Word: harlem
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...born on April 5, 1937, at a time when my family was living on Morningside Avenue in Harlem. The dominant figure of my youth was a small man, 5 ft. 2 in. tall. In my mind's eye, I am leaning out the window of our apartment, and I spot him coming down the street from the subway station. He wears a coat and tie, and a small fedora is perched on his head. He has a newspaper tucked under his arm. His overcoat is unbuttoned, and it flaps at his sides as he approaches with a brisk, toes...
After early years in Harlem, I grew up largely at 952 Kelly Street in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, where my family had moved in 1943, when I was six. In those days, Hunts Point was heavily Jewish mixed with Irish, Polish, Italian, blacks and Hispanics. The block of Kelly Street next to ours was slightly curved, and the neighborhood had been known for years as "Banana Kelly." We never used the word ghetto. Ghettos were somewhere in Europe. We lived in the tenements...
...guest list: to reach it, you pretty much had to be European or gay, or both. Then you would find your way into her paintings, as did the theater critic Carl Van Vechten, author of the novel Nigger Heaven and prime link between downtown white New York and the Harlem Renaissance, posing in rapturously exaggerated contrapposto in 1922's Portrait of Carl Van Vechten on a red stool on a black rug on a red carpet; while in Portrait of Stieglitz, 1928, the shoe and cane (nothing else) of artist Charles Demuth enter from the left, and the gloved, ermine...
DIED. SELMA BURKE, 94, artist; in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Burke rose to prominence in the creative caldron of New York City's "Harlem Renaissance." You may be carrying her best-known work at this very moment--the profile of Franklin Roosevelt that appears on the dime, which is based on a drawing Burke rendered on butcher paper after a 1943 encounter with F.D.R...
...wrote short stories for the New York Daily News and twice, as the Depression deepened, founded black literary journals. But the Harlem Renaissance had lost its early brilliance, and at heart, West was less a New Yorker than a black version of a proper Bostonian. Her father, who was born a slave, had built a thriving produce business in Boston and was prosperous enough to buy a summer home in Oak Bluffs. By 1943 West had moved there to live. Five years later, her first novel, The Living Is Easy, was set in the affluent world of proud black achievers...