And yet, this new army of developers, speculators, and investors marches through Harlem behind the wrecking ball of global capital, banking on the neighborhood’s rich history as the center of black culture and art.1
In the spring of 2013, the Real Estate Board of New York launched its first “Harlem Open House Expo.” It was an exclusive event in partnership with Chase Manhattan, geared at “potential buyers looking to get a peek at the hot Harlem real estate”:2 brokers from all major real estate firms operating in Harlem hosted viewings of pricey co-ops, condos, and townhouses for sale. The listings included a brownstone at West 126th Street selling for $2.5 million and a two-bedroom apartment at East 126th Street for $805,000. A few years before, “Harlem Is Booming” was the title of an eight-page advertising supplement that appeared in the New York Times:3 it depicted Harlem as a new hip and sophisticated destination for the well-off newcomers, listing the dozens of luxury development projects taking place in the neighborhood. These included the 2280 FDB at 123th Street, a 12-story luxury condominium building with prices ranging from $509,000 to $1.889 million; the Livmor Condominium at 115th Street, whose penthouses sold for almost $2 million, and which includes amenities such as a state-of-the-art fitness center and a media lounge; and the Apex, a luxury condo at 124th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard on top of the boutique Aloft Hotel, with a panoramic rooftop terrace, bar, and fitness center. Sponsored by the largest realtors with ventures in the district, the New York Times supplement celebrated the new wave of luxury development in Harlem, asking the readers, “Are we witnessing a second Harlem Renaissance?” The answer was of course a sound yes, although the supplement gave the rather clear impression that what drove this renaissance was a wave of luxury real estate, rather than a cultural and political awakening.
From the 1960s through much of the 1980s, Harlem had made headlines as one of the most infamous urban ghettos in America, plagued by poverty, gang violence, and drugs. But during the Bloomberg and de Blasio years, the neighborhood that had frightened middle-class Americans for decades has emerged as one of the city’s luxury real estate hotspots. Nowhere are these changes more remarkable than around 125th Street, once the bustling focal point of the “Harlem Renaissance,” the street where the history of black America was made in the 1920s and 1930s, and which entered a phase of steep decline in the late 1960s. Over the last 15 years, the swift pace of development has radically changed the face of the strip: today, Old Navy, H&M, CVS, Starbucks, Subway, Applebee’s, and Gap have made it almost undistinguishable from major commercial crossroads downtown, like 14th, 23rd, or 34th Street. A few blocks down, new lavish condos are popping up everywhere, bringing with them an army of new, hip, and moneyed city consumers. But it’s not hard to see what’s behind that gleaming surface. In today’s Harlem, pricey brownstones and luxury condominium buildings stand next to public housing projects that are still home to a poor and segregated community. While Sunday Times real estate sections routinely list Harlem properties to affluent professionals from downtown, along with anecdotes of black and white yuppies snapping up wonderful mansions for bargain prices, the old Harlemites lament the loss of their community. Over the past 10 years, I’ve spoken with both long-time residents and newcomers to the area, and I’ve witnessed first-hand the simmering conflicts over class that gentrification has brought about in the neighborhood. Heather is a young white woman I met while she was walking her dog at Marcus Garvey Park. She moved to Harlem in 2010 and is quite knowledgeable about the changes that are happening in the neighborhood:
All these new cafes and Whole Foods and the cupcake shops, these places are not catering to the people that were originally here. They are catering to those like us. New people who just moved in the neighborhood. Black or white doesn’t matter, but it’s still the newcomers they are building all this new stuff for.
That seems to be the case with new stylish restaurants like Red Rooster, opened in 2010 by world-class chef, TV star, and new Harlem transplant Marcus Samuelsson, whose patrons are majority white and nonlocal. Located between 125th and 126th, just nearby the historical soul food diner Sylvia’s, it was called a “game changer” in Harlem, as reported by a Guardian journalist:
Business owners speak about “before Red Rooster” and “after Red Rooster,” referring not just to its power in terms of drawing outsider crowds, but also in defining a specific kind of Harlem chic.4
But if a new trendy Harlem is being made for newcomers, what about those who lived here before? I talked to Gale, a black woman in her 50s whom I met in front of the therapy center for HIV patients at 125th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard. Although she still works here every day, she was recently forced to leave Harlem:
I don’t live in Harlem anymore. I stayed here 28 years, I had to leave in 2012, they took the apartment back, the landlord wanted all the apartments back so they could give them over to the new rich people…. This happened everywhere. They did no longer need us. I had to move in the Bronx by the new Yankee Stadium, and then I had to move from there again, ’cause my rent there was doubled too.
Gale is outraged by the changes in the neighborhood. To her, the new businesses along 125th Street are catering not to people like her, but to a brand-new population of consumers who don’t have any real bond with the community she knows:
These new people, they do not spend any money in the moms and pops. They spend their money only at Starbucks. They do not buy stuff from here. They go downtown. All these companies they come with their own people over here, they don’t bring new jobs, they promise they’ll hire people from the area, that’s the hoop-la to get all the paperwork to get approval from the city. We don’t benefit at all.
Although the commercial and residential gentrification of the areas surrounding 125th Street had been set in motion in the years of Rudolph Giuliani, the pace of these transformations has accelerated tremendously under the administrations of Bloomberg and de Blasio. According to Gale, it was the city’s rezoning of 125th Street, approved in 2009, that put the final nail in the coffin of what was once a predominantly black, working-class neighborhood:
That’s what they do all the time. They need to push those zoning changes. They need to change the blocks, they need to change an area that has been existing way before you even thought about coming here. This has been a growing neighborhood for years now. This ain’t no abandoned area. These rezonings are not for the average person. They spent $6 million for the park [Marcus Garvey Park], they made it for those white people living in those luxury condos over there. But we, the average people, we are stuck in a box. We see our shops close. They buy them out. We are not supposed to live here any longer.
The rezoning for 125th Street came at a very sensitive time for Harlem residents, who were already under pressure from escalating housing prices, massive development schemes by neighboring Columbia University, and extensive waves of foreclosures and bankruptcies of small businesses in the recessive economy of the late 2000s. And 125th Street, Harlem’s largest and most famous thoroughfare, has become the latest battleground between the ambitions of New York’s city producers, the demands of new city consumers, and the fears and outrage of many long-time residents.
Laid out in the 1811 Commissioner’s Plan for Manhattan (the “grid plan”), 125th Street is a broad cross-town street that runs from the Hudson to the East River, crossing West, Central, and East Harlem. Around the end of the 19th century, Harlem was a prestigious residential suburb lined with streets of beautiful row houses and freestanding mansions, but also of five- and six-story tenements for middle-class families. The beginning of construction work for the IRT subway in 1900 was the catalyst for a wave of rampant property development and the construction of new tenements in the area, and after the completion of a subway stop at the corner with Broadway in 1904, 125th Street established itself as Harlem’s central commercial thoroughfare. But the opening of the subway did not have the desired effect on property values: the improvement of mass transit to the outer boroughs instead drove many of Harlem’s middle-class residents away. As landlords were unable to find white tenants for their dwellings, they started renting to a growing African American community: during and after World War I, large numbers of African and Caribbean migrants from British, Dutch, and French colonies in the West Indies migrated to Harlem. By 1914, Harlem’s African American population was estimated at about 50,000.5
In the 1920s and 1930s, Harlem experienced a period of cultural and political ferment that was unique in the history of African American culture. Black intellectuals and artists were attracted to a neighborhood they saw as a promised land of opportunities for emancipation. This Harlem Renaissance was a moment of glorious artistic and literary achievements that for the first time in American history exposed black artists, activists, and intellectuals to an audience far beyond the traditional confines of the African American community. The works of writers like W. E. B. DuBois and Langston Hughes and artists such as Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden were applauded well beyond the boundaries of Harlem. In these years, 125th Street became the beating heart of Harlem’s nightlife, with its innumerable theaters, dance halls, lounges, speakeasies, cafes, and bars. Legendary jazz clubs, like the Cotton Club, the Lenox Lounge, and the Savoy, opened, along with numerous theaters. Harlem became the “Black Capital of the World,” and 125th Street became the bustling focal point of this extraordinary blossoming of culture (Figure 1.1). In 1917, the Loew’s Victoria Theater opened on 125th Street as a luxury vaudeville and motion picture theater; in 1934, the world-famous Apollo Theater opened in a former burlesque house on 125th Street. It was here that the careers of prominent black entertainers like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald were launched.
Figure 1.1 View of the Apollo Theater marquee, New York, between 1946 and 1948.
