HARLEM NOW AND THEN

The first thing you notice about Harlem is how wide the sky is. For a longtime New Yorker, so used to being blinkered by ever more towers, the views along the grand avenues of Malcolm X, and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. boulevards are almost giddying. Looking to the south, it feels as if you can see the rest of Manhattan below you, or at least down to the Empire State Building, and the other skyscrapers of Midtown, set against the horizon. They set a different tone poem every day, depending on the weather, and the time of year; spectacular beneath the gaudy sunset of a summer evening, moody and contemplative on a drizzly, winter afternoon.

The view is one of the few strands that physically ties the Harlem of today to what it was some sixty years ago, which is very welcome. Writing about the city as it was, one searches for any visual clue, however fleeting, to what people were seeing, feeling, hearing back then as they went about their daily lives.

Such moments are not easily forthcoming. New York is a wastrel with its past, shucking its skin like some giant snake as it slithers relentlessly on into the future. Even in this past year, and this preservation-conscious era, we have lost treasures as diverse as the Plaza Hotel, and the Fulton Fish Market. Some of this is inevitable, I suppose, if a city is not to become a mausoleum, and the past is not something to be idealized, either in New York or anywhere else. And yet, one finds oneself yearning that what was had not been eradicated quite so quickly, or so thoroughly, so that we might more readily connect it to the present.

Certainly Harlem, as much as anyplace else in the city, embodies our ambivalence towards the past. Its very history is a phenomenon, a fluke. Those wide avenues give away what it was intended to be, a hundred years ago—a wealthy, white suburb for the city growing explosively below it. Due to a combination of overspeculation, racism, and pure chance, it became something very different, the capital of black America, the locus of countless dreams—and a place where people were confined.

Real estate developers had moved too fast in converting the swampy village that had been Harlem into a home for the white elite, who had been retreating up Manhattan before one immigrant wave after another for most of the nineteenth century. Moving up the island almost simultaneously were New York’s African-Americans, living together as a separated community since the terrible lynchings they had suffered during the Civil War draft riots, taking their churches and their culture with them as they went; pushed on from one neighborhood to the next by active assaults from the police, and the same, white ethnic hoards that so frightened the nobs. Deprived of their anticipated upper class, the landlords of Harlem turned to black tenants, knowing they could be charged double the standard rents for working-class New Yorkers because they had no place else to go, no place else they were allowed to live.

The result was New York’s first real ghetto. The word, ghetto, has come to be used almost interchangeably with slum in the United States, but it means something else. Where a slum implies simply poverty, a ghetto is a place where everyone, from all walks of life, rich or poor, is relegated by virtue of their race, or religion. By the 1920s, the concentration of black immigrants from every walk of life, and from all over the country and the world had brought about the Harlem Renaissance, the first, great, concentrated flowering of black culture in America. The Great Depression was much harder on Harlem than it was on the rest of the city, and it ended the Renaissance, along with the heady optimism that had once suffused the community. Yet by 1943, Harlem was enjoying an edgy resurgence, infused with the new money generated by the war.

This was the last moment when Harlem was still a destination, an irresistible attraction for black and white servicemen alike as they passed through the city. Both the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Malcolm Little, later Malcolm X, were very much alive and walking those broad avenues then, and they would scarcely recognize the Harlem of today. Like the rest of Manhattan, it is an almost sedate place now, compared to what it used to be. Much of the exuberant street life is gone, the vendors hawking everything from ice to coal, shad to sweet potatoes to fresh greens, with songs they made up and sang to tunes from the hit parade. There are no more numbers runners, selling their dream books, and catching the nickels and policy slips that slipped like quicksilver through the fire escape slits above; no more “Thursday girls,” who strode out for a night on the town, from beauty shops that literally filled with smoke from the various, frightening hair-straightening processes of the day. Even after the depredations of the ’30s, the Harlem of World War II was still an incredibly vibrant place, a honed place where the music was harder and better than ever; where some of the best musicians who ever were “cut” each other in midnight rent parties, because they would never leave their best stuff in the downtown clubs.

Physically, most of Harlem is still built on a very human scale, still boasts one of the city’s largest collections of brownstones. Some of the old institutions remain from that time as well. The magnificently ponderous YMCA on W. 135th Street, where Malcolm and so many other eager newcomers stayed when they first arrived in Harlem. The stately, Hotel Theresa, where more celebrated visitors from Joe Louis to Fidel Castro stayed, and where A. Philip Randolph housed his Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and was already planning what would eventually become the March on Washington.

