lauded internationally for programs that included classic works in the European tradition by Shakespeare and Bertolt Brecht as well as by the esteemed black writers Derek Walcott and August Wilson, with a budget that grew fast enough to allow them in 2003 to move into two attached row houses at 645 St. Nicholas Avenue, near West 141st Street. Even the Romanesque Revival stone gatehouse at West 135th Street and Convent Avenue, built in the nineteenth century as a pumping station for the Croton water project and vacant since 1984, opened in 2006 as a venue for music, dance, and theater. By that time the racially mixed Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company had moved uptown.
Literature uptown was also making a comeback. Harlem mourned the 1994 death of Ralph Ellison, who lived at 730 Riverside Drive—Harlemites still recall Ellison strolling around the neighborhood, with his dapper suits and pencil mustache, greeting his neighbors in his kind baritone—and was buried in nearby Trinity Cemetery. But his close friend Albert Murray, a man Duke Ellington once called “the most unsquarest man in the world,” was just reaching the peak of his influence, still making his home at the Lenox Terrace Complex. The Harlem Writers Guild, which had helped introduce new voices like Maya Angelou—who now lived part-time uptown—kept turning out writers, among them the bona fide star Terry McMillan but also newer voices such as Grace Edwards, who sets her mysteries in Harlem.
Less surprising than the emergence of a new generation of independent clothing designers or bookstores or art galleries was the continued success of restaurants. Old favorites, especially those specializing in soul food, despite the cuisine’s appalling effects on the health of diners, continued to draw both locals and visitors willing to step off the tour bus—much resented as “drive-through safaris”—and experience Harlem at ground level. These included Showman’s, on West 125th Street, which opened in 1942, and Perk’s Fine Cuisine, which under the management of the former “mayor of Harlem” Henry Perkins, specialized in soul food and live jazz at Manhattan Avenue and West 123rd Street. The undisputed success in the hamhocks, smothered chicken, pigs’ feet, and chitterlings business was Sylvia’s, which remained not only Harlem’s most beloved restaurant but the epicenter of a $20 million soul food empire. Wells Chicken and Waffles, which originated that typically Harlem dish to satisfy nightclubbers who stopped by in the 1930s sometime between dinner and breakfast, and where Nat King Cole celebrated his wedding, reopened in 2020 at Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard and West 143rd Street. Despite soaring commercial rents, which doubled in the early and mid-2000s, entrepreneurs also began blanketing Harlem with other kinds of restaurants. Celebrity Chef Marcus Samuelsson, a resident of Harlem since 2004, resurrected the old Red Rooster Restaurant in a new location at Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street. The neighborhood under the viaduct along the Hudson River north of West 125th Street, now home to the West Harlem Piers Park, saw so many new popular new places that it was being referred to as the harlem Meatpacking District. Seats were often hard to come by at the International House of Pancakes located in Thurgood Marshall Academy, on the site of the old Smalls Paradise. In lower Harlem, fancy restaurants and food shops showed off everything from French-Mexican fusion to neo-Chinese cuisine, a caviar and champagne bar, and a wine store featuring the products of black-owned vineyards. Some of these restaurants didn’t survive the latest financial crisis but a proposal to build a Harlem Culinary Institute in the long abandoned Corn Exchange building at East 125th Street and Madison Avenue kept hopes high until the building burned down and was demolished.
Things in East Harlem also changed, especially in the old Italian blocks. In the 1960s there were only five thousand Italian families left in East Harlem, supporting just a few churches, undertakers, wine shops, and food stores. The festa of the Madonna of East 115th Street attracted only a few thousand people, most of them tourists, and by the 1980s it was abandoned altogether for a time. The doors of Our Lady of Mount Carmel church, which had always been kept open around the clock regardless of the weather, in order to keep the Madonna visible, were now usually locked tight to keep away the junkies, the hoodlums, and the vandals. By 1990 there were fewer than a thousand Italians left in East Harlem, most of them elderly residents of public housing, and a decade later that number had fallen to only some four hundred. As the Latino community in East Harlem grew, the festa was overshadowed by the Three Kings Parade each January. The longtime neighborhood favorite Andy’s Colonial restaurant closed in 2003, as did the unnamed breakfast spot at the corner of First Avenue and East 116th Street, which had opened in 1922 and served generations of local children, as well as the actors Al Pacino and Anthony Quinn, the mob boss Fat Tony Salerno, and the rapper Ice-T. Still, some of the favorite old restaurants flourished. Rao’s, which dated to the nineteenth century, and remained at East 114th Street and Pleasant Avenue, was a favored gathering spot for celebrities including Martin Scorsese, Billy Joel, Tony Bennett, Billy Crystal, Woody Allen, and Robert De Niro, though an infamous shooting in 2004 scared away many patrons. That didn’t bother the organized crime figures who kept coming; FBI wiretaps picked up mob bosses feuding not about hits and percentages but about rights to the different tables. Above the restaurant, and totally aboveboard after a 2005 renovation, were twenty-two units of high-priced rental apartments, with one-bedrooms going for $2,000 per month and a two-bedroom penthouse available for $5,400 per month. Slightly less colorful than Rao’s was Patsy’s Pizza, which opened in 1933 at First Avenue and East 118th Street and once took a takeout order of three hundred pies from Frank Sinatra, for delivery to California. Also going strong were Louie and Ernie’s pizzeria, which opened in the 1940s, and Morrone’s bakery, which when it opened in 1958 on East 116th Street between First and Second avenues competed with more than two dozen other Italian bakeries nearby. By the turn of the century it was the only one. Median income in El Barrio went up 10 percent during the Giuliani years, while the number of owner-occupied housing units was up by almost a fifth, and the number of college-educated residents increased by 45 percent.