But the cultural ferment of the Harlem Renaissance did not extirpate a long history of racial and social injustice. Most of the 125th Street bars, nightclubs, and stores were in fact owned by white landlords, and most were “white only” establishments that did not accept blacks as customers or even as clerks. Even housing opportunities were limited for black people, and home ownership was thwarted by the infamous redlining practices of banks, which denied loans to residents of black inner-city neighborhoods. In 1920, one-room apartments in central Harlem rented for about $40 to whites, but the price was up to three times more for black tenants.6 These and other forms of racial segregation, which persisted through the mid-1970s, encouraged the formation of political groups fighting for the emancipation and the self-determination of black Americans, and rampant political and social activism in defense of the rights of black people became a hallmark of Harlem in the early decades of the 20th century.
In the 1910s and 1920s, political leader Marcus Garvey galvanized the community with his struggles for the rights of African Americans. Many in Harlem joined the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, which advocated for racial pride and the self-determination and independence of American blacks. But the Great Depression of 1929 ended this moment of cultural and political ferment for the Harlem community. In the early 1930s, employment among black New Yorkers dropped dramatically, and activist groups started boycotting white-owned stores under the slogan “Don’t buy where you can’t work.” Protests escalated with the 1934 public demonstration at 125th Street in front of Blumstein’s Department Store for the right of African Americans to work in white-owned establishments.7 Rampant unemployment and persisting social conflict, which culminated in the Harlem Riot of 1935 at 125th Street,8 convinced those wealthier whites who had supported Harlem’s entertainment and retail businesses to leave.
Circumstances worsened after World War II, when 125th Street and the surrounding areas entered a phase of precipitous decline as middle-class blacks started moving away, leaving only the very poor and the unemployed in the neighborhood. With the passage of the Federal Housing Act in 1949, urban renewal and “slum” redevelopment processes changed the face of many areas of Harlem (Figure 1.2). While the impact on 125th Street was limited and focused only on its east and west ends, other public housing schemes in Harlem were responsible for the large-scale obliteration of entire portions of the historic fabric and the extensive displacement of long-time residents. Traditional tenements were replaced with monolithic high-rise, low-income housing complexes, surrounded by vast gardens and parking lots, which severely exacerbated the geographic segregation of the poor in Harlem. At the west end of 125th Street, the General Ulysses S. Grant Houses were completed in 1956 between Broadway and Morningside Avenue, from 123rd Street to 125th Street. The complex, the tallest housing project in New York City at the time it was built, hosted 1,940 apartment units in eight buildings at twenty-one stories, and was managed by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), established as the first public housing authority in the country by Fiorello La Guardia in 1934. At the east end of 125th Street, the Senator Robert F. Wagner Sr. Houses were completed in 1958 between Second Avenue and FDR Drive, between East 120th and East 124th Streets. The complex consisted of 22 towers with 2,154 apartments for around 5,290 residents.
Figure 1.2 The Riverside Park Community apartment complex at 3333 Broadway between West 133rd and 135th Streets, in Harlem.
The 1960s were the beginning of a three-decade-long age of decline for Harlem. When landlords could not afford property taxes or repairs, buildings were abandoned and boarded up, or even burned down to collect insurance money. More and more tax-delinquent buildings in Harlem (called “in-rem”) were foreclosed and taken over by the city, which by the 1960s came to own almost 40% of the area’s housing stock. As the building stock deteriorated, private landlords converted their buildings into privately run flophouses and homeless shelters. Meanwhile, in the 1950s and 1960s, the heroin epidemic hit Harlem like a storm. Drug-related crime, such as robbery, burglary, and murder, was six times higher in the neighborhood than the city average. The critical housing conditions in the neighborhood contributed to more social unrest.
In the summer of 1964, Harlem became the scene of a new riot unleashed by the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer. Other riots followed the shocking assassination in 1968 of Martin Luther King Jr., leader of the African American civil rights movement.9 During the late 1960s and 1970s, Harlem, like the South Bronx and the most deprived parts of Brooklyn, continued to experience widespread abandonment and arson. In the 1970s, the process of abandonment escalated to the point that Harlem reached a lower population density than the rest of Manhattan for the first time since before World War I. Also 125th Street’s fortune as a premiere commercial street declined dramatically. The famous Apollo Theater shut down in 1976. Few bars and clubs remained open on the street. Most storefronts were boarded up or left vacant. This is how a New York Times reporter described the street in 1978:
Empty, boarded-up stores along the once bustling 125th Street shopping corridor; burned-out abandoned buildings demeaning almost every block … ; hundreds of idle men clustered at corners, drowning empty days in wine and whisky; youths barely into their teens selling drugs as openly as other boys hawk newspapers.10
The lack of access to credit and the unaffordable insurance fees (due to Harlem’s vertiginous crime rates, among the highest in the nation) discouraged black storeowners from holding on to their businesses. Nonblack business owners, on the other hand, were threatened by the frequent “buy black” boycott initiatives launched by local groups. As a result, commerce gradually shifted to the sidewalks of 125th Street, where peddlers and street vendors started selling soul food and bootleg goods. A large illegal market emerged on the sidewalks of the street and on a vacant lot between 125th and 126th Streets. Dreams of a revitalization of Harlem and of its Main Street in the late 1970s and early 1980s were short-lived. The vision of a Harlem International Trade Center at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue never materialized. There also had been plans to create a major shopping mall and a center for the arts, but shrinking federal subsidies, coupled with the uneasiness of private investors to invest in a risky territory like Harlem, shattered the hopes of those who dreamt of a new Harlem revival.
There were some exceptions, however. In 1982, the Studio Museum, first opened in 1968 as a small loft exhibiting African American artists’ work at 5th Avenue and 125th Street, reopened in a new location on 125th Street between Lenox and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. In 1983, the Apollo Theater was eventually purchased by City Broadcasting, a firm owned by former Manhattan borough president Percy E. Sutton.11 The theater obtained federal, state, and city landmark status, and fully reopened in 1985. But despite these few encouraging signs, the prospects for the neighborhood remained bleak.
In 1982, Mayor Ed Koch commissioned a “Redevelopment Strategy for Central Harlem,” prepared by a special “Harlem Task Force.” The report called for public–private investments in selected anchor areas around Harlem, especially at 125th Street. In the early 1980s, the Koch administration also began auctioning the city’s in-rem properties back to private investors and to nonprofit organizations, in an attempt to foster private investment in the neighborhood. However, the results of the first auction in 1982 were discouraging, as most of the purchased properties were not rehabilitated, but flipped over to other investors for a profit. As a consequence, a second auction in 1985 remained open only to households with a substantially higher income than the Harlem average,12 mainly middle-income residents from other neighborhoods. Already around the mid-1980s, urban geographers Richard Schaffer and Neil Smith noted that activities in the housing markets of certain areas of Harlem were pronounced enough to signal the onset of the first forms of gentrification.13 In the early 1990s, a few national chains also opened their first branches on 125th Street. The first was a Body Shop at the corner of Fifth Avenue, followed by a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream franchise right across the street. But despite these signs of commercial upgrading, the long recession of the early 1990s once again frustrated city officials’ ambitions of a revitalized Harlem.14
On October 17, 1994, Harlem was again in turmoil, as hundreds of police officers swooped in to displace the many street vendors and peddlers populating the sidewalks of 125th Street. One New York Times reporter described the scene as follows:
In place of the vendors yesterday were police officers standing along the street in clusters of three, with metal barricades on the sidewalks, giving 125th Street an air of an area under siege…. Police officials declined to say how many officers were assigned to the area yesterday, but some officers estimated their numbers at more than 500. And while many Harlem residents found the scene disquieting, some praised how the Giuliani administration was dealing with what many had considered a perennial severe problem whose solution had eluded previous mayors.15
The illegal vendors were moved to a temporary market site at Lenox Avenue and 116th Street. The aggressive raid against them signaled the advent of that “law and order” platform that would become the hallmark of the Rudolph Giuliani administration in the following years, and would change the face of 125th Street for good.
The end of Harlem’s “crack wars” in the mid-1990s and the staggering drop in crime complaints in Harlem coincided with a new era of aggressive police enforcement in the neighborhood. Although crime in New York City as a whole had been declining since the Dinkins years, it was during the period 1993–2001 that the three Harlem police precincts (28, 30, and 32) reported the most remarkable drops in crime in the whole city—especially drug-related crimes such as burglaries and murders.16 The mid-1990s were also a time of rapid real estate appreciation citywide, but certain areas of Harlem hit record sales. During the 1996–2006 period, East and Central Harlem were among the neighborhoods with the largest increases in sale prices, with 499.6% and 270.2%, respectively,17 signaling a strong reactivation of the real estate market in a neighborhood that for decades had been off limits for developers. Harlem was becoming safer for investors. In 1993, the creation of a 125th Street Business Improvement District (BID) to promote shopping along the strip paved the way for the long sought-after revitalization of Harlem’s Main Street. In its early years, the BID installed security lighting to make the street safer at night, improved sanitation, created promotional maps and brochures, and organized summer concert series, sport and fashion galas, jazz programs, and business conferences. The closing months of 1999 witnessed the appearance of the first Starbucks on West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue—a very reliable indicator that something on the street was definitely changing.
