As an economic-development boom takes off in Harlem, residents hotly debate what path will lead the famed African American neighborhood into a prosperous future. Will its unique flavor and small, homegrown businesses be driven out by corporate projects?
Harlem residents hotly debate who should lead them into a prosperous future: Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, or Mickey Mouse and Starbucks
On the very spot where Billie Holiday once carved up hearts with her jagged voice, a quartet of black musicians in dapper suits eases through the ballad "For Heaven's Sake" before a midnight crowd at Harlem's Lenox Lounge. Ensconced in an upholstered booth and surrounded by zebra-patterned walls and silver-fin lighting fixtures, a visitor could be forgiven for expecting Lady Day to walk through the double doors of the Zebra Room, trailed by the scent of white gardenias. "That was her reserved booth over there," says owner Alvin Reed, pointing to a corner table in this club, which opened in 1942. "After she had a gig downtown, she would come up here to relax and sing a few."
Tall and slender, his beard starting to gray, Reed at age 61 remembers the days before Harlem became a global symbol of urban decay, when its artistic traditions bloomed and the sound of jazz bursting from corner bars was a balm for its chronic poverty. "When I bought this club, in 1988," he says, "I saw a Harlem that could come back."
More than a decade later, the Lenox Lounge has become a glorious example of what some are calling the Second Harlem Renaissance. Assisted by low-interest government loans, Reed, a local entrepreneur, already has spent $900,000 refurbishing one of the few original art-deco club interiors left in New York City. By doing so he hopes not only to make a profit but also to revive an idea that gained currency during the first renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s: that Harlem is to African American culture what Paris is to the French, and deserves to be treated accordingly.
Harlem's most recent rebirth was spurred by an infusion of government money that began in 1996. But even at this early stage of the economic-development boom, some residents and local entrepreneurs are complaining that there has been too much emphasis on corporate projects -- developments like the new Harlem USA mall that now dominates the main commercial strip of West 125th Street -- and not enough on small, homegrown businesses like the Lenox Lounge. They worry that a Faustian bargain is being struck without their consent: that development is happening so fast and is so dominated by outsiders, that the price could be Harlem's soul.
In many ways it's a familiar story: a historic district tries to balance development with preservation of its unique character. But more is at stake here than the fate of a single neighborhood. After decades of being decimated by poverty and neglect, the epicenter of African American culture for most of the past century could finally be crushed, ironically, by uncontrolled growth.
With its complex character and history, Harlem has always been more than an African American enclave. Settled in 1658 by the Dutch, it was a prosperous suburb during the 19th century and home to many waves of European immigrants, especially the Irish, Italians, and Jews, some of whose descendants remain. Broadly defined, the neighborhood stretches from 155th Street to 110th Street on the West Side, and to 96th Street on the East Side. Government planners often lump Harlem together with all of Upper Manhattan, a predominantly Hispanic area that includes Spanish Harlem, Washington Heights, and Inwood.
For much of the 20th century, Harlem stood as the embodiment of the African American dream of freedom and prosperity. Thousands of working-class blacks migrated to the area from the South before and after World War I. During the first Harlem renaissance -- one of the most creative periods in American history -- the neighborhood was a mecca for black intellectuals, musicians, writers, and artists such as Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes. Harlem gave birth to bebop in the 1940s, and during the civil-rights era it became a political nexus as leaders like the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Malcolm X rose to prominence. "Harlem is the recognized Negro capital," wrote author and civil-rights activist James Weldon Johnson.
But middle-class flight in the 1960s and 1970s left Harlem in the grip of crime, drugs, and joblessness. In the decades that followed, several attempts at revitalization failed for reasons that, depending on whom you ask, include the misappropriation of government funds, redlining by banks, dangerous streets, negative stereotypes perpetuated by the media, corporate myopia, and out-and-out racism.
Today, thanks to a booming national economy and a massive influx of government money, Harlem finally seems to be undergoing a true economic transformation. Developers running out of real estate in lower Manhattan are venturing into the area. Meanwhile, federal empowerment-zone legislation introduced by local representative Charles Rangel is kicking into gear after a slow start. During the next four years nearly a billion dollars in public and private investment capital is slated to find its way into Upper Manhattan.
Many residents embrace this evolving landscape. Crowds jam the sidewalk outside Harlem USA, which is owned by a consortium of three developers, one of them from the neighborhood and two from outside it. The mall brims with the kind of chains and superstores previously unknown here: a Disney Store, HMV records, a nine-screen Magic Johnson Theatres complex, the New York Sports Club, and other businesses that will ultimately create 500 much-needed permanent jobs. (Despite new investment, Upper Manhattan remains the most economically depressed section of the island. Its unemployment rate of 18% is more than four times the national average.)
"Look at this -- only $10," says a kid outside an Old Navy store, unfurling a pair of chinos as he lines up for the grand opening of Modell's Sporting Goods and the chance to score free Yankees tickets and meet New York Knicks legend Earl "the Pearl" Monroe. His friend, sucking on a Frappuccino from the Starbucks down the street, nods approvingly.
"They are just setting up a megastore in front of my place and saying, 'Survive it."
--Sikhulu Shange, referring to the HMV that is opening across the street from his Record Shack
Not everyone is equally sanguine, however. Wrapped in the colorful, flowing dress of his native South Africa, Sikhulu Shange sits in the back of the Record Shack, a long, narrow store on West 125th Street. With his deep voice and crisply enunciated English, Shange projects indomitability, a quality that has served him well in 30 years of doing business in Harlem. It was local merchants like himself, Shange says, who held the neighborhood together "when Harlem was hemorrhaging, when everybody was running away."