Another surprise in the new century was the rebirth of the uptown art scene. The Studio Museum in Harlem thrived under the leadership of Thelma Golden, whose 2004 show Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor introduced to the wider culture the term “post-black,” but the most exciting developments were to be seen in the dozens of smaller, independent spaces that built relationships with the artists who started moving back to Harlem. The best known of the new galleries was Triple Candie, on West 126th Street, which dazzled visitors with a 2006 show of found art and multimedia and conceptual works by David Hammond. As impressive as the art scene became, some of the most vital cultural energies came from music, as they always had. The movable musical feast known as the Jazzmobile survived, attracting huge crowds each summer to Grant’s Tomb. Long-standing institutions including the Lenox Lounge, Showman’s Café, and St. Nick’s Pub remained popular. New clubs also sprung up—Jimmy’s Uptown, the Lickety Split, the Robin’s Nest, and Striver’s Lounge. Even Minton’s, the birthplace of bebop, reopened in 2006 after decades of standing vacant.
Of course, by the time of Harlem’s New Renaissance, the music to be reckoned with was hip-hop. But popularity came at a price. A 1991 charity basketball game with rap entertainment at City College turned disastrous when more than five thousand people showed up, far more than the facility could accommodate. With seven security guards sharing two walkie-talkies and nine of the gym’s eleven exits locked, a mob scene ensued that killed nine people. As for the music most associated with Harlem, on the fortieth anniversary of Art Kane’s famous 1958 photograph of the greatest figures of the jazz world, only eleven survivors of the original could be found, and the building they stood before on East 126th Street was a boarded-up ruin. It was nonetheless a fitting backdrop for the more than two hundred rappers gathered for an updated version of the old photograph by an eighty-four-year-old Gordon Parks, including hip-hop pioneers Kool Herc, Grand Master Flash, DJ Hollywood, and Kurtis Blow, who had became a born-again Christian and host of a “Hip Hop Church.” By that time, rap had produced its second generation of artists, among them Andre Harrell of the duo Jekyll and Hyde, who went on to head up Motown Records, an East Harlemite named Damon Dash, whose Roc-A-Fella Records recorded Jay Z and Kanye West, and Dash’s boyhood buddy Cam’ron, who in turn recruited the rapper known as Ma$e.
Many older Harlemites had trouble making the leap from jazz to rhythm and blues to soul to rap, but not the Apollo Theater, although Harlem’s most hallowed hall did have its troubles. There had been more than a decade of sporadic openings and closings, with numerous aborted attempts at revitalization, all trumpeted with great fanfare before descending into infighting, incompetence, and greed. Percy Sutton’s vision of the Apollo regaining its old splendor was sound, but his timing was off, and by 1992 he had ceded control of the theater to the nonprofit Apollo Theater Foundation, chaired by Congressman Charles Rangel. It wasn’t until 1995, when the Apollo Foundation was taken over by Grace Blake, that the theater began its comeback. That year, Malcolm X’s widow Betty Shabazz chose the Apollo to come to a public reconciliation with Farrakhan. The old guard still played an important role in running the theater and in deciding its future. In 1998 the foundation’s board of directors rejected a million-dollar bid to redevelop the theater, instead accepting a $400,000 offer by none other than Percy Sutton. The New York State attorney general, frowning on the deal, dissolved the board, but Sutton’s Inner City Broadcasting was able to get a four-year contract for exclusive rights to broadcast from the Apollo for only $200,000, while eventually netting $26 million in proceeds. Meanwhile, the Apollo was building up its reputation yet again, now led by Harlemite and former AOL/Time Warner executive Derek Q. Johnson, who envisioned it as the centerpiece of a large-scale cultural complex on West 125th Street. That seemed like a long shot. In 2000 only one act per week was appearing at the theater; with fewer than two thousand seats, the theater was too big for small acts and too small for big acts, and ticket buyers still complained about that famous first balcony obscuring the view. The precipitous fall in donations from nonprofit foundations, corporations, and individuals that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, threatened the Apollo’s fund-raising, but the 2002 musical Harlem Song, produced by George Wolfe of the Public Theater, helped keep the theater afloat, though many Harlemites scorned the show as a nostalgic journey through a past that was as distant as it was glorious.