In 2001, as former US president Clinton’s staff moved its offices to 55 West 125th Street, reporters described the event as a psychological boost to the Harlem community, despite ambivalent local reactions, as some residents started fearing that gentrification was about to make its way into the neighborhood.18 In fact, one of the main catalysts for a new wave of commercial development on 125th Street was the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ) legislation backed by Clinton and introduced in 1994 in Congress by Harlem Representative Charles Rangel. It was one of nine empowerment zones established by the Clinton administration in distressed areas across the country with the goal to stimulate economic growth by granting tax breaks and low-interest loans to private investors. The UMEZ’s initial 10-year program was based on a federal grant of $100 million, alongside funds from the governor of New York State and the mayor, creating an investment pool of $250 million available for development in Harlem.19 However, the UMEZ’s funding to small businesses represented only about 10% of the total money allocated;20 most of the funds went to attract giant corporate retailers in the neighborhood. In true Darwinian fashion, while many locally owned establishments closed shop, global chains started opening their first branches on 125th Street, with the promise of hiring local residents. Most of the new jobs created, however, turned out to be mainly entry-level positions as cashiers or clerks, with minimum-wage salaries and few benefits.21 According to a Harlem businessman, “the Empowerment Zone is not empowering people, it is permitting them to be clerks.”22
A pilot project that received a major share of the UMEZ’s public financing was Harlem USA, a 285,000-square-foot, six-level retail and entertainment complex that opened at 125th Street in 2000. Anchored by large chain retailers including Old Navy, New York Sports Club, JP Morgan Chase Bank, and the “Magic Johnson Theaters” multiplex, it was a pioneering venture on 125th Street, and the trailblazer for such kinds of developments on the strip. In 2002, a large retail and office complex called Harlem Center followed suit at the corner of Lenox and 125th: its mall at the ground floor hosted Marshall’s, Washington Mutual, Payless Shoesource, Duane Reade, and an H&M outlet in a side pavilion close to the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Federal Office Building. In both developments, ground-floor rents were way beyond the reach of most local businesses, so that only corporate retailers could afford a space there.23 By 2002, the west end of 125th Street, which only a decade before was still dotted with abandoned buildings, started to look undistinguishable from the major cross-town retail strips downtown.
Meanwhile, the commercial makeover of the east end of 125th Street, between Lexington and 3rd Avenue, was carried out in the form of large, suburban-like superstores. A Pathmark supermarket, with a parking lot occupying the entire block between Lexington and 3rd Avenue, was completed in 2002. The three-story, 90,000-square-foot Gotham Plaza retail center opened the same year right across the street, filling an entire lot of East 125th between Lexington and 3rd. The huge enclosed shopping mall hosts the offices of Commerce Bank and AT&T and chain brands such as Sleepys and Radioshack. The Gateway Building, which opened in 2002 diagonally across from the Pathmark center, is a smaller, three-story, 39,000-square-foot commercial complex hosting franchises such as Duane Reade and Seaman’s Furniture (Figure 1.3).
Figure 1.3 The Gateway Building at 125th Street and Lexington Avenue.
Commercial development coincided with a new wave of extensive residential construction and rehabilitation of decrepit single- and multifamily buildings. The rehabilitation of old houses and the development of new units were spearheaded by the action of several community development corporations active in Harlem since the late 1980s, including the Abyssinian Development Corporation, whose efforts by the late 1990s shifted from providing housing to moderate- and low-income Harlem residents to the development of middle- to upper-income condominium apartments, and of massive commercial complexes along 125th Street, including the Pathmark supermarket and Harlem Center in partnership with the UMEZ. The Harlem Community Development Corporation (HCDC), created as a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation in 1995, was also crucial in the redevelopment of the neighborhood. By the late 1990s, tenement-style dwellings and row houses around 125th Street and in Central and West Harlem gradually started attracting increasing numbers of affluent in-movers, mostly black and white professionals from other parts of Manhattan, who could profit from the relative bargains and the excellent transportation options of the area.
Throughout the 1960s, the 1970s, and much of the 1980s, journalistic, literary, and cinematographic accounts of Harlem routinely portrayed the neighborhood as the underbelly of a city in chaos, a slum plagued by poverty and gang violence. Blaxploitation and action movies such as Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), Shaft (1971), and Black Caesar (1973) told the US public stories of crime and mobsters in the most dangerous American urban ghetto (Figures 1.4 and 1.5). Sensationalistic articles in magazines and newspapers were adding fuel to the fire, portraying Harlem like a nightmarish urban jungle to a frightened American audience.
Figure 1.4 Movie still from the movie Black Caesar (1973).
Figure 1.5 Movie still from the movie Shaft (1971).
But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the mass perception of danger that had long been associated with Harlem started to dissipate. Sociologist Sharon Zukin notes that it was in these years that mainstream media gradually began portraying the virtues of Harlem as a conveniently located Manhattan neighborhood just waiting to be discovered by brave urban pioneers:
Beginning in the 1980s mainstream media such as the New York Times and New York Magazine published occasional stories of gentrifiers, more black than white, who bought brownstone houses cheap because of the neighborhood’s decline and then confronted drug addicts, gangs and rubble-strewn lots. Through the 1990s, when the empowerment zone set up shop, the stories about new residents grew more optimistic, and after 2001 they focused on more whites than blacks.24
The rediscovered media interest for Harlem was also the result of two-decade-long efforts of local business alliances and city agencies to encourage tourism in the neighborhood. The Uptown Chamber of Commerce (UCC) had been launching timid initiatives to persuade visiting out-of-towners to add Harlem to their Manhattan itineraries since the early 1970s. Their aim was to promote a tourist-friendly image of a neighborhood that had long been associated with crime and poverty. In 1974, the UCC’s launch of “Harlem Day” (a one-day summer event celebrating the neighborhood and its culture, arts, religion, entertainment, and sports) proved successful, and the event was soon expanded into a week-long festival showcasing the best that Harlem had to offer.25 More initiatives to market Harlem as a viable tourist destination followed suit. In 1979, the UCC launched a “Do It Up in Harlem” campaign that was officially linked to the state’s globally successful “I ♥ New York” initiative. In the mid-1980s, the Harlem Visitors and Convention Association (HVCA) was created to promote tourism in the neighborhood. In 1985, the “I ♥ New York” campaign had Harlem as its centerpiece and an “I ♥ New York Harlem Travel Guide” was produced to highlight shopping and entertainment in the neighborhood. The Apollo Theater at 125th Street, which had finally reopened after many years of neglect, started featuring a tourist-friendly entertainment program with jazz nights, gospel Sundays, and the famous Wednesday amateur night shows. Since 1993, the activities of the 125th Street BID were also crucial to reinforce the image of Harlem’s Main Street as a vibrant shopping thoroughfare. The BID produced promotional maps, worked on streetscape improvements, and launched a series of initiatives to attract visitors to the area, including the “Holiday Lighting Program” during Christmas (1994), the “Harlem Summer Concert Series” (1996), and walking tours of the neighborhood’s landmarks. Also, the UMEZ dedicated part of its resources (through a $25 million Cultural Investment Fund) to promote tourism to some of the iconic attractions of Harlem, most of which were located on 125th Street or in its immediate surroundings. These included the Apollo Theater, the Boy’s Choir of Harlem, the Dance Theater of Harlem, the Studio Museum, and the Museum for African Art.26
By the late 1990s, the mainstream press was keener than ever to highlight the pleasures of visiting Harlem, and dazzling reviews of its best restaurants, bars, and jazz parlors filled the lifestyle and food sections of the New York Times and New York Magazine. By the early 2000s, tourism in the area was on the rise. In 2000, about 800,000 tourists visited Harlem’s attractions.27 But it wasn’t until the election of Michael R. Bloomberg that Harlem experienced its most staggering increase in tourist numbers. With Bloomberg in office, massive efforts were invested in the production of a new brand for Harlem and for its Main Street. Marketing initiatives by the UMEZ, the Uptown Chamber of Commerce, the 125th Street BID, and other local stakeholders were reinforced and coordinated by NYC & Company, Bloomberg’s newly created branding machine. In 2003, the UMEZ partnered with NYC & Company to open a visitor information center at the New York State Office Building Plaza on 125th Street. The BID, meanwhile, continued its initiatives to create a “friendly business atmosphere” on 125th Street and started partnering with larger companies:28 in 2000, it launched the “American Express Holiday Stroll Program” and a series of “Thursday Is Business Day” events, sponsored by Chase, the UMEZ, and Citibank. In 2009, a new visitor information center was opened in the Studio Museum, also on 125th Street. One year later, the opening of the Aloft Hotel, a 124-room Starwood franchise just one block south of 125th Street, was cherished by the press for being the first hotel to open in Harlem in decades.29 In 2012, NYC & Company launched “Destination Harlem,” a one-month-long campaign to highlight cultural events at renowned Harlem institutions, including the famous amateur nights at the Apollo, gospel concerts at the Dwyer Cultural Center, readings at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, cabaret shows at the Harlem Stage, and poetry readings at El Museo del Barrio. The campaign also promoted some of the few traditional local businesses that had managed to survive and thrive in the midst of the gentrifying neighborhood, like Sylvia’s Soul Food Restaurant, Amy Ruth’s, or the famed Lenox Lounge.30 The message conveyed to visitors and New Yorkers was that Harlem was no more a no-go area: instead, it had become just another welcoming, vibrant, and trendy Manhattan destination—with some black flavor. Only passing references to African American culture, and no mentions of the historical struggles for self-determination of Harlem’s blacks, were included in these new representations:
