Old heads in Harlem will tell you that in the 1960s, particularly after the riot of 1964, white policemen were afraid of walking an uptown beat. They were reluctant to come through even in patrol cars. Those who did were often on the take. White landlords would try to collect the rent, guns at their hips. Their black tenants defied them and in many cases the landlords walked away from their buildings, left them to run down.
Harlem was the place where you could do or get anything and get away with it. People would disappear for days into the cathouses and shooting galleries. One guy told me that at his corner of 124th Street and Lenox he once saw the garbage collectors in their truck nodding from heroin. They were parked for hours, the trash uncollected when they finally left. Delivery trucks at stoplights got held up. Sometimes a driver would be enticed by a woman to a room where he was then tied up. Down in the street, an orderly line was forming for the sale of his truck’s contents.
Drug money circulated fiercely. People could get shot in the middle of the afternoon and if you chanced to be on the street where it happened, you knew that you had seen nothing, heard nothing, and would say nothing. Many gave up because the streets and the schools were so bad, especially middle-class blacks who could at last go elsewhere. But jobs were plentiful in the city. If you didn’t like your boss, an old head told me, you could quit and have a new job by the end of the day. Some people had jobs as well as welfare. Blacks felt that they ran the place. You could pass out on a traffic island in Harlem and no one would bother you all day long. The only people around in those days were black, old heads say. If whites found themselves in Harlem, then they had to run. But you can meet whites who have spent their lives in Harlem, in their family homes, tolerated because they’d always been there, hadn’t run.
Things began to change under Mayor Ed Koch. Though the city itself had no money, black policemen in the 1970s were not afraid of Harlem. The story is that the first black police commissioner, Benjamin Ward, told dealers to get off the corners, which meant that the avenues, the main thoroughfares, were restored to ordinary people. But things fell into something worse with the coming of crack cocaine in the mid-1980s. A deranged population hunted the streets. Everything sexual and druggie went on in unbelievable numbers under the bridge at 125th Street or in Marcus Garvey Park, one block from where James Baldwin grew up on upper Fifth Avenue, across from the branch library where he read and read.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Harlem Renaissance became both a popular subject and a field of scholarship. Nothing contrasted more with the story of the glamour of Harlem’s cultural past than the paranoid ghost town Harlem mostly was at night when whole tenements were crack bazaars. Some buildings teemed with addicts, while the rest of the street held its breath behind multiple locks. Sugar Hill, West 145th Street, was gang territory. The drug violence of the 1980s, remembered in a memoir such as Lester Marrow’s The Streets of Harlem (2008), was much more deadly than anything that went on in Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), one of the autobiographies that first gave us the voice of troubled Harlem youth.
New York’s first black mayor, David Dinkins, rarely gets the credit he deserves for beginning the social clean-up of the city in the early 1990s. Instead, we point to Rudolph Giuliani and his policy of Zero Tolerance. In 2000, policemen gave out tickets for drinking beer on the street even if the can was in a paper bag. In that period, real estate buyers in Harlem could not always be sure that the person trying to sell them a house actually owned it. Soon enough, real estate listings were promising buyers that Harlem properties would be delivered “vacant,” i.e., the necessary evictions would have been carried out. A white Englishman said that he was looking around a brownstone that had long ago been cut up into implausible living spaces and the next thing he knew he was standing in the kitchen of a humiliated family at dinner. It was as though an epilogue to James Weldon Johnson’s classic study, Black Manhattan (1930), were playing itself out.
Little Italy was once Little Africa; Greenwich Village was a black neighborhood when Dickens visited in 1832. Johnson’s Black Manhattan charts how the city’s development steadily moved the black population uptown. By the beginning of the twentieth century, blacks had migrated to the Tenderloin, the West 50s. But the construction of Penn Station had increased the value of the land over a wide area. On the eve of World War I, black churches followed their parishioners to Harlem, which had been connected by subway lines to the rest of the city, though it had a suburban train station. Once a Dutch farming community, it had a large German Jewish population. The black Harlem of the 1920s that Claude McKay depicts in his novel Home to Harlem (1928) is small, centered on 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. Johnson’s father-in-law was a successful realtor who led the fight to open up more housing, but black Harlem was overcrowded and overcharged from the start.
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When we are incensed at the thought of the black population of Harlem forced out by developers, we are forgetting what an abandoned, boarded-up place it had become long before these developers came onto the scene. Harlem lost population from decade to decade, while Brooklyn became the largest black city in the US and a birthplace of hip-hop. The deeper problem was not the poor suddenly being forced out, but the lost cause of black people not getting bank loans to help them to reclaim anything in Harlem over the years. Someone on welfare was not going to get a loan, an old head reminded me.