Despite the success of Harlem Song, the foundation’s board soon put an end to Johnson’s grand vision for the Apollo and kept the theater focused on what it had always done best. By 2004 the annual budget reached $10 million, with three hundred acts per year. It was at that point that the foundation’s board authorized yet another renovation, this time including a new marquee, fixing the seats, installing new carpeting, and updating the audio and lighting systems. After seven decades Amateur Night remained popular, reaching a nationwide audience via a syndicated cable television show. Each week seventy-five people were auditioning, spending ninety seconds trying to gain a coveted spot before the most fearsomely honest audiences in the world the following Wednesday. After the 2006 death of James Brown, who in his final years had taken to stopping by unannounced to play the theater’s piano in private, was there any alternative but to hold his memorial service at the Apollo?
The Apollo was certainly poised to survive Harlem’s future. The same could not be said of its neighbor, the old Loew’s Victoria Theatre, at 235-37 West 125th Street, which was built in 1917. In 2005 developers announced a plan to tear down the theater and build a twenty-five-story tower that would include a luxury hotel and 160,000 square feet of commercial space, as well as a Black Sports and Entertainment Hall of Fame. There was also talk of making the new complex the permanent home of the Classical Theater of Harlem and the Harlem Arts Alliance. Even the financial turmoil of 2008 didn’t stop the city council from turning the seemingly cursed Uptown New York site on East 125th Street between Second and Third Avenues into a $700 million development featuring 800 apartments—600 of them for low- and moderate-income families—and a media and entertainment complex with an attached hotel. A Museum of African Art broke ground in the condominium tower at 1280 and Fifth Avenue, and the National Jazz Museum in harlem, along with a movie theater, café, shops, and a city tourism center, were poised to move into a space across the street from the Apollo Theater and occupied from 1986 to 2001 by Mart 125.
The most controversial project facing Harlem in the first decade of the new century, but the one with the best chance of happening, involved Columbia University, which historically had had unproductive relations with its neighbors to the north and east. After the “Gym Crow” debacle of 1968, Columbia kept a low profile, though it did quietly buy dozens of properties near the campus. Its efforts to buy the famed Audubon Theatre were impossible to keep quiet. The old dance hall had closed its doors shortly after Malcolm Shabazz’s murder in February of 1965 and was taken over by the city two years later, after the owner had failed to pay taxes. For a time it housed an automobile dealership before being used by the city’s Department of Housing, Preservation, and Development, the Office of Neighborhood Services, and Community Board 12—it was known as “Little City Hall.” In the 1980s, Columbia acquired the property and planned to demolish the entire building and put up a biomedical research center, but the university ran into strong neighborhood opposition. In one of the few instances when community opposition against grand plans succeeded, the two sides reached a compromise. A brand-new, five-building complex would go up on the site, including space for community organizations. The original polychromed terra-cotta facade would be preserved, and amenities would include a bank, a bookstore, a barbecue restaurant, a coffeehouse called the X Café, and a club called the Audubon Bar and Grill, featuring jazz on Monday nights. In 1997 a sixty-three-foot-long mural commemorating Malcolm X was installed and in 2003 a museum devoted to Malcolm X went up on the site, which now included shops, a theater, meeting halls, a restaurant, a bank, a worship center, and the Harlem–Washington Heights Historical Society.
Columbia’s efforts to reshape eighteen blighted acres north of Morningside Heights proved more problematic. Manhattanville, where George Washington won his first significant victory of the Revolutionary War, and later a nineteenth-century hub of trade and manufacturing, had by the 1990s become what one observer called “an industrial slum.” Less circumspect Harlemites called it “Murderville.” Hemmed in between the subway viaduct and the elevated West Side Highway were only a few dozen residential buildings and businesses, including a massive and busy Fairway grocery store that opened in 1989 among the vacant lots, tire recappers, self-storage locations, bait shacks, and meatpackers. Columbia looked toward Manhattanville as a way to ease crowding on its campus, hiring the Italian architect Renzo Piano to come up with a master plan. The result was a striking vision of a $7 billion, seven-million-square-foot satellite campus with glass-fronted buildings as high as twenty-five stories containing housing, offices, Columbia’s School of the Arts, and a brain science center, all surrounding a central piazza highlighted by cafés and shops, in addition to a convention center, a hotel, and an Amtrak stop. Columbia promised Harlem two thousand construction jobs over two decades and permanent employment for another nine thousand workers. Still, neighborhood opposition to the plan was vociferous. Harlemites admitted that the existing Columbia campus was overcrowded, but they believed that displacing Manhattanville’s admittedly small number of residents and businesses while putting a new campus between West Harlem and a $20 million Harlem Piers park along the river was hardly a solution.