While it’s too soon to call it a full-fledged neo-Renaissance, Harlem is unquestionably happening. Buoyed by an influx of former downtowners and emboldened by a tradition of culture and creativity, the neighborhood is chockablock with new high-end shops, restaurants, music halls, lounges and even a luxury hotel…. Harlem may still be beloved for its hundreds of churches, elegant row houses, unexpected parks and tiny home-cooking joints, but there’s another side of the neighborhood in the making these days: sleek, chic and sophisticated. It’s Manhattan at its colorful best.31
By the mid-2000s, city newspapers and magazines celebrated Harlem’s “Second Renaissance”: its vibrant atmosphere, its lively culture, but most of all its charming residential properties made headlines. Meanwhile, new trendy media were launched to show New Yorkers the coolness of living uptown. In 2004, Uptown Magazine was created by two young black entrepreneurs who set office at East 125th Street. The glossy lifestyle magazine speaks directly to the growing population of affluent black professionals living in Harlem. Articles featured in Uptown are about successful black businesspeople, CEOs, hedge fund managers, doctors—the new Harlem elites:
From ultra-elite Madison Avenue events and black tie galas to Fashion Week at Lincoln Center, New York City is the epicenter of style and status. UPTOWN gives you a firsthand look at the life and times of the city’s affluent African-Americans.32
The magazine’s readership includes “180,000 socialites, business executives, financial gurus, celebrities, power players, and style mavens with annual incomes exceeding $132,000 … a new audience of noteworthy influencers who inspire trends across the country.”33 The launch of the Uptown Flavor online magazine in 2006, presented as “the premiere online lifestyle destination in Harlem” and featuring pieces such as “The Ultimate Guide to Yoga in Harlem” and the “Holiday Wine Guide,” was also indicative of the emergence of a brand-new population of wealthy city consumers in a rapidly gentrifying Harlem. This same affluent and trendy population was the focus of a TV show produced in 2009 by BET Networks called “Harlem Heights.” The show celebrated the glamorous lives of the young black elite in gentrifying Harlem. In the show, gentrification, far from being a dirty word, had become an indication of status.34 Although the show lasted one season, the launch of this production was a clear indication that, by the late 2000s, representations of Harlem in the mainstream media were indeed undergoing a radical makeover.
This Rezoning will reinforce the 125th Street Corridor as an important regional business district and bolster its historic role as an arts, entertainment and retail corridor.35
In 2003, the Department of City Planning (DCP), in partnership with the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), the Department of Cultural Affairs, the Department of Transportation (DOT), and the Department of Small Business Services, crafted a development framework for a sweeping rezoning of 125th Street. An advisory committee of local actors, composed of local businesses, civic groups, cultural institutions, and community boards 9, 10, and 11, was included in the planning process, but a key role was played by business-oriented Harlem organizations like the 125th Street BID. The proposal came at a time when many projects in Harlem were already under way or in their first planning stages. These included Columbia University’s 17-acre campus expansion in Manhattanville at the western end of 125th Street and an oversized mixed-use project for the East Harlem Media Entertainment and Cultural Center on its eastern end. The so-called river-to-river proposal envisioned the rezoning of all blocks between 124th Street and 126th Street, from Second Avenue to Broadway. By increasing residential densities and encouraging mixed-use development, the plan called for approximately 2,600 new apartments and over 600,000 square feet of new office and retail space. Eighty percent of the new housing units would be market rate, and 20% would be set aside as “affordable” according to the city’s inclusionary zoning program, which offers developers floor area bonuses in exchange for including a percentage of non-market-rate housing in new developments. The proposal also introduced a height restriction of 290 feet for all new construction to discourage out-of-scale development in the area. The proposal was described by the DCP as a way to “sustain the ongoing revitalization of 125th Street as a unique Manhattan Main Street, enhance its regional business district character and reinforce the street’s premier arts, culture, and entertainment destination identity.”36 According to the DCP, the rezoning plan was the result of a substantial participatory process, made of over 150 meetings held from 2003 to 2007 with “stakeholders, property owners, residents and elected officials to discuss and refine the plan.”37 But many claim that these meetings repeatedly avoided discussing topics that were vital to local residents—particularly their fears that the rezoning would displace low-income households and small businesses, and concerns that the new housing units would be unaffordable to Harlem locals.38 In 2007, the DCP stated that the foreseen displacement of 71 small businesses and their 975 employees resulting from the rezoning would “not constitute a significant adverse economic impact.” Likewise, the indirect displacement of 500 residents and the threat of demolition of some of the street’s century-old buildings were not considered worthy of particular consideration.39 On December 5, 2007, community boards 9 and 11 (East and West Harlem) voted for conditional approval of the rezoning (i.e., they approved the plan, provided certain modifications were made), while community board 10 (Central Harlem) objected that at least 2,077 units, with an estimated 5,400 residents, would be under threat of displacement under the new zoning and disapproved of the DCP’s assessment that the displacement of 71 businesses would not constitute a significant adverse economic impact; the board also expressed concern about the impacts of an overproduction of market-rate housing units (80% versus 20% reserved as “affordable”) in a very low-income area like Harlem. All three community boards agreed that the plan did not guarantee a sufficient amount of housing affordable to local residents, nor any provision to protect existing tenants from eviction. They also called for the establishment of provisions to retain local businesses in the area. On January 30, 2008, the City Planning Commission held a public hearing at the City College of New York at West 135th Street. Over 100 residents, business owners, and local community organizers attended to voice their opposition to the rezoning.40
Before final approval was due on April 30, 2008, Councilwoman Inez Dickens, who represented the portion of 125th Street where the largest upzoning was proposed (CD 10), was holding the balance of power. Dickens, the daughter of real estate millionaire and three-term assemblyman Lloyd E. Dickens, is a woman strongly tied to the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce and to its development arm, the Greater Harlem Housing Development Corporation, and active in the Harlem real estate business with her own firm.41 Although the community board she represents was the one voting for conditional disapproval of the plan, the board had traditionally been siding with large development plans for Harlem.42 Dickens had promised to not approve the plan until she could extract some benefits for the local community. But after negotiations with the board of the DCP, Dickens came to an undisclosed agreement, and a modified version of the plan was presented to city council for approval. According to the modified plan, 1,785 of 3,858 of the apartments planned for Harlem (46%) would be indeed “affordable,” with 900 set aside for those earning $46,000 or less a year for a family of four, and 200 set aside for families earning a maximum of $30,750 a year.43 Other revisions included height restrictions capping buildings at 190 feet, a $750,000 forgivable loan program for businesses adversely affected by the plan, the creation of a local arts advisory board, and a $5.8 million fund for capital improvements at Marcus Garvey Park.44 On April 30, 2008, Council gathered to decide whether to approve or reject the plan. Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel (among whose donors were real estate firms with development plans for 125th Street)45 and Governor David Paterson backed the plan. Dickens voted yes, along with other council members Robert Jackson and Melissa Mark-Viverito (today’s city council speaker in the de Blasio administration).46 The modified version of the rezoning plan was eventually approved by an overwhelming majority of council members (47 to 2) in what became a tensed and emotionally charged session. The public, mostly composed of black Harlem residents opposing the plan, shouted at and booed Dickens from the chamber balcony. As the session ended, Dickens had to be escorted out of City Hall through a rear door.47 Council members Tony Avella and Charles Barron, the only two who voted against the rezoning, called it “top down” and “a sellout.” Barron protested: “Ten to 12 years from now, they will see that the housing will not be affordable. This will be the wholesale sellout of Harlem from river to river.”48 The same day, gleeful press accounts listed the generous concessions that Dickens had managed to extract from the DCP and boasted the large amount of affordable housing that the rezoning would create. The New York Post wrote of an “unprecedented 46 percent” of new housing units that would be reserved for low- and moderate-income families.49 Dickens said of the affordable housing agreement: “It’s an inclusionary program never before done in the history of this great city.” She added: “I’m fighting to support and protect my community…. With this rezoning, Harlem’s historically indigenous cultural institutions will be protected.”50
Figure 1.6 Special 125th Street District Zoning Map.
Figure 1.7 Special 125th Street District Zoning Chart.