Properties may have been neglected, but not everything had fallen into the city’s custody. Families still owned properties, including black families, sometimes slumlords, in their fashion. When we think that by cultural right Harlem should remain black, we are forgetting why Harlem became the capital of the Negro world in the first place. Gilbert Osofsky’s grim tale of segregation, discrimination, and disease, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (1965), should be kept near those cultural histories that celebrate the brilliance of Harlem’s jazz clubs or the sophistication of its numbers racket in the 1920s.
Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (2011) by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is an intensely literary work from a member of the post–civil rights generation. She read the great essays about Harlem and they were on her mind as she walked the streets in search of what remained. People know Harlem through literature as much as through photography or film or midcentury jazz. Rhodes-Pitts’s meditation on Harlem includes observations of the failed resistance to what used to be called gentrification. There were meetings, conferences, and corners of people desperate to confront someone, but a movement never got going; those who were offended by the lack of consultation over questions such as zoning could not make their presence matter.
In 2007, a minister with a big, made-up-denomination church on Lenox, a guy straight out of a novel about uptown hustles, tried to exploit the resentment of those who saw their access to affordable housing threatened. He proposed that Harlem boycott its merchants until prices there fell to 1990s levels. White journalists at his inaugural press conference looked at one another and departed, leaving women of a certain age to try to get the single men in the sanctuary to write down their phone numbers on clipboards.
The minister’s next scam was to present himself as a black critic of President Obama, calculating perhaps that that would bring him media attention. The brightly lit sign outside his church carries unpleasant messages about the president from time to time: “A Taliban Muslim Illegally Elected President…”
Up the street, in the next block, on Lenox Avenue between 124th and 125th Streets, a huge, fenced-in construction project is underway. Whole Foods is coming, some people say to one another with relief. Whole Foods will fix everything, they smile. Not everyone can remember what used to stand on that site.
Camilo José Vergara’s Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto tells you what had been there, because the corner of 125th and Lenox (aka Malcolm X Boulevard) is one he photographed over a period of years. Vergara prints six photographs of what had been known as the Eisleben Building on 125th, taken between 1989 and 2006. In the earliest, the large, four-story, handsome brick structure is already a faded tomb, most of its windows sealed with cement block, its street level a black retail graveyard of tin shutters. Probably late-nineteenth-century, the Eisleben’s style was typical in Harlem, even its distinctive pediment atop the main façade and the towered corner at an angle to the street. In Vergara’s photograph of 2000, the building had become a giant billboard. Subsequent photographs show different blankets of advertisement. An additional photograph, taken in 2013, shows the grassy expanse the site was for a long time, after the building had been torn down.
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Longtime Harlem residents suggest that arson helped the Eisleben to its doom. A fire in the mid-1990s hastened the destruction of the Mount Morris Bank Building on Park Avenue and East 125th Street. Built in 1889, it had been derelict for years and went on deteriorating while the owner, who in 2003 had bought it from the city in the hope of establishing a culinary institute, fought legal battles with other developers. Vergara’s series of five photographs of the building, taken from 1982 to 2011, show it as the great Romanesque shell it was for years, what it looked like after fire took the top two floors, and its ground-floor stump after the city stepped in and demolished the building as a danger to public safety in 2009.
Similarly, two views of West 131st Street show the venerable Lafayette Theater in 1988 and the disappointing Methodist church in 2012 that it had been turned into, with its distinguished decoration stripped away. Or Vergara offers three wide-view photographs of altered “urban fabric” on Sugar Hill, West 145th Street and Edgecombe Avenue, W.E.B. Du Bois’s former address. In his series, the tenements of 1988 give way to the inoffensive condominiums of 2007.
A striking photograph of a film-extra, Aryan-looking New York City Marathon runner shows him pale and lean against a backdrop of ruined brownstones along Mount Morris Park West and 120th Street in 1994. There are no stoops, no windows, no doors, just black holes. The city had planned to tear them down and erect social service facilities, but neighbors organized to block the proposals. The area had been designated a historic district by the city’s landmark commission as far back as 1971. The ruins were then fenced in and forgotten. But now some of those houses are listed on the neighborhood association’s annual Harlem heritage tour.