Another local concern was the environment and its impact on health care, which had been an issue in Manhattanville since 1986, when the city built the North River Water Pollution Control Plant, a twenty-two-acre facility that handled sewage treatment for more than one million residents of Manhattan’s West Side. Some Harlemites bitterly opposed the project, considering the city’s promise to build Riverbank State Park on top of the plant an insulting bribe. A $45 million health care center named for Ron Brown opened on Lenox Avenue near West 135th Street in the late 1990s and was welcome, but the benefits were, many Harlemites believed, offset by hundreds of job cuts at health clinics and at Harlem Hospital, which went from twelve full-time cardiologists to five, the result being that more than 7,000 heart tests were seriously mishandled. North General Hospital on Madison Avenue closed altogether, though it was scheduled to be replaced with a walk-in clinic and rehabilitation center. Even the opening of a $40 million Harlem Health Center at Morningside Drive and West 125th Street, built by the hotel workers union for its more than thirty-six thousand affiliates, promised little in terms of overall health conditions. Uptowners expected more from Harlem Hospital’s five-year, $226 million program of renovation and expansion, but no single hospital could do much to change an appallingly high mortality rate, an explosion of obesity among children, a deplorably high number of AIDS-infected babies dying every day, asthma rates double those of the city average, drug addiction rates twice those of other New York neighborhoods, and triple the incidence of childhood mental illness—all in a neighborhood in which one-third of all residents had no health insurance.
Columbia asserted that its Manhattanville campus would provide enough jobs to help lift the entire surrounding neighborhood out of the poverty behind the health problems. As for environmental concerns about the hazards of biotech research, Columbia countered that the university already operated a number of such facilities with a perfect safety record, and that such a laboratory posed a far smaller health risk than the continued underdevelopment of the neighborhood or even the radically conservative plan proposed by the anti-Columbia forces, a stubbornly low-density design that would preserve all of Manhattanville’s current industry and housing. In the end, Columbia was able to move forward by acquiring or agreeing to lease about two-thirds of Manhattanville. A promise from the city to use its power of eminent domain if the owners remained recalcitrant was confirmed by the state’s highest court in 2010. Hunter college anticipated no such problems in the building of its new school of social work on Third Avenue near East 118th Street.
Conspicuously absent from the negotiations surrounding Columbia’s plans for Manhattanville was the effective involvement of Harlem’s political class. The Gang of Four wielded less political power uptown than it ever had, partly out of choice. David Dinkins devoted his energies to teaching at Columbia University, and Percy Sutton, who dies in 2009, and Basil Paterson had largely retreated to business matters. The only one still active in politics was Charles Rangel, who reached new heights of power and influence during the Clinton years. During the presidency of George W. Bush, Rangel assumed the chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee, which set the nation’s agenda on taxes, trade, and health care—“chairman of the money,” they now called him. However, political infighting and accusations of impropriety and corruption resulted in his losing considerable authority, not only in Washington, D.C., but among voters in Harlem. First, Rangel refused to endorse the Democrat Eliot Spitzer for governor in 2006 because Spitzer had neglected to seek Rangel’s advice in choosing the Harlem state senator David Paterson, the son of Basil Paterson, as running mate and candidate for lieutenant governor. After Spitzer stepped down two years later in a marital infidelity scandal and handed over the governor’s mansion to Paterson, it was revealed that Rangel maintained not one but four rent-regulated apartments in the relatively posh Lenox Terrace apartment complex, even as he failed to pay taxes on income he derived from a home he owned in the Dominican Republic. Finally, many Harlemites looked askance at the wink-and-nod techniques that Rangel was using to raise funds for a Harlem school that would bear his name. The eighty-year-old man who inherited Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s seat in Congress gave up his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee in early 2010 but managed to win the Democratic nomination in September—against Powell’s grandson, who had recently been convicted of driving while impaired—even while facing House Ethics Subcommittee charges, had failed to learn how easily the appearance of personal impropriety could outweigh decades of public service. As for Governor David Paterson, he decided not to run for re-election after a furor over his behind-the-scenes intervention in a domestic abuse case involving one of his aides.
Meanwhile, a newer generation of politicians struggled with very personal versions of uptown history, among them Assemblyman Keith Wright, the son of the legendary judge Bruce “Let ’Em Loose” Wright, and State Senator Jose M. Serrano, the son of Congressman Jose Serrano. Adam Clayton Powell IV served in the New York City Council and in the state’s assembly, though his career was tarnished by accusations of sexual misconduct in 2004. Of course, the most prominent new Harlemite of the twenty-first century was former president Bill Clinton, who after leaving the White House began working out of a nondescript office building at 55 West 125th Street. Many looked askance at Clinton’s arrival, claiming that he was yet another white carpetbagger. An organization called the New Black Panthers organized protests that included banners reading “CLINTON=GENTRIFICATION.” But it was impossible to ignore how the former president, a lifelong striver and a risk taker, a lawmaker and rule breaker, as well as a competent jazz saxophonist and an Arkansas-bred aficionado of soul food—Toni Morrison famously called him America’s first black president—had more in common with his new neighbors than at first seemed obvious. Popular, brilliant, determined, haunted by possibility, Clinton quickly won over his neighbors by joining the Harlem YMCA, starting an organization called the Harlem Small Business Initiative, bringing his foundation Operation Hope to Harlem, and starting public school programs in music and economics.