The rezoning established a new contextual “special district” for 24 blocks between 124th and 126th Streets, from Broadway to Second Avenue, crossing through West, Central, and East Harlem. It allows for denser and taller buildings and introduces mixed-use developments in lots that were once zoned for commercial activity (Figures 1.6 and 1.7). To create new commercial space that is more suitable to large-scale retail, the rezoning increases the allowable commercial and residential densities. In all, the plan allows for approximately 3,900 new apartments and around 600,000 square feet of new office and retail space, which is expected to fill in the vacant lots and replace the one-story retail shops that line 125th Street. In an effort to create a pleasant pedestrian experience, the rezoning aims to enhance “ground-floor retail continuity” and regulates uses located on the ground floor in all new developments with street fronts on 125th Street. “Dead” uses (including bank and hotel lobbies, offices, and residential uses) are prevented from fully occupying the ground floor of new developments: they are allowed only on the upper floors, and can have only limited space for entrances and lobbies on the ground floors. The same goes for offices and hotels. The plan also outlined a “special arts and entertainment district” between Frederick Douglas Boulevard (8th Avenue) and Malcolm X Boulevard (Lenox Avenue), the area where major landmarks such as the Apollo and Victoria Theaters, the Blumstein Department Store, and the Hotel Theresa are located. To maintain a vibrant street environment, new developments in this area are required to dedicate 5% of their total floor area to arts- and entertainment-related uses such as museums, performance venues, and restaurants. The proposal also includes regulations to enhance the streetscape by preventing shop owners from coating storefronts with roll-down metal grates—probably too reminiscent of the old ghetto days—and promoting instead “distinctive signage,” for example, allowing theaters to build marquee signs reminiscent of the old times of the Harlem Renaissance. An “arts bonus,” usually in the form of additional floor area, is available to developers in exchange for the provision of nonprofit visual or performing arts spaces in their developments.
The 125th Street rezoning received a chorus of criticism from local residents, community advocacy groups, tenant organizations, and even urban planning think-tanks. Although objections have targeted almost every aspect of the plan, most concerns addressed its lack of affordable housing provisions, the threats of displacement of existing residents and businesses, and its impact on the physical character of the neighborhood.
I don’t think the average person can like the rezoning, ’cause it works against them. As far as apartments, if they are kicked out, and they are, they won’t ever find another apartment in the area.51
The strongest opposition from residents and civic groups addressed the lack of guarantees that new housing developments would be within the reach of local residents. They were right.
Talks of a 46% share of affordable housing, considered by the popular press the biggest win for Councilwoman Dickens, were just smoke and mirrors. The plan approved has no mandate to produce even a single affordable unit. It only offers developers the option to take advantage of incentives if they decide to reserve a percentage of the newly developed units as “affordable.” These units can be placed on-site (within the rezoned area) or off-site, in the immediate surroundings. But in boom times and in heated property markets, the majority of developers have generally chosen to opt out of these subsidies, in search of higher returns from market-rate developments. Furthermore, the few units that may be produced won’t be affordable to the local residents of Harlem. The average median income for the zip codes included in the plan was approximately $22,000 in 2008. Since the affordability standard is measured with respect to the area median income (AMI) of New York City as a whole (around $71,000 in 2008), by these measures only 5.18%, or 200 units, out of a proposed 3,858, would be available to households whose annual incomes are $30,750 dollars or less (the average Harlem resident)—if they ever get built.
In addition to worries about housing affordability, concerns have addressed the threat of displacement of long-time residents. According to Community Board 10, at least 2,077 units will be directly impacted by the rezoning, in addition to the indirect impacts caused by development, including pressures to tenants in rent-stabilized buildings. Massive displacement would happen because, even if the developers took advantage of the inclusionary zoning incentives, most of the new residential developments will be market rate, versus a much lower percentage set as “affordable.” Nellie Hester Bailey, human rights activist and cofounder of the Harlem Tenants Council, a tenant rights advocacy organization that is active in fighting the displacement of residents and businesses in the neighborhood, pointed to the increasing number of residents’ complaints about landlords illegally raising rents, harassing tenants, and evicting people to make way for new affluent in-movers,52 and to reports on family homelessness in New York City showing that Central Harlem ranked among the top 10 neighborhoods in the city with the highest displacement rate.53 She described the proposal as “a plan that seeks to replace a working class community of color with an affluent white community.”54 Other locals voiced their concerns that the rezoning would force African Americans out of the area. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, a Harlem resident and author, claimed: “Their plan basically says that working-class people don’t have the right to live here…. The soul of the city is being drained out of veins.”55 According to Craig Schley, the head of Vote—Voices of the Everyday People, a group engaged in a campaign (eventually unsuccessful) to stop the 125th Street rezoning plan, “People talk about gentrification, but this would be Katrina-fication done by a swipe of a pen rather than a hurricane.”56
They are closing all these stores. Lenox Lounge just closed. They asked him $10,000 a month, like three times what he was paying before. That’s not Roseland [Ballroom]. You don’t have the kind of space to make that kind of money. So they had to shut down.57
Local mom-and-pop store owners bemoaned that the rezoning would force their businesses to close due to rising competition from large retail chains or escalating rental prices. Again, they were right.
In 2008, Community Board 11 (East Harlem) made several recommendations aimed at preserving small businesses in the neighborhood. The board suggested the introduction of provisions that would require developers to reserve a space to host existing local businesses in their developments and recommended incentives to developers in exchange for the commitment of new establishments to hire locals. The plan didn’t include any provisions to protect existing small businesses other than the establishment of a $750,000 no-interest, forgivable loan program for businesses that were forced to close shop or relocate. But this meant only a paltry $10,000 per business—a ridiculous amount to offset the costs of displacement and relocation. Meanwhile, a staggering $5.8 million was allocated for improvements to Marcus Garvey Park, an initiative that no local group had ever requested or supported, but that sure pleased the developers of several new luxury residential condominium buildings facing the park—most of which were on the drawing board by the time the rezoning was adopted (among these, the 28-story condominium tower, 5th on the Park, completed in 2009). A great many small, locally owned businesses have left their locations along 125th Street since then. According to the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce, approximately one-third of businesses in Harlem closed only between July 1, 2008, and June 30, 2009. This was not a merit of the national recession alone. As will be demonstrated in the following pages, dozens of small businesses along 125th Street were directly evicted by their landlords so that they could take full advantage of the increased density coming with the rezoning and make room for more lucrative developments. Needless to say, this happened at the same time that big chains were tirelessly expanding their presence along the strip—even in the midst of a global economic slump.58
I was just driving west on 125th street last week…. I truly couldn’t believe how quickly that long stretch of street has literally become a long large mall. Anything with any sort of personality and history to it is being wiped out at a really rapid pace.59
The plan was presented by the press as one of the most meticulously crafted initiatives to come out of the DCP under the chairmanship of “rezoning czar”60 Amanda Burden. Burden herself claimed she had spent more time working on the 125th Street proposal than she had on any other prior rezoning plan.61 The rezoning promised to promote the development of “building forms that are compatible with existing neighborhood character,”62 but has missed opportunities to incorporate measures to preserve historical landmarks in the area. Aside from two public libraries, both landmarked in 2009, no other historically significant building was given landmark status during the planning process. The city admitted that the rezoning “could result in significant adverse impacts due to potential demolition of four Register-eligible resources on potential development sites, including: the former Harlem Savings Bank, the Marion Building, the Bishop Building and the Amsterdam News Building,” none of which was calendared for designation as a city landmark.63 The list of iconic buildings on 125th Street that are not protected by landmark laws, however, is much longer, and should also include Blumstein’s Department Store (completed in 1923), which was the site of Adam Clayton Powell’s “Buy Where You Can Work” campaign, and the glorious Victoria Theater, which was hailed at the time of its opening in 1917 as one of the most beautiful theaters in the city.64 At several public meetings in preparation of the rezoning plan, Michael Henry Adams, Harlem historian and author, pointed to the difficulties he encountered when struggling for preservation against Bloomberg’s development-prone administration: “Harlem has the same cultural and architectural significance as New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah…. Our local law is flawed. It’s old and timid. Mayor Bloomberg essentially dictates what gets designated or not.”65
The modified plan also sets height restrictions of 190 feet, or about 17 stories, on the north side of 125th Street and of 160 feet, or about 14 stories, on the south side. City officials said that this was necessary, as the 1961 zoning did not incorporate any height limits. However, it was the old zoning that kept too-tall buildings from being built in practice, as it incorporated narrower limits to the allowable building density. This is why most buildings along the corridor have remained predominantly low scale for decades. Because of the increased allowable densities, instead, the new zoning actively encourages the demolition of low-scale structures to build taller and more profitable ones.66
Yesterday’s demilitarized zone is today’s luxury condo haven. Double-wide strollers wheel down sidewalks where yuppies once feared to tread. This has been the pattern everywhere from the East Village to Hell’s Kitchen—and don’t even start with Brooklyn—but nowhere has the resurgence of development and renewed real estate interest been quite as clear as it has been in Harlem.67
I bow down to the Gods of real estate every night the rezoning passed! I’m moving to Harlem soon, and I’m already dreaming how it will soon be like Hell’s Kitchen. I lived there for years and welcomed the change. I will be so happy in my condo, and very happy when 125th street is nice! So long, Ghetto!68
The same neighborhood that middle-class New Yorkers were fleeing for decades has finally morphed into one of the city’s real estate hotspots. Today, rehabilitated townhouses and new luxury condominium apartments keep drawing a brand-new population of black and white newcomers in the area.