Yet almost all of the Harlem nighttown has simply vanished. It has gone the way of the city’s other fantastic, entertainment nexuses, from the Latin Quarter, to the German beer gardens that once lined the Bowery, to the first, incomparable amusement parks out along the sands of Coney Island. The enormous dance halls, where the big bands played and jitterbugging came into its own, are long gone. The Cotton Club moved to midtown before the ’30s were out, and the fabulous Savoy Ballroom—“the home of happy feet,” “the shrine of syncopation addicts” with its battles of the bands, and its 250-foot long dance floor, where Ella Fitzgerald sang, and Chick Webb’s Orchestra reigned supreme, has been completely obliterated, replaced by a housing project, and a few, low stores. The only physical remnant of the great halls left is the gorgeous ruin of the Renaissance Casino, a hall that was itself big enough for one of New York’s first great basketball teams, the New York Rens to play there. It still runs the length of a city block on Powell Boulevard; somehow majestic despite the layers of grime on its red-brick façade, the trees growing out of its roof, and its rusting marquees, one of them incongruously advertising “Chow Mein.”

The great clubs are gone as well. Connie’s Inn, where Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller once played, has been replaced by something that looks like a garage. The ultra-sophisticated Small’s Paradise, which had the best floorshows and the only working air-conditioning in Harlem, where Malcolm had his first job in Harlem, and where he met all the hustlers, the policy bankers and pimps and burglars and enforcers he would later write about so lovingly in his Autobiography, has now been subsumed by a school, and an International House of Pancakes. The old live theatres and the great movie palaces have been ploughed under as well, or changed beyond recognition, the Lafayette, and the Alhambra; the Victoria, and the Regency—considered the first truly “deluxe” movie theatre in Manhattan—which has long since been converted into a church.

Gone, too, are the less respectable establishments. The stretch of 133rd Street between Malcolm X Boulevard and Powell was then known alternatively as “Beale Street” or “Jungle Alley,” a block full of raucous clubs and after-hours bars, described rather melodramatically at the time as a place where “a knife blade is the quick arbiter of all quarrels, where prostitutes take anything they can get.” Now it is a quiet block full of brownstone churches, and workmen rehabilitating brick townhouses that would steal any realtor’s heart. West 144th Street, where a teen-aged Malcolm once worked as a “john-walker,” escorting white tricks up to see black prostitutes, seems even more somnolent.

About all that remains of Harlem, the entertainment mecca, is the Apollo, looking more elegant than ever. One can still stand along W. 126th Street and study the long, fire escape staircases along its back, wondering which one might have been used as a separate entrance for black patrons, confined to an upper gallery when it was still the segregated, Hurtig & Seamon’s theatre. This was an insult endured by African-Americans all over Harlem, even through the height of the Renaissance in the 1920s—when they could get into a theatre at all.

To the west of the Apollo used to stand the old Braddock Hotel, now demolished. It was for awhile a place where the leading black entertainers in the country would stay, and in the 1940s the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, and Dinah Washington, and Billie Holliday and Billy Eckstine could still be found in its bar—close enough so that the performers might step over through the stage door of the Apollo, to score a quick drink, or one of the joints that Malcolm peddled there. But by the war the hotel itself had become rather seedy. The riot of 1943, the worst in Harlem’s history, which would leave six people dead and the neighborhood ravaged, would begin there when a black serviceman was shot by a white cop in a fight that started over a room complaint.

Across W. 125th Street from the Apollo is the site of other battles, won and lost. The old Kress department store, where an earlier, more contained riot began in 1935 over the false rumor that a shoplifter had been killed by store detectives, has been altered irretrievably. But the facades and names of two other, defunct department stores just down the street, Blumstein’s and Koch’s, are still in place. These were the last bastions of segregation in Harlem, both stores refusing to hire black employees or even allowing black women to try on dresses before they were finally conquered by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s “Don’t shop where you can’t work” campaigns.

It was a dramatic first step for Powell, who while still holding the pulpit he had inherited from his daddy at the Abyssinian Baptist Church would go on to become the city’s first black councilman, then its first congressman. It was not surprising that the first black man to represent Harlem in the U.S. Congress should have come from the clergy. No part of the old Harlem has survived as intact as its many, splendid churches. They stand like fortresses along its streets, just as many of them have for the last eighty, or even ninety years—the Abyssinian, and St. Philip’s and Mother A.M.E. Zion; Salem Methodist and Mount Olivet, Mount Calvary and St. Mark’s, Metropolitan Baptist, and St. Martin’s, and Mount Morris Ascension Presbyterian, to name just a few.

The great churches have never been the be-all and end-all of religion in Harlem—no other area of the city, then or now, has boast as many humble, storefront churches, as many cultists and revivalists—but the great churches played a special role. These were the “invisible institution” made manifest—the term dating back to the days of slavery, referring to how black believers had often had to hide their services. Over the decades they had been painfully brought to life, some of them dating back to origins in Lower Manhattan, in the late 1700s. They had been kept together over the years as their communicants moved up the West Side of Manhattan, transferred to private homes, abandoned buildings, even old stables. Critics argued that the great structures they built or bought from fleeing, white congregations were too great a burden on the community, but to finally establish large, impressive churches of their own was to make a statement, to say that Harlem was where they would make a stand.