One of the most inspiring of the new breed of uptowners was, like most of uptown’s heroes through the ages, not from Harlem. Geoffrey Canada, a native of the South Bronx, organized the Harlem Children’s Zone, a social services agency that blanketed ninety-seven square blocks around Lexington Avenue and East 125th Street, including nine thousand children, with cradle to college programs, including arts, education, sports, job counselling, legal services, health care, and housing. As with the efforts of Kenneth Clark’s HARYOU program from the 1960s, it seemed like an impossible task. Some neighborhoods began to recover in the 1990s, but a decade later average annual income uptown was only $26,000, which was just under half the national average, and only a small increase over the situation under Ed Koch’s last days. Only half of all Harlemites had a high school diploma. East Harlem lagged even further behind, with more than 50 percent of its residents living in poverty and more children in foster care than in any other area in the entire country Canada, who envisioned a “no-excuses culture of high expectations, marketplace accountability, and tightly structured schedules,” told parents: “Nobody’s coming to save your children. You have to save your own children.”
Canada realized that making changes would depend on making the most of Harlem’s overcrowded, understaffed, dilapidated public schools. The old Benjamin Franklin High School, at Pleasant Avenue and East 116th Street, had been reinvented as the Manhattan Center for Mathematics and Science, but by the time students were ready for high school the damage was already done. In El Barrio three-quarters of all fourth graders were failing to read at grade level, and during the Bloomberg years most Harlem schoolchildren still weren’t earning a high school degree. Canada founded Promise Academy, a privately funded charter school—meaning that it was exempt from normal union regulations governing hiring and firing—at Madison Avenue and East 125th Street that, starting in 2004, attempted to offer children from kindergarten through high school not only a “dawn to dusk” school day but a longer school year that would help the youngest and neediest make the most of a summer break that would otherwise be spent in front of the television or on the streets. Canada saw that almost half of the students were overweight because of poor eating habits at home. An informal poll showed him that most of the students had never even eaten a fresh peach. Canada decided that meals served at the school, including breakfast, would consist of locally grown, organic food. Every child would also have a sports period otherwise unavailable in inner-city schools. By the end of the first school year, the number of five- and six-year-olds learning at the appropriate grade level rose from 11 percent to 80 percent, though older students were still struggling. But not everything Canada touched turned to gold. Despite the enthusiastic support of no less than president Obama, the harlem Childrens Zone’s attempts to build a Promise Academy at the St. Nicholas Houses, displacing playgrounds and gardens, ran into fierce local opposition, much of it directed at the charter schools movement in a general for its supposedly anti-union approach and its tendency to keep out special education and English as a Second language students.
Canada realized that making changes would depend on making the most of Harlem’s overcrowded, understaffed, dilapidated public schools. The old Benjamin Franklin High School, at Pleasant Avenue and East 116th Street, had been reinvented as the Manhattan Center for Mathematics and Science, but by the time students were ready for high school the damage was already done. In El Barrio three-quarters of all fourth graders were failing to read at grade level, and during the Bloomberg years most Harlem schoolchildren still weren’t earning a high school degree. Canada founded Promise Academy, a privately funded charter school—meaning that it was exempt from normal union regulations governing hiring and firing—at Madison Avenue and East 125th Street that, starting in 2004, attempted to offer children from kindergarten through high school not only a “dawn to dusk” school day but a longer school year that would help the youngest and neediest make the most of a summer break that would otherwise be spent in front of the television or on the streets. Canada saw that almost half of the students were overweight because of poor eating habits at home. An informal poll showed him that most of the students had never even eaten a fresh peach. Canada decided that meals served at the school, including breakfast, would consist of locally grown, organic food. Every child would also have a sports period otherwise unavailable in inner-city schools. By the end of the first school year, the number of five- and six-year-olds learning at the appropriate grade level rose from 11 percent to 80 percent, though older students were still struggling. But not everything Canada touched turned to gold. espite the enthusiastic support of no less than president Obama, the harlem Childrens Zone’s attempts to build a Promise Academy at the St. Nicholas Houses, displacing playgrounds and gardens, ran into fierce local opposition, much of it directed at the charter schools movement in a general for its supposedly anti-union approach and its tendency to keep out special education and English as a Second language students.
Although Promise Academy received the lion’s share of the publicity, a number of schools were posting extraordinary results. In 2009 East Harlem’s Amber Charter School outperformed every other charter school in the city, and the Harlem Science and Arts Center, Leadership Village Charter School, and Harlem Village Academy all had more than 85 percent of their student bodies reading at grade level. In fact, the entire neighborhood was already benefiting from Harlem’s revival.