In the midst of this Harlem boom, the website of 5th on the Park, the luxury residential condominium tower completed just a few blocks from 125th Street at 5th Avenue and 120th Street (Figure 1.8), where two-bedroom units were listed for over $2 million, talked of a “New Harlem” and celebrated its brand-new population of affluent “urban pioneers”:
Located in upscale New Harlem in the heart of Manhattan, 5th on the Park Luxury Condos are the ultimate in fine living. New Harlem is now welcoming thousands of upwardly mobile new home owners of various backgrounds. These are sophisticated urban pioneers, who will settle for nothing less than the finest apartments.69
On the website of Douglas Elliman, one of the largest residential brokerage firms in New York, Harlem is described as a neighborhood in transition, revived by an injection of new residents:
Harlem’s newest population is refreshingly diverse, made up of residents who enjoy the neighborhood’s history, the gorgeous homes and unrenovated gems, oozing with potential.70
Figure 1.8 Construction at 5th on the Park, a luxury condominium building in Harlem built in 2007.
So, who are these “sophisticated urban pioneers”? Who makes up “Harlem’s newest population”?
Today, a large share of Harlem’s new residents is made up of middle- or upper-middle-class families, Columbia University students, and young professionals squeezed by the impossible costs of living in Manhattan and attracted by the area’s quick connections to midtown and downtown.
While the number of white in-movers has grown in recent years, a large share of Harlem’s new residents is made up of black professionals. Recent studies have emphasized the importance of the “black gentry” as an active agent—just as much as its white counterpart—of sweeping social change in the neighborhood. Columbia University Professor Lance Freeman points to the almost doubling of black Harlem residents holding a college degree between 1980 and 2000 as an indicator that a solid black middle class has been settling in Harlem, resulting in “a critical mass of potential black gentrifiers.”71 In his investigation of the “new urban renewal” in Chicago’s Bronzeville and New York’s Harlem, urban affairs scholar Derek S. Hyra also contended that it is mostly middle-class blacks that are transforming the social fabric of both neighborhoods.72
But the popular press has been generally keener to emphasize the influx of white residents into what had once been an African American enclave. To be sure, the influx of whites in Harlem has escalated in the last two decades—they made up 2% of the total population in 2000, while now they account for nearly 10%. Still, these numbers are modest in comparison to a still-overwhelming black and Hispanic majority. Freeman notes that “although the black middle class or gentry was perhaps a more potent force than whites behind gentrification … their presence did not attract the attention that the statistically smaller white populace did. Nonetheless it was whites who figured prominently in narratives of gentrification.”73 Particularly in Central Harlem, long a bastion of black America, black residents still make up the large majority (63%) of the population. The most dramatic ethnic shift in Harlem in the latest years has been instead the major increase in the Hispanic population: Hispanics accounted for 4.3% of Harlem residents in 1980, but their number reached 18.6% in 2006.74 Other changes in the social fabric of the neighborhood indicate that a new population of city consumers is settling in Harlem. The number of college-degree holders has doubled during the 2000–2010 time span to 28%, while the young population has also risen and now accounts for about 19.6% of Harlem.75 This is also a reflection of the increasing number of Columbia University students who have been steadily streaming uptown in recent years, renting apartments especially in the area of Morningside Avenue between 110th and 125th Streets. Median income levels have also increased across the whole neighborhood, indicating a growing influx of wealthier residents. By 2010, one of the most gentrified census tracts in Harlem—between Morningside Avenue and Frederick Douglass and 122nd and 126th Streets—registered an average annual income of $33,500, a 124% increase over the previous decade.76 Harlem is, indeed, in transition.
Then comes the motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here…. You can’t just come in when people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations and you come in and now shit gotta change because you’re here? Get the fuck outta here. Can’t do that!77
The community that a New York Times reporter has enthusiastically renamed the “21st-century laboratory for integration”78 is still far from being a conflict-free zone, however. The integration of a brand-new population of city consumers into a neighborhood that for decades has been geographically and racially segregated is not going to be a smooth ride.79
Questions related to who are the main beneficiaries of the neighborhood’s transformations spark controversy among Harlem locals: a common perception among many long-time residents is that “the improvements taking place are … targeted to others,” that is, the new gentrifiers.80 Most people I talked to during my interviews feel like they didn’t have any say in the major decisions affecting their neighborhood. In the words of one of my interviewees:
They are opening a new bank every other month on 125th Street to finance the loans for all these new people to buy these houses…. We do not have anybody representing us here in Harlem. When they have a conversation on television, they never talk about people like us. It’s like we don’t even exist. People that make, say, $10,000 a year. We don’t exist. We don’t benefit at all.81
The presence of new businesses such as upscale wine stores, gourmet restaurants, or cafes charging $5 for a cup of coffee is seen as catering not to long-time residents but to a brand-new population of more affluent, mostly white city consumers.
The issue of race has taken center stage during the process for the rezoning of 125th Street. Many have bemoaned that Harlem’s black cultural identity would be erased to make the neighborhood suitable for a population of affluent whites. Historian Michael Henry Adams said of the rezoning: “If the only black presence in Harlem is a memory in the form of museums and place names, to hell with that.”82 The increased presence of police officers patrolling newly opened stores has also inspired resentment, as locals do not feel that police were protecting them in the bleak days of Harlem’s decay. If Giuliani’s war on crime managed to dismantle whole patterns of community life in Harlem, with crackdowns on street vending, public drinking, loitering, and block parties, the Bloomberg years were no better for black residents in Harlem, with a skyrocketing increase in stop-and-frisk searches, mostly targeting young black males. And more police enforcement has come under de Blasio, with the NYPD announcing in 2015 the creation of a 38-officer unit to be stationed at 125th Street to deal with the homeless roaming the street.83
Many long-time Harlem residents also complain that the demands of the new residents, whether black or white, have disrupted their daily habits.84 The case of the African and Caribbean drummers of Marcus Garvey Park is emblematic. The drummers have played in the park every summer Saturday since 1969. But across the street from the park is now 5th on the Park, where a three-bedroom apartment can sell for over $3 million. In 2008, some of its residents, mostly young professionals, complained about the noise and had the Parks Department remove the drummers more than once. The situation got tense as a racist email against the drummers was sent by a white co-op tenant to the other residents, and the controversy “bubbled over into a dispute about class, race and culture and has become a flash point in the debate over gentrification.”85 In 2012, when plans were unveiled to build an eight-story building for low-income families on a parking lot on 123rd Street between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Frederick Douglass Boulevards, both black and white middle-class residents of the brownstones that line the street voiced their opposition to the plan. The building, to be built by the Abyssinian Development Corporation to relocate residents from “the projects”—the adjacent and decrepit public housing complex called Ennis Frances Houses—was contested for being “out of character.” But what residents really feared was people from the “projects” moving in front of their middle-class homes. They deplored the drug sales and violent crimes that had long been associated with the dwellers of the ill-famed Ennis Frances Houses.86 This resentment was representative of the simmering conflicts over class that gentrification has brought about in the neighborhood, where pricey brownstones and luxury condominium buildings, symbols of a new Harlem of affluence and success, today stand next to public housing projects that are still home to a poor and segregated community.87
Since the early 2000s, the influx of a new population and the rising average incomes have consistently driven up prices in Harlem. Increases in the average price of housing in the neighborhood have been steady and remarkable in the last two decades: from $190,000 in 1995, they rose to $412,000 in 2001.88 Average prices registered a decline after 9/11 but soared again as the economy rebounded. In 2007, Harlem’s average sale prices had already peaked to $713,000,89 and the staggering costs of living in the neighborhood were making headlines. The 2008–2010 recession brought a drop in real estate values, with foreclosures and bank takeovers that hit Harlem very hard, and left 125th Street blighted by stalled developments and fenced-off construction sites. However, the slump was short-lived, and sale prices rose again swiftly in 2010–2011. By 2011, the most luxurious condominium developments in Harlem commanded prices of over $715 per square foot.90 Among these were developments like 5th on the Park, the Langston, the Lenox, the Lenox Grand, and the Dwyer—the kinds of condos that provide luxury amenities like 24-hour concierges, gyms, and landscaped roof gardens. By 2012, in the highly gentrified tract around 110th Street, home values had jumped 39% compared to 2007 levels—the highest increase in all of Manhattan. In 2012, a luxury penthouse located in the One Museum Mile building on 110th Street and 5th Avenue sold for $3.1 million. One year later, an East Harlem townhouse was purchased by actor Neil Patrick Harris for just under $4 million.91 In 2016, another neighborhood record was set, with a townhouse in Hamilton Heights selling for close to $5 million, after having been purchased for $1.7 million back in 2007.92
I was born here, lived in Harlem all of my life. I lost my apartment in 2011. My landlord kicked me out ’cause I was renting a room in the apartment. I did it to pay the rent…. Everything had become too expensive. Now I’m here living in the shelter, and let me tell you, it is horrible to be here. I’m tired to be searched every time I go to bed. But what are you gonna do? What happened to people like me, and, you know, many others, is, we are left here to die. What happens to us? We just live under a garbage can or in a homeless shelter for 20 to 30 years, and then we die. Where is the affordable housing? I haven’t seen any of that.93
Change is good; we are doing something good for this neighborhood. More services, more housing for all. We are making the neighborhood diverse.94
I met Carlos, a Puerto Rican man in his 60s, by the entrance of the Pathmark supermarket, at the east end of 125th Street. He is one of the many homeless folks populating this stretch of the strip, the hub for many that come by bus from the shelters at Randall’s and Ward’s Islands. Some are here for treatment in the methadone clinics nearby; others are waiting for the Relief Bus to provide food and clothing. Some are junkies waiting for their pushers, or just killing time before returning to the shelters. Many stand by the bottle deposit machines of the Pathmark at the corner. Some sleep on the sidewalks on flattened cardboard boxes; others push shopping carts piled with all their belongings. Carlos is one of those who have been tossed to the curb while landlords and speculators were making a killing in Harlem.