Richard Rodgers, the theater composer, grew up on 122nd Street and Mount Morris Park when it was known as “Doctor’s Row.” In 1939, some members of the neighborhood association were urging Jewish physicians not to sell their practices to “negroes.” But they did. In the 1960s, the Rodgers family donated an amphitheater to the park, which was renamed Marcus Garvey Park in 1973. Longtime residents can remember when Malcolm X was Detroit Red and lived on the south side of the park, as would Maya Angelou much later. Recently, Marcus Samuelsson, the celebrated Ethiopian-Swedish chef, has moved in. The Ethiopian co-owner of a nearby Sicilian restaurant pointed out that Harlem had been a mostly white neighborhood for only a short time, between the late nineteenth century and World War I. But actually, what we think of as Harlem was not overwhelmingly black until after World War II.
Vergara has witnessed African American Day parades over the years. He relates to Harlem as a community of the poor. Its history is on his mind, and so, too, are his illustrious predecessors, photographers in Harlem, including Helen Levitt and her “surreptitious picture taking,” a tradition in which he places himself and his unnoticed cable-released digital SLR camera. Vergara has photographed the old black women in their church hats, pastors, a street evangelist, the new African immigrants, the evicted, the addicts, newly released prisoners, the homeless, cooks, video salesmen, liquor store customers, corner basketball players, a Chinese woman selling pet turtles, police arresting a black woman in front of Samuelsson’s restaurant, the Red Rooster, and of course subway riders. Yet as sympathetic as his portraits are, of the 269 photographs in his book those of the physical place hold the chief interest.
Vergara sometimes returns to the same address—319 West 125th Street in 1977, 1996, and 2007, in the course of which the Baby Grand bar turns into Radio Shack (see illustrations on pages 52 and 54); or seventeen photographs of 65 East 125th Street, taken between 1977 and 2011, documenting its transformation from a bar to a fish-and-chips joint, a dubious smoke shop, a mattress store, and then a storefront church. “In my frequent visits to this site over the years,” Vergara says in an accompanying essay, “I was often confronted and ordered to stop photographing lest I be punched and have my camera broken. An advantage of the business changing so frequently was that the new owners did not recognize me.” Vergara, who has photographed minority communities in other cities—see The New American Ghetto (1995)—always intended to make a visual record of Harlem, but it eventually became clear to him that he was also capturing “the end of an urban era,” showing “how cities declined and how residents and city officials tried to stop it.”
One section of the book, “Harlem’s Walls,” includes photographs of the murals devoted to black history, memorial portraits on brick walls, and those paintings that could be called the equivalents of outsider or naive art. Several such murals are still visible on shop gratings after business hours along West 125th Street near the former Hotel Theresa. Tourists stop and take pictures with their smart phones. They are symbols of another time, of an earlier style of black pride, as was the Theresa when it finally became black-owned in 1937. Shutters installed more recently are made of bars or screens, surfaces that can’t be painted on.
Vergara responds to the homemade signs over barbershops and nail salons, over local hamburger palaces and funeral homes, paintings on vegetable markets and shut-up businesses plastered with layers of posters—the commerce of the inner city. The remnants of this kind of street life are even more exotic when compared to most Manhattan neighborhoods, as the city becomes what many complain of as being homogenized. Some Harlem residents don’t want where they live to lose its distinct look and feel. They mind that progress in Harlem is now measured in the number of lively new bistros and retro diners. Part of what can seem like a sanitizing process is that Harlem’s black history is now a heritage tour. Hardly anyone pays attention to the old-style black nationalists on Harlem’s streets haranguing passersby on weekends, while European tourists—Vergara does not neglect to include shots of them—line up around the block to gain entrance not to the Apollo but to gospel services at the Abyssinian Baptist Church.
The photograph, like the written word, as Sara Blair points out in her study Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (2007), helped to turn Harlem into “a poetic resource,” representative of the “iconic images” of black poverty and despair. Authentic Harlem for many people retains living connections to black history, not the remote Jazz Age, but the politicized ghetto that Castro visited, where James Brown used to play, and black people told truth to power, from Malcolm X to Al Sharpton.
This history as a capital of black struggle has more dignity than the upbeat blackness that the mainstream seems to ask of entrepreneurs. While many regard Harlem’s look as what the poor have had to put up with, they, like Vergara, know that the luxury housing supposedly now on offer in Harlem is certainly not that when compared to what luxury in the rest of the city means:
In its moral and economic implications, the twenty-first-century vision of commercial developers breaks radically with the past. The neighborhood offers green technology, modern design, space, adventure, and consumerism in an ethnically and racially mixed middle-class community.
Segregated old Harlem, the capital of black America, was a unique place where blacks could realize their potential. Multicultural Harlem offers those who can afford it an open neighborhood in which to live well, to enjoy diversity, and to live right.
