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Forget the horror stories -- Harlem is a great place to live. P H O T O G R A P H : U P I / C O R B I S - B E T T M A N BY TESSA SOUTER | "harlem might very well be the darkest, dirtiest and most dangerous place on
the face of this earth," writes Eddy L. Harris in "Still Life in Harlem," his
recent account of his two-year sojourn on West 131st
Street and Amsterdam Avenue. "You cannot move without the sense of danger forever present around you."
With endorsements like that -- and by a black writer, yet -- it's no wonder the white tourists peer nervously out of the open tops of their tour buses, or huddle protectively together outside Harlem's churches on Sundays as they wait to get in, practically laced to the railings by the straps of their handbags. For a while after I read his book I was pretty
nervous myself -- and I live here.
For years Harlem's had a bad rap -- accusations of
racism against whites, charges of violence and hatred, drug addiction and
gang warfare. The first stories I ever heard about Harlem referred to its dangers. "I suddenly realized that mine was the only white face on the subway!" said one acquaintance, recounting his horror at discovering, in situ, that the next stop after 59th Street on the A train is 125th Street, Harlem. Another acquaintance described coming up to the Apollo on the subway with his girlfriend. They were greeted by a man who announced, "White people! I love
white people!" and insisted on escorting them across the street for "their
own protection." He was clearly joking (the Apollo is literally 100 steps
from the 125th Street station and is perfectly safe), but they didn't see the
irony. As far as they were concerned they'd found an English-speaking guide
in a dangerous foreign country.
It does seem foreign at first. Most of the locals speak Spanish. Sometimes
you see people walking around with cling wrap and hair straightener on their
heads. Yellow cabs are few and far between -- most people get around locally in
gypsy cabs. Hip-hop booms out of passing cars. The African women in the hair-braiding shops on 125th Street call out at me and tap on the windows
whenever I pass by, trying to tempt me in for hair extensions. There's a man
around the corner on Amsterdam Avenue who sits in a chair, which he moves from
one side of the street to the other, depending on where the sun is -- just
chewing the fat with passers by. Occasionally he is joined by the local cop
on the beat.
A little different, yes. But it's not nearly as dangerous as the horror stories would have you believe. As Larcelia Kebe, who runs her Harlem Your Way! walking tours out of a
grand, if dilapidated, brownstone on 130th, tells her clients, "You've heard a lot of things about Harlem. None of them are true!" Real estate broker Malcolm Barksdale of the New Harlem Land Company says, "When the white tourists get off the bus they realize that people aren't lying in wait to rob them."
This small urban area (it runs between the Hudson and the Harlem rivers and from the upper 90s to around 155th Street), has at one time or another spawned, inspired or been lived in by practically every black American historical figure you've ever heard of, including Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay and Paul Robeson. It's been home to
bootleggers, racketeers and entrepreneurs, including the richest self-made
woman in America, Madame C.J. Walker, who became a millionaire on her secret
formula for hair straightener, and "Pigfoot Mary," who started out selling pig's feet from a pram which she pushed around Harlem until she'd saved enough money to become a local property owner and landlady. In its heyday in the 1920s and '30s, Harlem was so synonymous with black pride and culture that the famous comedic basketball team the Globetrotters, which actually came from Chicago, was named the Harlem Globetrotters to emphasize its blackness.
Fats Waller's father was once the minister at the Abyssinian Baptist Church
on West 138th, as was the flamboyant Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Charlie Parker's funeral was held here. Pianist Mary Lou Williams lived at 63 Hamilton Terrace. Billie Holiday lived with her mother at 108 West 139th St., where best friend Lester "Prez" Young used to crash out after gigs. James Baldwin was born in the Harlem General Hospital on Lenox Avenue. Malcolm X
used to hang out at the miraculously preserved (and exquisitely beautiful)
Lenox Lounge bar. It's still open seven days a week from noon to 4 a.m.,
putting on jazz, blues and comedy nights for Harlemites -- a few of whom have
been going there since it opened 52 years ago. Nowadays the club draws
Japanese tourists, who also flock to Showman's Cafe to hear countrywoman Miki
Sakaguchi, who now lives in Harlem, sing the jazz and blues standards that
her father (a Tokyo cab driver) used to love.
For the past seven months I have lived in Harlem, nine blocks down from where
Eddy Harris used to live, and much of what I see is beautiful. In warm weather people take to the streets to gossip, play chess, watch the girls
skipping rope or the boys playing hoops. Outside the corner liquor stores men
stand and chat, drinking beer out of brown-bagged cans. Yes,
Harlem has its sketchy stretches (mostly farther north and east) but it also
has a kind of faded, almost Venetian grandeur. The wide streets are lined
with once opulent apartment buildings and rows of brownstones. Scattered among them are the newly restored, which stand out like flowers growing amidst stinging nettles beside those with bricked-in windows and doors. Properties ranging from
$125,000 for a near derelict shell to $500,000 for a restored four-bedroom
are snapped up by middle-class African-Americans at roughly 10 percent of prices for similar properties downtown. "White folks worry more about safety,"
says Malcolm Barksdale, who nevertheless encourages his white clients to buy
in the area. "I welcome ethnic diversity," he says. "It encourages growth and
better services."