They did not brook other masters. The leaders of the big churches did not mind seeing the great dance halls and the clubs close, considering them immoral influences that sapped the resources of their impoverished congregations. Powell relentlessly mocked his fellow clerics, accusing them of hypocrisy, and “churchianity.” A prince of the church himself, he was a determined democratizer, ridiculing any and all pretensions on the basis of income, or background, or skin tone. His needling fell largely on deaf ears. There were always distinctions made within the ghetto, lighter skin vs. darker skin; old New Yorkers vs. Southern migrants vs. proud immigrants from the British West Indies.

And of course, there was money. Wealthy Harlemites gathered together in certain, specific areas—on Sugar Hill, in the Dunbar Apartments, or on Strivers Row—as the rich always have, everywhere. But in the press of the ghetto these bastions were more heterogeneous and interesting than they were in New York’s wealthy, white neighborhoods. On Strivers Row alone, there lived at various times the composers W.C. Handy, Eubie Blake, Fletch Henderson, and Will Marion Cook; the architect Vetner Tandy; Dr. Louis T. Wright, the prominent surgeon and grandson of Booker T. Washington; Henry Pace, the founder of Black Swan Records; the fine heavyweight Harry Wills, the comedian Stepin Fetchit—and Powell himself.

No neighborhood better exemplified both the triumph and the frustration of Harlem. Strivers Row remains to this day two of the most beautiful streets in all of New York; blocks of lovely, ethereal yellow- and rust-brick, Italianate townhouses that seem to almost float above the branches of the slender trees along the sidewalk. Originally called the “King Model Houses,” they were designed by Stanford White and several other of the leading architects in New York in the 1890s. Along the north side of W. 138th, one can still find gates with the ancient imprecation, “Walk Your Horses,” directed at the sports who liked to race their horses along the broad avenues. There are even back alleys that run down the middle of the blocks, providing residents with those rare, New York luxuries of house decks, and garages.

Yet Strivers Row was designed for white people. When enough of them would not stay, refusing to live in an increasingly black Harlem, the Equitable Life Assurance Company, which had gained control of the buildings, kept them vacant for a whole year before finally giving in, and allowing African-Americans to buy them. Even in Harlem, black people had to be insulted before their money was accepted.

One more, extant building tells the story of what this would lead to. The vast, art deco armory at 142nd Street was built for the 369th Regiment, the “Harlem Hellfighters,” after their return from World War I. Forced to fight with French troops, the Hellfighters had distinguished themselves, serving longer in continuous combat than any other American fighting unit, and they had marched back up Fifth Avenue in triumph, the regimental band under James Reese Europe breaking into “Here Comes My Daddy Now” as they crossed into Harlem.

But for World War II, most of the 369th had been transferred to training camps in the Deep South, under white officers, along with tens of thousands of other black soldiers. Throughout the war, the people of Harlem had been receiving letters from their young men telling of how shabbily they were being treated, both by their white commanders and by the sheriffs and cops of Southern towns who did not hesitate to beat, arrest, or even shoot them on the slightest pretext. The letters, combined with press reports of white mobs assaulting black defense workers around the country, began to bring people of all classes and types in Harlem together by the summer of 1943. James Baldwin would remember seeing “the strangest combinations” of people, standing about in tense, silent groups, churchgoers and “the most fragrant disbelievers; something heavy in their stance seemed to indicate that they had all, incredibly, seen a common vision, and on each face there seemed to be the same strange, bitter shadow.”

All that summer, the conflagration crept palpably closer, with every precaution taken against it only more enraging than the last. Military authorities had the Savoy closed, ostensibly to preserve the morals of our fighting men but mostly to prevent “race-mixing,” and motorcycle police patrols roared constantly through the streets, looking out for trouble. When it did come, it would catch everyone by surprise, nonetheless—an inchoate expression of fury that permanently altered Harlem, both for better and worse. It would ultimately leave standing only a few suggestions of what had gone before, peeking out here and there.

I suspect that largely vanished Harlem could be understood most readily from the inside looking out, from those broad views of the looming city below, with its sentinel skyscrapers. So accessible and yet so unobtainable, still spurning those it had so arbitrarily driven out. To have looked upon that city everyday, to understand the hatred and bigotry it represented even if you had no desire whatsoever to join with it but only to be left alone, must have been all but unbearable.

© Copyright The New York Times

 

Fiction | Nonfiction | Columns | About | Contact | Home