The kind of innovative, local solutions that Geoffrey Canada introduced were also offered by a Jamaican immigrant and City College graduate named Maurice Ashley, the first black grandmaster in the world of competitive chess. He started a team called the Raging Rooks at Junior High School 43 and another one called the Dark Knights at Mott Hall Intermediate School. Ashley built these teams, which represented families who had lived uptown for generations, as well as immigrants from Albania, China, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, and Poland, into nationally known powerhouses, despite the access to private teachers and camps that was commonplace among their competitors. In 1997 the Dark Nights were taken over by a native Harlemite named Jerald Times, who came from a poor, broken home and lived for years in the Langston Hughes house. Times, who hustled chess at the Elegance Barber Shop, on Lenox Avenue, led the Dark Knights to several national championships by preaching an uptown gospel—he calls it “the sacred hierarchy”—of God, family, school, and chess and by exposing his students to a variety of inspirations, including visits by a tai chi master and a traditional Latino storyteller. Victory in the face of similar odds has also been the story of another group of young Harlemites who made up the Harlem All-Stars Little League team. In 2002 they made it to the league World Series. Funded by a Harlem couple named Dwight and Iris Raiford, the All-Stars did it without the expensive equipment and private coaches that their opponents had access to, instead holding practices in a vacant lot and playing games in run-down Marcus Garvey Park. The same kind of improvisatory approach was also on display at the “Castle,” a 1913 Catholic School called St. Walburgas Academy, at Riverside Drive and West 140th Street, which had been abandoned in the 1970s and was in 1998 renovated as a group home for fifty-nine former convicts by the Fortune Society, a social services organization specializing in reintegrating prisoners back into society. Similarly, Bobby Robinson’s Happy House Records made it into the new century and its sixth decade, at new quarters on Frederick Douglass Boulevard.
Among the most prominent of the newer generation of Harlem leadership was the Reverend Calvin O. Butts III, the head of the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Born on the Lower East Side in 1949, he studied philosophy at Morehouse College before returning to New York to take a degree at Union Theological Seminary, making sure that the church remained in the forefront of the religious and secular revival. The old description of the Negro mecca, with “a bar on every corner and a church on every block,” seemed truer than ever, with more than four hundred Christian institutions—from storefront, charismatic sects to established and flourishing congregations—which was almost twice the number of half a century ago. But there was nothing like the Abyssinian Baptist Church, America’s best-known church, which remained a major force in community development. In 2003 the Abyssinian Baptist Church spent $36 million to renovate the old Smalls Paradise building, at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and West 135th Street, to house the Thurgood Marshall Academy, a combined middle and high school that the church founded in 1993. Of course, the Abyssinian Baptist Church had no monopoly on the good news uptown. When Nelson Mandela visited New York in 1994 for the first time as the president of South Africa, he appeared at the Canaan Baptist Church, led by the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker, who had known Martin Luther King Jr. in seminary school and who went on to become the first executive director of the SCLC. Mother Zion AME Church still boasted a sign on the outside of the building reading “We love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Even the Elmendorf Reformed Church, at 171 East 121st Street, which traced its roots back to Harlem’s very first church, was flourishing. Harlem’s biggest black synagogue, the Commandment Keepers, in the old Dwight Mansion just off Marcus Garvey Park, was undermined by a battle over rabbinical succession and sold to the writers Darryl Pinckney and James Fenton.
Even as Harlem seemed to rise from the dead, some of its most beloved institutions were in trouble. St. Thomas the Apostle Church, the gorgeous 1907 Roman Catholic institution at West 118th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, was closed by the Archdiocese on New York, as was our Lady Queen of Angels in East Harlem, and the Church of St. Charles Borromeo’s Monsignor Wallace A. Harris resigned in 2010 amid allegations of sex abuse. Even the National Catholic Museum on east 115th Street shut its doors permanently. the Little Flower Baptist church on Fredrick Douglass Boulevard closed its doors, and the Mount Morris Ascension Presbyterian Church fell on hard times, as did the Rescue Baptist Church. Even after All Souls Church closed its upstate summer camp, its Alchoholics Anonymous program, it couldn’t afford a full-time preacher. The Boys Choir of Harlem, founded in 1968 by Walter Turnbull in the basement of Ephesus Church at Lenox Avenue and West 123rd Street, also fell on hard times. For more than three decades the Boys Choir was one of the most visible signs of life uptown, with numerous concert performances and recordings, international tours, and the formation of the Girls Choir of Harlem in 1997 and a Choir Academy of Harlem. Although three-quarters of the school’s students came from poor homes with single parents, they outperformed many of the city’s upper-middle-class communities, with a graduation rate of 98 percent, compared to 30 percent in the rest of Harlem. Then in 2003 the organization was rocked by allegations of sexual abuse by one of the school’s counselors. Turnbull, the head of the choir, not only failed to report the accusation to the authorities, as required by law, or to fire the counselor, but he bailed him out with $2,000 of the school’s money and, with the support of Congressman Charles Rangel and the choir board, publicly denied the claims all way to trial, where the counselor was found guilty on two dozen counts of sexual abuse. The difficulties only deepened in early 2006, when the New York City Board of Education, which had had enough of Turnbull, ordered the choir out of its city-owned building at Madison Avenue and East 127th Street. Turnbull managed to reach a compromise in which he would step down as chief executive but remain as artistic director. Meanwhile, funders fled the situation and the school’s staff of coaches, accompanists, and choreographers shrunk from twenty-five to eight and then to none. After Turnbull’s death in 2007, the choir also met its demise.
