Word: harlem
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...white American who avoids Harlem missing something? Yes: for starters, a poignant and profound social textbook lying open for study in the heart of a great city. One gazes at block after block of abandoned brownstones -- their fronts corked by arson, their doorways cemented shut, their empty windows gaping like a skeleton's eye sockets -- and realizes that agonizing irony is Harlem's chief industry. Perhaps, then, the European tourists are seeing things. Yes, they are: spectacular things. Any tour of Harlem compresses into a few square miles the melodramatic contradictions of urban life. Horror dwells in the basement...
...doors a street genius named Franco has painted Pop-art murals appropriate to the goods sold inside: an underwater paradise for the fish shop, a spangled Eiffel Tower for the travel agency, a chain- laden Mr. T for the jewelry store. Midblock stands the legendary Apollo Theater, which brings Harlem alive every Wednesday with its Amateur Night display of singers, rap masters and a wonderfully gaudy fashion show. Next door is a vacant lot bearing the sign DANGER: KEEP...
...Harlem is certainly not a harmless place for residents or itinerants, but neither is it the city's worst crime area. In any case, fear is no excuse for missing out on Harlem's cultural and historical bounty. Prudent visitors, black or white, can ride a tour bus or a subway uptown during the day, drive or call for a cab at night, stroll with a worthy purpose on a Sunday-go-to- meeting afternoon. They will feel as comfortable on Amateur Night, with its superefficient security staff, as they would at Carnegie Hall. They will be made as welcome...
...this, and see the Harlem beneath the cliches, beyond its familiar notoriety as a graveyard for Great Society programs. True, the place is not what it was during Harlem's toniest decades, when swells partied at the Cotton Club (now defunct) and Joe Louis stayed at the Hotel Theresa (today an office building). Nor is Harlem what it may become in a looming decade of gentrification and white encroachment. But it is, at its best, a community that radiates warmth to outsiders who dare to embrace it. During Sunday service at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Pastor Samuel Proctor greets white...
Peter Stuyvesant established Nieuw Haarlem in 1658, and it was later connected to New Amsterdam with a ten-mile road built by black slaves. During the colonial period, Harlem became a retreat for the Bleeckers, Delanceys, Beekmans and Rikers and in the 19th century a chic suburb for the well-to-do. Then, around 1880, the city extended its elevated lines to the north. Handsome neighborhoods sprang up, and by the early 1900s, Harlem bustled with urbanity. But the speculators had built too much too fast. So in 1904 a black real estate agent named Philip A. Payton rented apartments...