For years, advocacy groups like the Harlem Tenant’s Council, the Coalition to Preserve Community, and Buyers and Renters United to Save Harlem have worked to help struggling tenants by providing access to legal counseling and training and educating the local community about their rights. By the time the rezoning was passing, these associations reported complaints by hundreds of Harlem tenants being threatened with eviction or being displaced because of escalating rental prices, aggressive landlord harassment, or expiring rent regulations.95 City Planning chairwoman Amanda Burden rebuffed criticism and referred to the “over 90%” of existing rent-protected housing units in the neighborhood to reassure residents that their fears of displacement were unfounded. It is true that subsidized housing still makes up a large share of the housing stock in Harlem. In 2006, the districts of East, West, and Central Harlem had a total of 51,216 units for people of moderate and low incomes. Another 24,207 units were in the public housing projects.96 However, with rent regulations phasing out throughout the city, the question is how many of these residents will manage to stay in their community in the coming years.97 In 2005 alone, New York City lost a record 5,518 rent-protected apartments whose landlords opted out of subsidy programs: nearly 80% of the units lost were in the South Bronx and especially in Harlem, where the landlords of three large housing complexes (Riverside Park Community, Schomburg Towers, and Metro North Houses) decided to opt out of the Mitchell-Lama program, a program established by New York State in 1955 that offers developers tax abatements and low-interest mortgages for the development of middle-income housing.98
In too many cases, the weakening of rent regulation laws, combined with the overheated Harlem property market, has encouraged the proliferation of “predatory equity” schemes. Predatory equity is a form of real estate speculation whereby private equity firms purchase apartment buildings with rent-regulated units in gentrifying neighborhoods and promise their investors very high returns that can only be achieved by aggressively driving out existing rent-controlled tenants. After a tenant leaves, the landlord can sell or rent the vacant units at market price. This can mean, for instance, managing to earn $5,200 a month for a Manhattan two-bedroom apartment that was renting for $1,700 with the old tenant.99 This happens all the time in New York City, where about 266,000 apartments have been deregulated since 1994.100 In just the time span between 2004 and 2008, private equity firms have acquired almost 75,000 rent-regulated apartments in the city.101 To speed the turnover, many employ illegal tactics to kick rent-regulated tenants out. Often, they neglect maintenance works, cut gas or electricity service, or intimidate tenants with bogus legal proceedings: there have been innumerable cases of tenants being baselessly sued by their landlords for alleged illegal sublets or unpaid rents.
In March 2008, Bloomberg signed legislation that allows tenants to take their landlords to court if they file repeated and groundless proceedings to force them out of their homes. A day late and a dollar short: only few low-income tenants have the legal skills to file a lawsuit against their landlords, and many drop it altogether, fearing their landlord may retaliate and eventually win in court. It goes without saying that complaints of tenant harassment have nearly doubled in the following years, particularly since 2011.102 A few years later, in 2015, de Blasio signed new laws to protect tenants from harassment and authorized funds for offering counseling to troubled tenants in hot development areas. But these initiatives will not even start to offset the impact of the speculative craze that the new administration’s rezonings have unleashed.
Another threat to subsidized housing is caused by landlord mismanagement or neglect. In cases of extremely bad maintenance, the federal government can cut off subsidies or even sell the properties through foreclosure if they are deemed uninhabitable. Between 1991 and 2006, the Department of Housing foreclosed on 17 low-income housing complexes in New York City, with 2,264 housing units. More than half of these units were located in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Harlem.103 Horror stories of tenants displaced because of abusive landlords’ tactics increased as the Harlem real estate market boomed in the mid-2000s. In 2005, as the massive public housing complex at 3333 Broadway (135th Street) opted out of the Mitchell-Lama program, rental units were deregulated. The residents filed a class action lawsuit claiming that the new firm that purchased the building used illegal tactics to kick them out.104 The same has been happening over and over again at Lenox Terrace, a middle-income housing complex at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, whose landlord has been planning since 2003 to turn the complex into a more upscale complex with six brand-new towers and new commercial space105—a dream that is finally approaching reality under de Blasio.106 There are innumerable cases of landlords’ violations, including violations for not providing heat, hot water, maintenance, and repairs to tenants. Sometimes landlords can keep their apartments in such bad conditions that tenants are forced out by city authorities because of structural damages or health hazards. In 2007, 27 families were evacuated from a Harlem building at 305 West 150th Street that had a long history of violations.107 In 2012, dozens of families living in two buildings at East 120th Street were forced out of their homes after the Department of Buildings deemed the buildings unsafe due to fire code violations and structural damage.108 The same year, dozens of other tenants were evacuated from their apartments at 3750 Broadway after the FDNY deemed the structure unstable.109 In many such cases, displaced tenants have never been allowed back into their homes.
Obviously, homeownership can be an effective antidote against displacement. In fact, in gentrifying neighborhoods, it is homeowners who generally stand to benefit from the unabated increase in home values. This is not the case for the majority of Harlem residents, however. According to the 2010 census, 87.5% of Central Harlem residents were renters. In West Harlem and East Harlem, 12.6% and 7.9% of residents were homeowners, respectively.110 Such a small share of homeownership in Harlem is also the result of a long history of redlining, which for decades has made it impossible for residents of black neighborhoods to receive loans and mortgages by private banks.111
The truth is, housing for low- and middle-income residents is dropping out of sight. And the construction of the much-trumpeted new “affordable” housing in Harlem so far hasn’t even remotely made up for the amount of affordable units lost because of recent development pressures.
At 121 West 125th Street, plans were approved in 2013 for a city- and state-backed 400,000-square-foot complex that will house the national headquarters for the National Urban League and a civil rights museum. The complex should also include 114 “affordable” housing units. A new $415 million luxury development made of two 32-story towers at Park Avenue and 125th Street, called 1800 Park Avenue, may soon rise on the site where Harlem Park, a project abandoned after the recession, was once supposed to be built. It will become the tallest building in Harlem and should have a total of 650 residential units. In 2014, East Harlem residents demanded more than the 70 affordable units set aside in the original plan.112 As of today, it is not known how many affordable units will eventually be included in the project.113 Three lots across the street were recently purchased for $37 million by Waterbridge Capital, which plans to build a mixed-use residential and retail tower.
At the eastern end of 125th Street, the NYCEDC is moving forward with the development of E125, a mixed-use development on a massive site spanning from 125th to 127th Streets along Second and Third Avenues that was seized by the city through eminent domain in 2008. When completed, it will provide for 950 housing units. Of these, 295 should be reserved for households earning less than 60% of the AMI.114
Old Navy, Blockbuster Video, ColdStone Creamery, RadioShack, FHM, Citarella, Pathmark, Verizon, Dr. Jays, CVS, Marshalls, White Castle, Starbucks. All of these chain and more are already on 125th Street. I just don’t understand the call to protect the mom and pop shops from the rezoning, when they clearly lost that battle years ago.115
Over the last decade, the swift pace of development has changed the face of Harlem, and particularly that of its Main Street, where innumerable locally owned stores (bookstores, clothing stores, fried-chicken joints, bodegas, hair salons) have been substituted by large corporate retailers. Where this still hasn’t occurred, banners on the dozens of empty storefronts are there to inform us that brokers are on the hunt for new A-list tenants. This process of commercial gentrification, which was boosted by the new developments brought about by the UMEZ funds in the late 1990s, has been steady since then, and has only intensified in the Bloomberg and de Blasio years.