Well before the global economic turmoil started in 2008 that ended up threatening the future of Riverbank State Park and East Harlem’s Wagner Pool and drive up Harlem unemployment to 18 percent—four times the national average—uptown Manhattan remained a financial question mark for both philanthropists and investors. Money problems dogged the Dance Theater of Harlem, one of New York’s premier dance institutions. In 2004, the thirty-five-year-old organization, faced with a $2.4 million debt that it attributed to declining contributions since the terrorist attacks of 2001, closed its school after failing to pay its liability insurance, laid off dozens of dancers, and canceled its coming season, though a flurry of donations allowed the school to open early the next year and the organization even attracted million-dollar grants from the Ford and Catherine Steinberg foundations in 2006. Hard times also struck the Opus 118 Harlem Center for Strings, which was celebrated in the 1999 film Music of the Heart for reintroducing music education in East Harlem public schools, but it turned out much of the problem was self-inflicted. In 2004 the director of the program, Katherine Gooney, admitted to having defrauded the program of more than $45,000. A similar betrayal was uncovered in 2001 when Lorraine Hale, who had taken over Hale House, which her mother had founded in 1969 to assist drug-addicted mothers, was charged by the state with seventy-two counts of mismanagement and fraud. She pleaded guilty the next year to overseeing abusive child care practices—her husband allegedly called their charges “cash cows”—as well as a complex scheme in which she had helped steal more than $1 million from her own charity, in part by charging market rate rents for apartments that she told the city would go to poor families.
City College also struggled. The school announced a $250 million expansion plan that would put a new dormitory, academic buildings, and research units at the southern end of the campus, yet the blackest sheep at what should be one of the country’s premier institutions of black scholarship, Leonard Jeffries, continued to attract publicity that undermined City College’s reputation, broadcasting the racialist philosophy that had so damaged the school’s reputation.
The role of race in Harlem’s future will surely be complicated. In 1997 Wilbert A. Tatum turned over the Amsterdam News, whose circulation had fallen from more than a hundred thousand in the 1960s to under thirty thousand three decades later, to his half-Jewish daughter, Elinor. It was distressing news for those devoted to promoting one race only, a sign that the new Harlem wouldn’t be that different from the old Harlem. To be sure, in part because of the focus on big projects and national franchises, fewer than half of the business on 125th Street were owned by blacks, though this was less a question of race than of local ownership, a pattern that applied to the city as a whole. The same was true in Harlem’s residential real estate, which after a decade of surging activity saw prices grind to a halt and start falling back in 2009. It was in part due to a glut of new apartments—shades of a century ago?—which caused prices to fall by a third. the real estate giant Cocoran went so far as to close its uptown offices in 2010. Even venerable real estate like the Riverton Houses was vulnerable, its owners foreclosing in 2010. A black middle class was on the march, and black celebrities such as the actor Samuel L. Jackson, the singer Alicia Keys, NBA Hall of Famer Walt Frazier, the writer Maya Angelou, and the basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were all rumored to have bought homes uptown, but Harlem was less black than it had been in almost a century, and the continuing influx of Africans, Latinos, Asians, and whites promised to make it a more diverse community. By 2005 the area’s racial balance had changed so drastically that for the first time in decades a Harlem neighborhood was represented by a white City Council member. Then again, new attitudes about race—was “post-black” the right word?—were sweeping across Harlem. In 2005 a charming little family-owned thrift shop on West 125th Street specializing in black memorabilia began selling mementos from the Jim Crow era, from ashtrays and cookie jars featuring corpulent, coal-black Jemimas and grinning Uncle Toms to an actual KKK hood. Harlemites rejoiced in November 2008 over the election of Barack Obama as the first black president, but not all of them—the Amsterdam News had backed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, remembering that picking politicians by skin color hadn’t always been good for Harlem.
Although the arrival of an African community was the most visible development in recent decades, the continuing Latinization of uptown Manhattan may prove more significant. The percentage of African-Americans in Harlem dropped from 88 percent in 1990 to 80 percent in 2000 to 40 percent in 2010, but as much as a third of that figure consisted of Latinos of partially African descent who did not claim black racial status on census forms. Meanwhile, the number of whites increased to about 8 percent, or some twenty-three thousand, although again Latinos—mostly Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans—posed a particular statistical challenge, since many of those who were racially white tended to identify by ethnicity when it came to the census. In East Harlem, the number of non-Hispanics was growing so fast that by the turn of the century non–Spanish speakers made up 45 percent of the population. Such figures were closely watched by Julián Zugazagoitia, the Mexican director of the Museo del Barrio, which since 1977 has operated from a former orphanage at Fifth Avenue and East 104th Street. Tougher national attitudes toward illegal immigration—such as proposals to deny public services including education and food stamps to the children of illegals—and more restrictions on legal immigration may slow the “whiting up” of Harlem. But how reliable an indicator of economic status will skin color remain? James Weldon Johnson asked back in 1930: “Will the Negroes of Harlem be able to hold it?” He thought not, though the process is taking longer than he’d imagined.