With the New York crime rate dropping every year (and the second biggest
drop occurring in northern Manhattan), word is that Harlem is poised to experience another Renaissance -- although a slightly more commercial
version of the literary original. New York Gov. George Pataki announced last November, "You don't succeed in moving forward if you rebuild Wall Street and 42nd Street, but ignore 125th Street," backing a proposed $11.2
million shopping and entertainment complex called Harlem USA that will stretch between St. Nicholas and Eighth avenues. It will house the Gap, an HMV
store and the re-opening of the landmark jazz venue Minton's (investors include Robert De Niro). A Magic Johnson-owned movie theater, planned farther along on East 125th Street, will top off a revitalization program that began about a year ago when Blockbuster Video
finally came to 125th Street, along with Duane Reade (a chain drug store),
the Body Shop, Krispy Kreme and Ben and Jerry's.
These might seem like small advances, but they are significant to those of us that live here. True, there are no stores selling overpriced specialty foods in designer surroundings. But people drive from as far away as New Jersey to
shop at the incredible Fairways on 12th Avenue, an exotic, sawdust-floored (and wholesale-priced) version of
New York foodie havens Dean and DeLuca, Balducci's and Zabar's. "Two years ago you had to go a long way downtown on the subway to buy decent, cheap food. Now it's right here," says Doris Leak, who grew up in the same apartment building as James Baldwin. And although there is still only one four-diamond-awarded restaurant (The Terrace on 119th Street) in which to indulge a taste for French cuisine and obscure dessert wines, Sylvia's Soul Food Restaurant on Lenox Avenue dishes up delicious smothered chicken, macaroni and cheese, black-eyed peas and candied yams to tourists from all over the world. There are also several less
famous places worth investigating, including Sister's Cuisine on Madison Avenue, Londel's on Frederick Douglass Boulevard and Aahirah's Palace just across
the street from the wonderful African market, held daily on the corner of 116th and Lenox.
And a lot more remains
to justify Harlem's continuing status as a black mecca. The elegant houses on
Strivers Row and around Hamilton Heights. The Boy's Choir of Harlem. The Dance Theater of Harlem. The Schomberg Center for Research. The Studio Museum
on 125th. La Marquetta, the bustling Spanish market on Park Avenue between East 111th and 115th streets.
For someone who loves jazz, of course, Harlem is full of landmarks. Bebop evolved up at
Minton's at 210 West 118th St. (now an old folk's home) where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker went to jam after hours with house pianist Thelonius Monk. Ella Fitzgerald started her career by winning an Amateur Night contest at the Apollo Theater on 125th Street. She'd been planning to dance but was too intimidated by the dance troupe that went on ahead of her,
so she sang instead. Lena Horne was booed off the same stage before she learned how to sing, and Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday both performed there. According to David Levering Lewis' marvelous book, "When
Harlem Was in Vogue," "almost every out of work actor, singer or musician in
Harlem found work after a vigil under the Tree of Hope" on Lafayette and Seventh. Of course that's because that's where news of jobs was spread, but
the superstition persisted. When the tree was finally cut down, part of it
was saved by the Apollo where it is put out on stage on Amateur Night (still
held every Wednesday) for the performers to rub for luck.
The Cotton Club, which once made jazz royalty Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway
and Lena Horne suffer the indignity of coming in through the back entrance
to perform to whites-only audiences, is now black-owned. At its new venue on
125th Street it welcomes both black and white customers for evening jazz and
blues shows and a weekend gospel all-you-can-eat brunch, which begins with
grace and ends a few hours later with resident gospel singer Ann Sinclair
asking everyone to cup their hands and imagine filling them with their problems. "Now raise your hands up to God and say, 'Hey, take 'em!'" she says. "I don't just sing," she tells us, "I minister." She's been known to bring foreign tourists to tears. "Sometimes they don't understand a word but they understand the emotion," she tells me.
And on summer Sundays there is jazz in Central Park by 110th Street at the
Charles A. Dana Discovery Center's Plaza at the restored Harlem Meer. Just a
few years ago the lake was filled with trash and old tires. Now the scene
resembles Seurat's "La Grande Jatte." People
are fishing at the lake's edge. Families are picnicking. The air is filled
with the smell of barbecued steak and chicken.
Eddy Harris writes that there is "nothing glamorous here," but on Sundays, there is nothing but glamour outside the gospel Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th, especially on holidays. "If
you want to get in on Easter Sunday you have to start lining up at 6.30 a.m.!"
remonstrates a be-suited, white-gloved usher. The straggly line of shamefully
scruffy foreign tourists are as conspicuous as beggars outside a society ball
in comparison to the magnificently turned-out parishioners, and many of these outsiders are turned away for lack of space.
But with 400 churches to choose from in Harlem -- as the saying goes, there really is "a bar on every corner and a church on every block" -- those who can't get in at the Abyssinian won't be stuck without somewhere else to go. Take a cab to the beautiful Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam
Avenue and 112th, in the genteel Morningside Heights part of Harlem which is home
to the Ivy League Columbia University, or just walk a couple of blocks to the Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on West 137th Street. There you'll find a sign that perfectly captures the spirit of the Harlem I know. It says: "We love you and there's nothing you can do about it."
Tessa Souter writes for various publications, including the Times, the Independent On Sunday, the Evening Standard, the Guardian newspapers and
Elle and Vogue magazines in London. She is working on becoming a professional jazz singer.
Are you interested in attending the Harlem Week festival? Do you know how to catch the A train? Search for Harlem in Wanderlust Marketplace's special New York City coverage.
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