Check-cashing spots, methadone clinics, and housing projects are not a part of that twenty-first-century vision, Vergara notes. Yet the new architecture is not distinguished and neither is the public sculpture closely associated with it.
Vergara’s photographs remind us that public housing in Harlem is extensive, from West 116th Street to West 145th Street, though several of the towers have been turned into co-ops. East Harlem has large brick boxes, some of them public housing, all over the place. Squad cars, mobile watchtowers, and black, white, and Latino patrolmen and patrolwomen are visible on many corners. In the days of Bloomberg, late at night, you could pass very silent stop-and-frisk scenes in front of apartment entrances and up against brick walls, young black men with their legs spread, kept waiting.
Not every white person in Harlem is a home owner. Many are hipsters or young people who are not afraid of black neighborhoods and want to live someplace relatively cheap. Among those couples with young children who have moved into Harlem’s most desirable addresses are integrated straight couples with mixed-race children and integrated gay couples with mixed-race children. They, like Francophone Africans, have found a neighborhood where they fit in. “Damn fags,” you can hear at the subway stops—and not from an aggressive hip-hop kid with his trousers down around his nuts, but some relic of black separatism, a gray-haired Rasta.
Before, when even the landlady was black and not much better off than you, you could be poor in the privacy of your own home, stores, dentists’ offices. When white people who were better off started moving in, they exposed how badly off you really were. Harlem was not where they had ended up or had always been, it was what they had chosen, a new possibility. Real estate is not related to the integration of black culture into the American mainstream, but the changes in Harlem do coincide with historical changes having to do with race in America. For the first time in US history, more poor people live in the suburbs than in the cities, making income inequality a block-by-block story in many shared urban spaces. White and black kids in new fashions thread their way among an older, unhealthy black population on canes, on walkers, diabetic amputees in wheelchairs.
Harlem is shrinking as it gets divided up for marketing purposes. North of Morningside Heights, Columbia University’s dramatic campus expansion fills the valley that used to be Manhattanville. Ralph Ellison is still fondly remembered in the apartment building on Riverside Drive and West 145th Street where he lived for almost fifty years. In his time, his address was generic west Harlem, but it’s now better known as Hamilton Heights. Back down at 110th Street, Morningside Park used to be the Columbia border, a cliff that marked the boundary between the safety of Morningside Heights and the perils of sociology textbooks come to life below. But these days, once-notorious drug blocks feature cafés and various establishments meant to appeal to students. Not far away, on 116th Street, a new Little Africa blossoms, the air thick with French and baking bread.
Harlem was his Left Bank, Ellison said. When he hit town in 1938, he was taken up by a group of black gay friends that included the philosopher Alain Locke, the poet Langston Hughes, and the sculptor Richmond Barthé. Instead of looking at new residents as invaders, perhaps they should be seen in Harlem’s cosmopolitan tradition. They know Harlem’s history and are just as proud to be there. It is not their fault that the storefront churches in Harlem are disappearing. Vergara says that Harlem lives at night, but 125th Street now closes up early for the most part, like Houston, Canal, or any crosstown street of mostly retail shops. The chic crowds that turn out for exhibitions at Thelma Golden’s Studio Museum of Harlem include many people who also jam Khalil Muhammad’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—part of the New York Public Library—to hear Dr. Muhammad talk with Michelle Alexander about the need for radical political change. These institutions are among the few places in Harlem that can draw audiences from elsewhere in the city in the evenings.
But Harlem is no longer isolated from the rest of Manhattan. Its property revival has extended its past by opening up the history of its architecture. Michael Henry Adams’s Harlem: Lost and Found (2001) delights in exploring the last colonial house, the surviving baronial mansions, the row houses that replaced mansions as Harlem became middle-class and the apartment houses that then were built instead of row houses. Vergara also photographs the tranquil federal houses of Astor Row as well as the harmonious façade of Strivers’ Row built by McKim, Mead, and White.
What has happened uptown is a process ongoing all over town and some veterans of 1960s jazz and 1970s New Wave in the East Village are as bitter against the manifest destiny of NYU as old heads in Harlem are against trendy whites. Incense and marijuana waft down Harlem’s side streets in the middle of the afternoon, but whose weed is it? Jane Jacobs was right about so much in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), but even for her, change comes with the dollar. On July 20, 1921, The New York Times ran a story about the United Cigar Stores Company leasing the property at 125th and Lenox—once the Eisleben Apartments—to a syndicate. “The new lessees contemplate razing the old building and improving the site with a large business building, possibly with a theater on the 124th street end.”