If the transformation from a multiracial if segregated community into a black monolith coincided with the decline of Harlem, changing demographics since the 1990s that promised more diversity in the capital of blackness are also bringing new challenges. A rising middle class seemed to inspire a new wave of muggings and robberies of tourists, new residents, and commuters at the 125th Street Metro North station in 2006—cops warned outsiders and newcomers not be lured into vulnerability by what the newspapers said about falling crime rates. The fact that Frank Lucas’s story could be filmed, as American Gangster, on location in Harlem in 2006 was one sign of how slowly things were changing—it took little cosmetic work to make some blocks resemble the burned-out ghetto of the 1970s. But this wasn’t a simple matter of aesthetics. Crime continued to be an all-too-common fact of life and death, especially after the economic boom ended and the uptown housing bubble burst. Drugs were still for sale out on Lexington Avenue and East 125th Street, and while the number of shootings was virtually unchanged citywide from 2009 to 2010, in East Harlem the figure was up by 243 percent, and other uptown precincts weren’t far behind. In 2007 the Reverend Philip Mann, who for almost three decades had served as the leader of the Blessed Sacrament Baptist Church, was stabbed to death in his home on Fifth Avenue. Such events led Harlemites to ask, What enabled the Dutch, the Germans, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, and to a lesser extent the Latinos to live out the American dream, while the Negroes, who arrived with more or less equivalent levels of poverty and education, have not? To be sure, the nature of community life in Jewish, Italian, and Latino East Harlem, protected from the incursions of outsiders by language barriers, was very different from that of African-Americans. Single or married men who temporarily left their wives and children behind constituted the bulk of the first waves of Jewish, Italian, and Latino immigrants, but eventually intact and even extended families became bastions of stability that provided for a better chance at psychological and economic well-being and advancement. Meanwhile the black family unit, under attack for centuries, became less stable as time went on. Also, the deplorable and yet somehow deeply American discrimination experienced by minority immigrants uptown did not compare to the suffering experienced by African-Americans who had fled the legal terror of Jim Crow in the South to find conditions that were only marginally better in Harlem.
It is a time-honored uptown tradition to misread Harlem’s changes. The notion that this time is the fire next time has echoed from the stepladders of the Seventh Avenue speechifiers for more than a century. After all, change is Harlem’s defining characteristic, as much as improvisation is the watchword of its music, from jazz to rap, bred by the people who live on what the Indians call the River that Runs Both Ways. At the same time, some things have not changed over the centuries, such as the tensions between natives and new arrivals—between Indians and European settlers in the seventeenth century, between Protestants and Catholics, between western and eastern European Jews, between Jews and blacks, between native-born Negroes and West Indians, between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, and between African-Americans and African immigrants. Such tensions have always reflected and inspired both conflict and more progressive ways of understanding social identity and its relation to economic class. The line that Harlemites have always walked between secular pleasures and the demands of religion has resulted in a popular culture—from blues to hip-hop—deeply informed by the quest for justice. Strains between the desire for self-determination uptown and the inevitability of downtown authority have always given rise to Harlem politicians with an often fatal streak of independence. Collisions between the quest for economic self-sufficience and dependence on outsiders with grand plans, from the Randel plan to the Manhattanville project, have always allowed Harlemites to define themselves not just as apart from all other New Yorkers but as the divided soul of the city itself.
Nonetheless, this time around, Harlemites are witnessing the most important transformation of the community in six decades. For the first time since the 1920s Harlem is attracting wealth. The rich are once again preceded by a group of related strivers—American-Africans this time, instead of African-Americans—seeking to take advantage of what is still the most undervalued real estate on the island. The distant approach of the long-awaited Second Avenue subway and the development of the Hudson and Harlem waterfronts promise to turn the uptown economy away from real estate speculation and toward a more sustainable mix of residential and business activity, an echo of the events a century ago that brought so much promise. In 2006 the Department of City Planning began a project that analyzed the zoning patterns along 125th Street from river to river to allow higher buildings containing housing, office space, and shops at the major intersections, particularly those with subway stations, while retaining the low-rise, neighborhood feel of the surrounding residential blocks. How could that be bad, especially if it protects Harlem’s sacred places, from the Apollo, where performers still rub the last remaining stump of Seventh Avenue’s Tree of Hope before taking the stage, to the Theresa Hotel, which was scheduled to become a satellite location of Columbia University’s Teachers College, and from the newly swinging Minton’s to the Harlem YMCA, which after remaining closed altogether from 1975 to 1992 completed a $2.5 million renovation in 2004, and the West 135th Street’s Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library, which underwent an extensive expansion and renovation in 1990, topped off by a ceremony in which Langston Hughes’s ashes were reinterred under the lobby? The old Blumstein’s sign is no longer visible on 125th Street, but it is not gone—only obscured by a banner from Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine, which was founded as a Jewish educational institution in 1970 but now courts students of every religion, even while serving only kosher food and shutting down on the Sabbath.
The same combination of hard work, good luck, and faith allowed the Hamilton Grange to be lifted carefully from its spot on Convent Avenue and West 141st Street and inched down the block and around the corner to the more bucolic and historically authentic setting of St. Nicholas Park. The wild turkey that was recently spotted at the Riverton Houses reminded Harlemites of the transformative power of their recorded past and their imagined future, both always in the making.