In the early 2000s, as the rezoning of 125th Street was in the making, cases were reported of commercial rents in the area soaring almost 300% in the time of only one year. By the spring of 2005, rents along the corridor had become comparable to those of the rest of Manhattan—the average asking rent for retail space at 125th Street amounted to $90 per square foot, compared $103 per square foot for an average rent in Manhattan.116 After rents peaked in 2007, an abrupt drop marked the onset of the national recession, which hit Harlem and other low-income neighborhoods in the city particularly hard. In 2008 and 2009, Harlem’s independent businesses experienced record bankruptcies and foreclosures, which by 2009 resulted in a 37% store vacancy rate in some of Harlem’s main shopping corridors117 and in a 16% vacancy rate along certain sections of 125th Street.118 After the frenzy of development of the previous years, Harlem’s Main Street entered a limbo: the large superstores and newly built shopping malls stood next to empty lots and boarded-up buildings vacated in expectation of the rezoning. In 2009, the largest urban void was at 125th Street and Park Avenue, where plans for Harlem Park, the $435 million office tower that at one point was to include TV studios for the Major League Baseball Network, were scrapped in December 2008. A New York Post reporter describes Harlem’s Main Street in 2009 as follows:
Dreams of a Harlem renaissance have been deferred…. Instead of planned office and retail towers, a pro-sports television station, high-rise hotels and a culinary-arts school, there are vacant storefronts and trash-strewn lots. Dozens of often bitter mom-and-pop businesses … were booted for high-rises that never rose.119
Most of the boarded-up storefronts belonged to small businesses that had been in the neighborhood for decades. Many of these were forced to leave because of unaffordable rents; others, unable to compete with large corporate retailers or confronted with a changing customer base in the gentrifying neighborhood, had no other choice but to close. Most were directly evicted by landlords who took advantage of zoning changes and rushed to vacate lots to build taller, denser, and more profitable buildings. The casualties of the 125th Street rezoning include a number of stores that had become cultural fixtures and that for decades had served the Harlem community. In 2007, Sigfeld Group and Kimco Realty Corporation purchased a $50-million, 110-year-old building on the northwest corner of 125th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard with the intent of clearing the land and building a new mixed-use retail and office building. The 16 tenants forced to move included the legendary soul food restaurant Manna’s and the Bobby’s Happy House music store (among the first African American–owned businesses in Harlem). Some of the businesses were offered a paltry $5,000 for relocation costs.120 Several store owners left immediately, while Manna’s and five remaining neighbors united into the Save Harlem Association and filed a lawsuit against the developers. The lawsuit was successful, and the businesses managed to eventually settle for a restitution of over $1 million121 before leaving the building by September 2008. Today, a 100,000-square-foot box-shaped four-story retail building is on the site, anchored by a 30,000-square-foot Designer Shoe Warehouse, a Joe’s Crab Shack, a Blink Fitness, and the offices of Capital One Bank occupying almost all of the ground floor. So much for the “distinctive signage” and “ground-floor entertainment uses” envisioned in the rezoning plan!
On the east end of the strip, plans for a $700 million East Harlem media, entertainment, and cultural center also collided with the interests of existing long-time small businesses. The area, located between 3rd and 2nd Avenues, had been designated as a blighted urban renewal area since 1968 because of soil contamination and the many abandoned lots. In 2008, the city approved the project of developers General Growth Properties, Archstone, Richman Group, and Monadnock Construction for a huge mixed-use development that would include 385,000 square feet of retail space, 250,000 square feet of class A office space, a 98,000-square-foot hotel, 600 housing units, community and cultural space, and a public plaza. The city moved to the court to condemn six acres of properties and leave them empty in preparation for the project.122 But in 2009, half a dozen remaining businesses joined in the East Harlem Alliance of Responsible Merchants and filed a class lawsuit against the DCP’s determination to make use of eminent domain for the benefit of private developers. Their lawsuit was dismissed on October 12, 2010. In 2011, however, the ruling was making headlines once again after an appellate judge lambasted the city for falsely claiming “blight” in the neighborhood as a means to transfer private properties to a private developer.123
Other casualties of rezoning-led development are to be seen all along 125th Street (Figures 1.9 and 1.10). The Boro Hotel, at 125th and 5th, has been boarded up and slated for demolition in April 2008. Its first floor once hosted a small restaurant and jazz club called La Famille, opened in 1958 by two sisters who were among the first African American women to work on 125th Street.124 Also, the legendary M&G Diner at West 125th Street between Morningside Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue, known in the neighborhood for its extravagant marquee sign and its cheap southern food, was sold in 2008 and now sits vacant. The world-famous Lenox Lounge at 125th and Lenox, a legendary bar with a striking art deco interior and signage, hosted performances by the greatest names of jazz, including Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. After 73 years in Harlem, it closed its doors on December 31, 2012, its rent having been literally doubled.125
Figure 1.9 Vacated building with “for sale” banner at 69 East 125th Street, in 2008. The building was demolished to make way for a 12-story mixed-use building.
Figure 1.10 The vacated M&G Diner at West 125th Street.
If in just a few years a large number of small businesses on 125th Street went out of business for good, the crisis was a golden opportunity for corporate retail chains. During the national recession, while independent stores were dropping like flies, large retailers heavily increased their presence along the strip.126 These included Starbucks, which in 2008 inaugurated its second 125th Street branch, and Applebee’s, which in 2009 opened a new store along the strip. As the recession ended, commercial rents along the 125th Street corridor climbed again. By the fall of 2011, they soared to about $129 per square foot.127 To put these numbers into perspective, average asking rents in midtown Manhattan were at $130 per square foot, while the Manhattan average was at $112 per square foot. Such asking prices are enabling only corporate retailers to settle in on 125th Street. In 2012, there was an 11.2% rise in corporate chain retail in Harlem compared to 2011—the biggest growth in new chain retail openings recorded in New York City in that year—bringing the total number of chain stores in Harlem to 338.128 The same year, more stores that had been around for decades, like the Harlem Lanes bowling arcade, the black-owned Hue-man Bookstore, and the delicious MoBay Restaurant, were all forced to shut down. In 2013, a new Gap store opened on 125th Street next to Mart 125, replacing a locally owned kids clothing store. Just across the street, next to the Apollo Theater, a $14-million, three-story retail building anchored by a Red Lobster and Banana Republic was built on a long-vacant site by the developers of Harlem USA, Grid Properties, and the Gotham Organization.
At the eastern end of 125th Street, the Pathmark supermarket shut its doors in 2014, leaving behind a shady boarded-up storefront that occupies an entire block at the corner with Lexington Avenue. The closure has left 236 workers jobless and is making this part of Harlem virtually a food desert, as East Harlem residents are forced to travel further downtown to find any well-supplied supermarket.129 The land, once property of the East Harlem Abyssinian Triangle Limited Partnership, backed by the Abyssinian Development Corporation, was sold for $39 million to Extell Development Company, which according to rumors has planned to build luxury condos on the 69,000-square-foot site. No plans have yet been filed, however.130
As Pathmark has left 125th Street, a much more glamorous grocery store—and with it a much fancier clientele—is on its way to the strip. Whole Foods, the high-end grocery chain that is rightfully considered the pièce de résistance of gentrification, and a solid indicator of neighborhood affluence, will be the anchor of a five-story glassy retail development at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue.
Not far, near the intersection with 5th Avenue, Bed Bath & Beyond and WeWork will be the anchors of a new 130,000-square-foot building at 5-15 West 125th, which should be topped by 30 residential rental units.
In the 1980s, when Harlem was to the American public nothing more than one of the most infamous ghettos in the country, urban scholars Richard Schaffer and Neil Smith called it “a supreme test for the gentrification process.”131 After 40 years of relentless creative destruction, it’s fair to say that gentrification has passed the test, especially in the blocks around 125th Street, a neighborhood that has changed at lightning speed. Today, the homologating force of corporate retail is compromising the community’s uniqueness and, according to some observers, even jeopardizing its potential as a tourist destination. In 2012, the executive director of the Harlem Business Alliance told the New York Daily News: “The risk of a homogenized, cookie-cutter landscape filled with chains is that we become less interesting: We’re not there yet, but we’re near the tipping point.”132 Today, the tipping point has clearly been reached. Subway, Applebee’s, McDonald’s, Dunkin Donuts, Old Navy, H&M, CVS, and Starbucks dominate a completely revolutionized physical, social, and symbolic space, and the “Main Street of Black America” is morphing before our very eyes into just another main street of American franchise. Assisted by rezoning and branding, the steadfast forces of corporate capital have managed to penetrate almost every corner of the famed thoroughfare in their relentless struggle to conquer Harlem and to extract profit from it.